Serious Science(serious-science.org) A science popularization site featuring researchers giving video talks about their respective areas of study. (Russian readers of HN might happen to know the site postnauka.ru, of which this is an English-language spin-off.) |
There is nearly no way for a PI (head scientist) to cite everything that they say. Knowledge at the forefront is cobbled together from little whispers, tastes of failed experiments, hearings-ons from colleagues, intuition, guesses and literally decades of thinking. And so when speaking abstractly (as these videos are), they are often less wrong than anyone else (Clapper, this is how you use that term...). If you were to press them on specifics, they would become mostly correct and dig up where they got that nugget of wisdom, though simultaneously losing much of the power of generalization. In that sense - the generalities are always slightly suspect, but of far greater quality than anyone else's generalities. And usually the generalities you'd like to hear about from the cutting edge are those that there is no consensus about anyway.
So in that respect, I'd say the generalizations of cutting edge scientists are usually the least wrong, rarely perfect, always insightful, and nearly impossible to source. They are the tenuous 'hypothesis' writ large to which their career is attesting. Citation of such is nearly a moot point, as no generalizable experiments yet exist.
On the other hand it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper or review about some of the stuff they just spoke of. It'd be trivial for them to name a paper or two that they find dominating their perspectives here.
Great idea! We'll put it unto the to-do list.
[1] http://www.bigbible.org/blog/2008/05/citation-nazis-get-u2_0...
(FWIW, not a commentary on source link, just on parent comment)
A better comparison would be one with mainstream science journalism.
PS: Also the "subscribe" page can, for now, just link to the youtube channel. At least I could subscribe there.
I'll watch how you guys evolve closely.
Good job.
Your description says you are a neuro-scientist. So science is just something you say? If you say it, it is true? Or do you usually try to provide supporting documentation? Show statistical evidence and provide the parameters under which such figures were gathered? Encourage others to reproduce such results rather than merely relying on 'stuff you said'?
In this age research fraud run amok I think "its science cuz scientists said it" is a particularly dangerous viewpoint.
though, i would agree that citations wouldn't hurt if particular claims are being made, but a lot of the videos look like overviews of generic knowledge
Happy now?
[0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhist...
The ideal of science that we are taught boils down to one premise and one premise only: as part of a scientific statement there will be a recipe. By following this recipe we can replicate the findings of the author.
This ideal is met less and less the more complex and expensive our science gets.
(Thanks for the support and clarification btw!)