maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 13 Posts
  • 696 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Thank you!

    I’ve only watched the first minute or two, but I think I get the idea. Clickbaity generalisations etc … yea that makes sense and are obviously shitty (I guess I just expect that more from YouTubers who are otherwise reasonable people).

    The whole “most research is BS” claim isinteresting though. I’ll be interested to see how the video addresses it. If we’re talking about >50%, and that it’s substantially imperfect in its constitution due to systemic issues, I dunno, I’d be interested in an actual investigation TBH.

    Thanks again though!


  • as people are losing more and more faith in academic research and science

    Counter argument: it’s happening with or without her and it’d be better to rationally highlight the issues rather than allow the uneducated to hijack the issue.

    IME, the biggest deflator of faith in science etc for laypeople are their friends who left academia telling their own stories aligned with Sabine’s general point.

    Broadly, I’d wager the erosion of faith in research is a much bigger picture and getting to the bottom of the causes is more important than getting precious about maintaining the status quo.


  • Sabine is the poster child for science populism. She got chewed out by academia for having mediocre research ideas and now she loves to claim that there’s a conspiracy to take funding from her favorite fringe fields and give it to the establishment.

    Gotta say you’ve got me sceptical.

    I don’t follow her closely and am no mega fan or anything. But it’s not like it’s uncommon for good people to get pushed out of academia for shitty reasons.

    Plus, I don’t think you need to conjure conspiracy theories before you start arguing that there are dominant dogmas, cultures, practices and even some sort of “establishment”. I’d wonder how many fields of science don’t have some internally recognised “establishment” and “counter-establishment” ideas.

    And I’m not sure I see the “poster child … populism” claim? Sure, she’s probably popular, but for my money she does a decent job of YouTube science. Not sure she’s a household name or all over tv or anything.

    Got any more substantive links/sources about her being mediocre or conspiratorial?


  • Yes this basically.

    I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.

    But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.

    A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.