Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking āthey can be very usefulā (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:
Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowdās having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, heās getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.
Shit, I actually like Hank Green his brother John. Theyāre two internet personalities I actually have something like respect for, mainly because of their activism, Johnās campaign to get medical care to countries who desperately need it, and his fight to raise awareness of and improve the conditions around treatment for tuberculosis. And Iāve been semi-regularly watching their stuff (mostly vlogbrothers though, but I do enjoy the occasional SciShow episode too) for over a decade now.
At least Hank isnāt afraid to admit when heās wrong. Heās done this multiple times in the past, making a video where he says he changed his mind/got stuff wrong. So, Iām willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope he comes around.
Still, fuck.
Just gonna go ahead and make sure I fact check any scishow or crash course that the kid gets into a bit more aggressively now.
Iām sorry you had to learn this way. Most of us find out when SciShow says something that triggers the Gell-Mann effect. Greenās background is in biochemistry and environmental studies, and he is trained as a science communicator; outside of the narrow arenas of biology and pop science, he isnāt a reliable source. Crash Course is better than the curricula of e.g. Texas, Louisiana, or Florida (and that was the point!) but not better than university-level courses.
That Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldnāt spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the āGell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knollās law of media accuracyā from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipediaās policy.
By Crichtonās logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!
Yeah. The whole Gel-Mann effect always feels overstated to me. Similar to the āfalsus in unusā doctrine Crichton mentions in his blog, the actual consensus appears to be that actually context does matter. Especially for something like the general sciences I donāt know that itās reasonable to expect someone to have similar levels of expertise in everything. To be sure the kinds of errors people make matter; it looks like this is a case of insufficient skepticism and fact checking, so Hank is more credulous than I had thought. Thatās not the same as everything heās put out being nonsense, though.
The more I think about it the more I want to sneer at anyone who treats ādifferent people know different thingsā as either a revelation or a problem to be overcome by finding the One Person who Knows All the Things.
Even setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed ā which, frankly, we probably shouldnāt set aside ā yeah, itās just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.
Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.
Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.
Depends, he made an anti-GMO video on SciShow about a decade ago yet eventually walked it back. He seemed to be forgiven for that.