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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg

Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.




Counterpoint, please consider watching Professor Dave discuss the issues with Sabine's talking points.

While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field.

https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0


I got to the point where he says the email she made a video about is probably her own making and stopped. It is a >1.5h response to a 10-minute video, and at minute 7 (of 1.5h) he proceeds to basically call her a liar in a fundamental way without having any strong evidence for it. Mind you the first 7 minutes were spent claiming she put forall quantifiers where she just implied strong prevalence and telling how much better the guy is for the society than her. From these things I would say you'd waste your time watching this unless you want to practice fishing for fallacies. The 3 I mentioned so far are: the leaky bucket fallacy (weak evidence for liar claim), straw man (arbitrary adding forall), and ad hominem (attack character instead of presenting argument).


>Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field

"The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).


I would absolutely never take the opinion of someone who makes a career dunking on people, no matter how much they deserve it, at face value.


I think there may be a language issue here; to use her own words as best as I can remember them, excusing her bluntness under "perhaps I'm just German" — a messy kichen here in Germany would be described with the word "Chaos", and a mistake that a Brit would call "dropping the ball" would be described as "eine totale Shitshow".

This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/

But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.


The Republicans are not fixing anything that's broken with scientific funding. They are purposely making the problems worse.


Yes, lighting the house on fire may have not been the best plan, but in all fairness the it was a mess and something had to be done.


What is your basis for believing that this is the needed reform or that it will fix what is broken?


Sabine is pretty unreliable, checkout professor dave's explanation of her




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