alt Hacker News> Your complaint is that it is hard to extract truth from her videos. > > However extracting truth from what you said is trivial if you believe that what she reports as fact, is fact. And what she reports as her opinion, is her opinion.
So the level of doubt and or critical thinking I apply to Sabine's videos is not much different than what I would apply to a physic paper out of journal and I feel like I can often apply less than what I apply while reading many popular science articles. That is no where close to the level of trust I would put in to a well grounded physics text book though.
This sort of doubt is critical to most people while reading journal articles, double checking, verifying, not assuming ground truth for what a paper says to uncover hidden assumptions, mistakes, and differing interpretations.
~"Just believe" is not conductive to learning science and is not going to make for curious or simulating conversation.
> If you pick any 5 videos you want, I'd be happy to help you spot check them. Just like I did with this one.
You did not extract the value from this video though. You reference other resources to try and get the value. I am not interested in doing something similar with her other videos.
> 1. Your point about settling physics with experiment is not applicable here. The result is about what the math will predict if you make a specific assumption in a specific mathematical model. Testing that is like trying to test the frequency with which 1+1 gives you 3. It's a question of logic. What becomes a question of experiment is whether a particular model is a good description of reality.
If physical reality does not, can not matter to resolving a question, your question may not be about physics. This one point is not enough, like I said original, by itself, to make the apparent contradiction obviously non interesting.
> 2. She may not be skewering cows that are sacred to all of physics. But a lot of her videos skewer cows that are sacred to some group, and she's constantly getting an earful about it.
Is the earful about any sacred cows though? Are their other viable explanations You may have evidence for you conclusion, but it is not here.
> I think it is very important to be aware how easily branches of science become pseudoscience.
Sabine asserts this has happened to quantum loop gravity but doe snot show it. If I thought what she said was true and I wanted to make convincing case I would have to go out and do considerable research and put together a case, I could not simply reference this video.
> And with John Baez' support, it's clear that her complaint is more than simple sour grapes.
Sour grapes normally means that when someone can not have something they want they go negative on it instead. Does this saying even apply here? Nothing in the video made me think she was sour about anything.
My lengthy comment was not about value extracted in this video, it was addressing your doubts about the information in it. I personally got value from the subject of the video itself. Which we did not discuss.
It really appears to me that you weren't trying to address any value. What you describe as critical thinking was merely searching for ways to object without thinking too hard about whether it was a fair objection. As an example I point to your failure to follow the trivial mathematical argument saying that LQG models either have to accept that there is no lower bound on quantized area, or that they violate Lorentz invariance. You kept trying to insist that this sounded like she was contradicting herself (she wasn't), and this argument should be resolved by some sort of experiment.
If this is truly the critical thinking that you take to research papers, you're probably not doing nearly as good a job of reading them as you imagine. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I make a habit of attempting to figure out how trustworthy and well-informed each source is. And how objectively they report on what they think that they know. I'm extremely pleased with Sabine. She's very careful to only report as fact things which are true. She's willing to express opinions with no regard to who will agree or disagree. And she's clear on the difference between her knowledge, opinion, and speculation.
Because of this, I've learned to trust her claims on things that I can't independently verify. Her personal reports on the behavior within LQG is of interest to me. The independent confirmation from John Baez, who I've known for years, trust, and has a completely different point of view, makes her description extremely trustworthy. Her claims on that topic are not something that I can independently verify other than to decide which primary sources I trust. And I've learned to trust both Sabine and John.