this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Science-y types do so much damage when they venture into social or political topics. You just know theres some bright-eyed youngin who will uncritically transfer over the esteem they have for their science communication & just accept their premise without second thought.
The crazy part is that they have so little to gain from it, much to lose, and yet... All the cred she had from making quality, seemingly-informative content vanished with one video. Now, even if she were to present valid info on science topics, I'd forever be skeptical of her basic ability to vet information. I doubt theres an equivalent converse effect within the capitalism fanboy demographic. All she had to do was nothing.
I have a hypothesis that this phenomena of science types overestimating their ability to draw conclusions in the social sciences is a result of STEM-y people persistently being told they are smart for being relatively competent with more concrete subjects, making them far less likely to negatively assess their understanding of the more squishy world. Thoughts?
I think part of it is that they underestimate the complexity of the topic. I think Sabine doesn't know what she doesn't know, and then she's too overconfident to realize it because neoliberal narratives are fucking crammed into every conceivable corner of human discourse — and if they're that ubiquitous, they must be really well vetted and they must be fuckin true!
"We peer-reviewed ourselves and found no social murder"
This is absolutely 100% a thing. I'm a software dev and every other colleague is like this to some extent, they'll make the most puddle-deep analysis of a societal problem backed up by nothing but their personal biases and think they're fucking sociological geniuses.
This is my experience as well. People act like there's a data structure for any and every complex social phenomena.
Physics is the absolute worst with this, too. When I was doing my postdoc in a climate lab, by far the greatest amount of pushback against climate science as a discipline (at least internally) came from the physics department. They sometimes think that since physics is in some sense the "most fundamental" science, they have a right to pontificate on anything else since everything is, at bottom, a physical system. Combined with the fact that they deal with mathematically sophisticated but frequently highly idealized or constrained models--and thus are skeptical of complexity in general--this sometimes gives them the attitude that they can pick up any other discipline and do it better than genuine experts. It's a pretty pervasive problem.
STEMlords get told their shit don't stink, which cultivates a form of arrogance. The funny thing is that this happens enough that once they get old, they start doing the same shit to STEM fields that they have no expertise in. It starts with the social sciences and the humanities when they are younger, but by the time they're old, they become full-blown cranks who think their expertise in electrical engineering makes them an expert on the efficacy of vaccines.
I said it in a previous thread about her, I think she's intentionally misrepresenting this. She did some shady stuff with climate change which is science. She doesn't deny it but talks it down for her audience.
In first minutes of climate change video she says we can't stop using cars. This is a "scientist". Idk why people bother