Pop Science And The Limitations Of Infotainment

it's finally here... Pop Science, a video essay.

Popular Science is science for the masses. The stock in trade is nifty insights and suprising facts, conclusions that amaze and astound. Here's my TED talk about it. It's simple, it's neat, and hopefully it's backed by science.

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Books Referenced Here:
everything by Malcolm Gladwell - your barnes and noble front shelves

Music:
Hill - String Thing

ALL REFERENCES ARE LISTED HERE:

NOTE: Youtube has a limit to the length of the description, and so I’ve been forced to put my source page above: my apologies for the inconvenience.

EDIT: To those of you who wondered in the comments, yes, this was the video planned before all the Kurzgesagt in a nutshell stuff blew up.

EDIT 2: I received a kind comment on 4/22 letting me know that I have used a VOX graph at 12:32 without proper attribution in the video. That was an oversight during my editing process, and I wanted to correct this. That graph is sourced from here:

[CoffeeBreaks]

Thanks to everyone who hung in there for this video, I know it took forever, but I couldn't be more proud of the end result. If you'd like to subvert other people's weakly held beliefs about pop-science, you can do your part by pressing the like button, subscribing or sharing! <3

[Procrastinus]

I was worried about how my words were going to be used, so I am glad that this was a very thoughtful treatment of the topic. It is easy to be cynical about this, which I sometimes lapse into, especially when writers take the position that they can rake in all the cash but have no responsibility for what they say. We don't know their motivations, but it is coincidentally the same position that an amoral individual would take: if you buy it, we will sell it. On the other hand, writers have to position their work so people will read it, to make it accessible and interesting. In any case, that there is an appreciative audience for Stephen's work is a reason to be optimistic.

[KonstantinKovar]

This video subversed my weakly held believe that I can somewhat trust pop science content.

[parkermillican]

**Makes pop science video about pop science**



Sorry, i had to. I love you ❤️

[ZacharyBittner]

The person who wrote procrastination is good is procrastinating publishing the paper.
Is that surprising?

[fernandoed]

My problem with pop science is that it may fool people into thinking they fully know the subject explained or that it substitutes formal education. Ex: "wow this is better than school and books!"

[Ozepyon]

This is the Coffeebreak I subscribed to! Wonderful return to form

[jorgec]

One thing I really like (ironically) about what In a Nutshell does is when they, for instance, use an atom in their animations and write a tag that says "Atoms don't really look like this!".
They use a useful, practical way of representing the objects they're trying to explain without needing to dive into the complex world of quantum mechanics, while also providing a challenge for the viewer to question what they're looking at and wonder how atoms really look, why they mention such a thing.
So it passively encourages curiosity and investigation, without losing the benefits of the simplified concept of a Bohr atom.

[Crispman_]

I'm very glad that you made a video on this. It's very important and I think you nailed it.

[MillRunner]

People just want to feel smart without doing any work.
It's the same way people read the headline of a news article and then act like they're political experts.

[xilanceylan]

I hope people don't keep attacking you because of your last Kurzgesagt video, and even if they do, I hope you don't let it get to you.
What you are discussing is an important subject that needs to be talked about and isn't talked about enough in this content marketing era, please don't let some haters make you doubt the signifigance of your work.
I'm also looking forward to the next fake guru episode on your second channel, those are also great. Wish you all the best.

[wordman]

Gladwell oversimplifies but also aggressively defends his oversimplification.

I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast where Gladwell disagreed with the original author of the 10, 000-hour research that he oversimplified his findings in his book.

Sometimes I noticed Gladwell not only oversimplifies but also overextends original research to his own ideas based on anecdotes. I spend a while looking at learning psychology book and noticed that he used a concept of desirable difficulties (which is when you make things harder for yourself when learning to help you get better results - ex: recalling stuff from memory rather than looking over notes when revising for exams) to imply that dyslexia was a desirable difficulty because a lot of millionaires tended to be dyslexic...

What's worse is Gladwell's ideas are then cited by highly educated and influential figures.

[pratibhabansod]

This is enlightenment. I was thinking of starting a Pop Sci Channel, I'm engineering in Biotechnology but I have more than sufficient knowledge on important everyday topics that need to be explored to the masses.
YOU JUST MADE ME MORE RESPONSIBLE, CAREFUL AND A BETTER PERSON
THANKS

[saumitjin]

Glad that you're still into Making these!!! I love your Content dude and just wanted to say - Thanks :D

[gnatdagnat]

13:25 This seems to imply Cody'sLab is an example of educating us "efficiently and accurately using robust science". I agree with this assessment.

[abadabamcyadadya]

"We tend to believe claims that sound science-y."
-Scientist, 2019

[PeterKato]

Malcolm Gladwell just gives the masses what they want to hear so he can sell books, not sure even he believes what he writes.

[infinitemausoleum]

Something I think would be intensely helpful for spreading science to everyone is "Read-alongs" for journals.


A lot of journals are byzantine, hard to parse at their best for most people. Having someone in the field record themselves explaining parts of the paper for someone to listen to as they read along would be a godsend. It might even help people learn how to parse more dense work and help them develop the tools to seek answers for themselves. Who knows, maybe by having experts reading journals and explaining them aloud we'd end up catching errors and faulty logic that would otherwise not be noticed. "Rubber duck debugging" has helped people do similar stuff. The people could learn stuff, might get a valuable skill, and we can walk away with a more watertight journal for the trouble.

[matthewb]

Basically nuance is important and you should be skeptical

[maybelikealittlebit]

I think this is why I don’t want to make videos sharing my ideas on YouTube or public platform just yet because I know I don’t have the mindset I’d like to share with the world. Just having ideas isn’t the end all, it’s about executing them.

Lovely video. Glad to have you back Coffee Break. 💖