long live scientific debate

Atoms: Do we need it? What is it? Where is it? How much?

The line "you're not the devil's advocate, you're just the devil" is so hard

Don’t worry: ”my personality is just thermodynamics” holds true for every personality.

Your description of structured debate reminds me of how Steve Mould and Mehdi Electroboom had a back and forth posting videos trying to explain the motion of chained metal balls pouring out of a standing glass. They both had a hypothesis and they tried to convince one-another of their idea, but they also had a week between videos to collect their thoughts. So it was more spectacle debate, but they were both acting in good faith. They acknowledged each other's points in their videos, but at the same time they also made an effort not to lose the debate. It was good content 😆

I grew up being told to hold religion/conspiracy as higher than science, so when the " spectacle debates" happened, I saw science being raised, not lowered. It was an important part of my life. I can see now that it does degrade it now, but I think it depends on someone's current perspective. It might harm more people, and then it helps, but it helped me to bridge the gap to elevating real science.

Unironically: High school debate clubs are exactly what "spectacle debates" are good for. Because in a club/competition like that, the goal isn't to find the true answer to a question, the goal is to learn how rhetoric works, and how persuasive arguments work, and other skills like public speaking. To my understanding, actual debate competitions are won by the team with the strongest argument, with FULL understanding that the strongest argument is not the same as the truest answer. But that doesn't mean that its useless to learn what makes a strong argument in the first place.

For every like I'll study for 1 hour

The truth springs from arguments amongst friends. David Hume What I like about this quote is the implied importance of good faith in debates, and debate spectacles are not based on good faith.

"The goal of the scientific debate is not to win the debate. The goal is to get the right answer." I wish our judicial system worked that way.

The debate bro community will never recover from Angela's brutal put-down

you've kind of explained the way I feel about what you call “spectacle debate” and I've always known as “Classical™ Debate” as being less about the merits of the idea being debated and more about the psychological constitution of the participants, and the ability of one party of withstand the psychological pressure that their opponents subject to them without cracking or, as you put it, bursting to tears.

About the debates thing, it kind'a reminds me of this one quote from Mark Twain. "Don't argue with stupid people. They'll simply drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience."

Big fan of "we can't observe atoms, so I'm going to discard material reality in favor of trying to abstractly logic my way through physics, because that's much more grounded"

It's fun that Einstein, who was very much a Machian at heart, basically confirmed atoms (on top of what the other people did, who you mention) with his work on Brownian motion.

I just looked up your publications thinking you did a more "fundamental" physics so I was very surprised to see you do galaxy/star cluster astrophysics. Your videos are amazing and your range into the history of physics and theoretical physics is excellent.

I know it’s only been out for 20 minutes, but I went ahead and skipped to the part about debate spectacle. While I ultimately agree that the spectacle isn’t valuable, I would keep in mind that it does force some people to be exposed to it things they haven’t seen before. Before the Ken Ham, Bill Nye debate, I believed in creationism. I grew up in rural WV and was taught creationism in school. I was also taught rebuttals to evolution in 7th grade. That Ken, Bill debate actually changed my mind with the closing statements when they were asked what would change your mind. It got me to start looking into evolution. While I’m not in a lab science, I am now a PhD student. So I’m not saying that the spectacle is valuable to Science (capital S), but those types of debates CAN have value. I’m not saying that it was worth it because he changed my little mind. But if I’m being honest, I think it’s very elitist to expect non experts to read the literature of a field as a way to learn something. As someone in a highly specialized field, people would learn nothing by reading my papers.

Clippy pops up: It looks like you're saying "energy" without an equation! Do you need help?

This reminds me of the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek. The audience cheers and shouts every two sentences spoken as if they are watching a fight between two teams. Zizek tries to tell them the goal of the debate is not to 'win' but to have a serious discussion about important topics, of course the audience carries on screaming.

Angela, will you be commenting on Sabine Hossenfelder's latest video entitled "My dream died, and now I'm here". Just wondering what's your take on her utter condemnation of the current research environment.

On the scientific debate of atomic theory, there's a nice quote by statistician George E P Box: "All models are wrong, but some are useful"