Hacker News Reader

Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Spacetime is nice because they / Matt often acknowledge uncertainty (indeed, gaps being found or closed in current understanding are probably one of the most common themes of the show), unlike many others which tend to present theories as facts (e.g. kurzgesagt often does this). Likewise, they don't shy away from making relatively complex explanations instead of leaning all to heavily into bogus analogies. They made a well-regarded by physicists (as far as I can tell) series on relativity, for example.

View on HN

I think acknowledging uncertainty is one of the most important jobs of science communicators. It’s important that they say, “…but we really don’t know for sure” and emphasize when something is theoretical, a best guess, or a rough model. I think Matt and team do this very well.

Unfortunately, there are people that take that "we really don't know for sure" comment as a negative as "proof" of whatever thing they are pushing instead. The internet is full of them.

I still think it's important that scientists be factual about the uncertainty, though. The alternative whacko theories also have uncertainty, so if we hold ourselves to that standard, we can also rationally hold them to their even greater degrees of uncertainty. When we try to pretend that a current theory is 100% certain and factual just to win an argument with idiots, it invites obvious and IMHO reasonable criticism of all of science.

Science is not a set of facts caved in stone. Science is a process; a way of thinking critically and exploring the boundaries of reality in a way that makes a best effort at getting closer and closer to the boundaries of the knowable in a rational and reasonably-objective way. It often makes missteps and corrections along the way, and we can acknowledge that openly while also contrasting it to non-science junk that isn't even on the right track.

I've come to somewhat randomly expose a few of my major biases and preconceptions in the last couple months, which has been very interesting. This video hits the nail on the head for science communication (the 2nd half is the meta portion, the 1st half addresses a specific issue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzpIsjgapAk

I took a philosophy class one where several of the participants were getting upset that there weren’t just facts to learn because up to that point they had not been exposed to any kind of uncertainty. These were mostly students in the sciences too.

Kurzgesagt has acknowledged this was a problem with some of their earlier videos, but they're trying to do better with presenting any uncertainty around the topics they cover from now on.

I would agree, they have done a much better job presenting the uncertainty.

Do you remember where they did this / have a link? I'm not "citation needed"-ing you, I'm just curious when they said this.

I believe they did it on this video called "Can You Trust Kurzgesagt?". They also removed a few of their older videos at the time because they had this exact issue of presenting as fact some things that were not at all certain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtUAAXe_0VI

> because they / Matt often acknowledge uncertainty

Great pun! :D

They also will present the strengths and weaknesses of various 'competing' theories. For ones that have been shown to be incorrect, they still present them accurately and well and explain how those theories led to our current, more correct understanding. For ones that are still being considered they will tell you evidence for and against.

I think this show is what made me realize that physics isn't one unified whole, but rather a lot of different models that are all somehow wrong (but still better than what they were built on!), and that there's conflicting evidence for each of them.

The way a lot of so-called science channels make the mistake of presenting theories as facts is why I've dropped most of them. Spacetime has been the only show I've never had that complaint with. Kurzegesagt was an especially big offender in that manner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com