Josh Susser on Nostr: TLDR: Who do you trust for science news? I need to find some better sources! I need ...
TLDR: Who do you trust for science news? I need to find some better sources!
I need to discover some better science communicators. Most of the ones I used to follow have revealed themselves to be untrustworthy. It's frustrating how many science communicators that I had to abandon after they showed themselves to be gullible fools about anything other than their narrow field of study, which ends up being most of them.
A few years back, Neil Tyson became the first of the modern crop that I lost faith in. He started babbling bullshit about evolution, then doubled down when folks pointed out he had no idea how evolution works. Turns out he's like that about nearly everything. I also suspect that those accusations of sexual harassment were swept under a rug and made to go away with a settlement and NDA, so there's that.
But in recent months it's gotten so much worse. Sabine Hossenfelder is now an ableist TERF who makes videos about being trans or autistic that are basically hate speech. Brian Keating is now a Fauci-hating MAGA conspiracy theorist who thinks wearing a mask on an airplane is an assault on civil rights, and John Michael Godier provided him a platform to say that without any pushback. And most of the science news world seems to have lost all perspective over Avi Loeb's alien artifact treasure hunt boondoggle, as well as the hullabaloo about UAPs we keep seeing in Congress. Then there's all the space enthusiasts who hate Starlink ruining the night sky but won't say a word against Elon, and how that corrupts much of science communication.
Avi Loeb is really quite troubling. He joins a crowd of academics who have gone over the edge into crackpottery. Michio Kaiku, Lawrence Krauss, Eric Weinstein - there's a lot of these credentialed crackpots who get to spout nonsense mostly unchallenged because news orgs don't have the expertise to tell the difference between brilliance and bullshit. Capitalism ruins everything, right?
All the best science communicators I know of today are in Astronomy, but I assume that's partly my personal selection bias as an astronomy nerd. Fraser Cane and Dr Becky Smethurst have been my astronomy favorites for a couple years. Don Lincoln and Matt O'Dowd are good for physics stuff but they are more about fundamentals than news and events. Forrest Valkai is an evolutionary biologist who I trust, but again he's more about fundamental science than science news.
Who do you trust for science news? I need to find some better sources!
I need to discover some better science communicators. Most of the ones I used to follow have revealed themselves to be untrustworthy. It's frustrating how many science communicators that I had to abandon after they showed themselves to be gullible fools about anything other than their narrow field of study, which ends up being most of them.
A few years back, Neil Tyson became the first of the modern crop that I lost faith in. He started babbling bullshit about evolution, then doubled down when folks pointed out he had no idea how evolution works. Turns out he's like that about nearly everything. I also suspect that those accusations of sexual harassment were swept under a rug and made to go away with a settlement and NDA, so there's that.
But in recent months it's gotten so much worse. Sabine Hossenfelder is now an ableist TERF who makes videos about being trans or autistic that are basically hate speech. Brian Keating is now a Fauci-hating MAGA conspiracy theorist who thinks wearing a mask on an airplane is an assault on civil rights, and John Michael Godier provided him a platform to say that without any pushback. And most of the science news world seems to have lost all perspective over Avi Loeb's alien artifact treasure hunt boondoggle, as well as the hullabaloo about UAPs we keep seeing in Congress. Then there's all the space enthusiasts who hate Starlink ruining the night sky but won't say a word against Elon, and how that corrupts much of science communication.
Avi Loeb is really quite troubling. He joins a crowd of academics who have gone over the edge into crackpottery. Michio Kaiku, Lawrence Krauss, Eric Weinstein - there's a lot of these credentialed crackpots who get to spout nonsense mostly unchallenged because news orgs don't have the expertise to tell the difference between brilliance and bullshit. Capitalism ruins everything, right?
All the best science communicators I know of today are in Astronomy, but I assume that's partly my personal selection bias as an astronomy nerd. Fraser Cane and Dr Becky Smethurst have been my astronomy favorites for a couple years. Don Lincoln and Matt O'Dowd are good for physics stuff but they are more about fundamentals than news and events. Forrest Valkai is an evolutionary biologist who I trust, but again he's more about fundamental science than science news.
Who do you trust for science news? I need to find some better sources!