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Serious Science (serious-science.org)

79 points by agrostis ↗ HN
A science popularization site featuring researchers giving video talks about their respective areas of study.

(Russian readers of HN might happen to know the site postnauka.ru, of which this is an English-language spin-off.)

27 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] thread
jesuscrust
It's called "serious science" but its articles don't even cite sources for their claims. So it's actually less serious than wikipedia. Why should anyone use this over wikipedia?
ivarrr
I guess cauz it provides knowledge directly from scientists
jasallen
That would be our high priest caste of "scientist" from which all knowing is given. We needn't evidence or studies, people, the 'scientists' said it is so.

(FWIW, not a commentary on source link, just on parent comment)

kghose
That's what science is. Stuff said by scientists, often referring to other stuff said by other scientists before.
jasallen
I can't think you really believe that to be true.

Your description says you are a neuro-scientist. So science is just something you say? If you say it, it is true? Or do you usually try to provide supporting documentation? Show statistical evidence and provide the parameters under which such figures were gathered? Encourage others to reproduce such results rather than merely relying on 'stuff you said'?

In this age research fraud run amok I think "its science cuz scientists said it" is a particularly dangerous viewpoint.

ivarrr
Dangerous viewpoint is when science is provided by anonymous wikipedia, but not by scientists themselves.
judk
It's how we avoid cult of personality and the fallacy of argument from authority.
tokipin
i think you're jumping the gun. he means that science is vetted by consensus. and this particular website has a casual tone and the videos look like layman explanations for people who aren't afraid of getting a teeny bit technical.

though, i would agree that citations wouldn't hurt if particular claims are being made, but a lot of the videos look like overviews of generic knowledge

kghose
Lectures often don't have citations. It breaks up the flow. Basic text books often don't have citations. Citations by themselves are also meaningless.

The ideal of science that we are taught boils down to one premise and one premise only: as part of a scientific statement there will be a recipe. By following this recipe we can replicate the findings of the author.

This ideal is met less and less the more complex and expensive our science gets.

(Thanks for the support and clarification btw!)

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pervycreeper
> Why should anyone use this over wikipedia?

A better comparison would be one with mainstream science journalism.

toufka
I don't think this is a serious question here. On the other hand, I think it's an intriguing question in general.

There is nearly no way for a PI (head scientist) to cite everything that they say. Knowledge at the forefront is cobbled together from little whispers, tastes of failed experiments, hearings-ons from colleagues, intuition, guesses and literally decades of thinking. And so when speaking abstractly (as these videos are), they are often less wrong than anyone else (Clapper, this is how you use that term...). If you were to press them on specifics, they would become mostly correct and dig up where they got that nugget of wisdom, though simultaneously losing much of the power of generalization. In that sense - the generalities are always slightly suspect, but of far greater quality than anyone else's generalities. And usually the generalities you'd like to hear about from the cutting edge are those that there is no consensus about anyway.

So in that respect, I'd say the generalizations of cutting edge scientists are usually the least wrong, rarely perfect, always insightful, and nearly impossible to source. They are the tenuous 'hypothesis' writ large to which their career is attesting. Citation of such is nearly a moot point, as no generalizable experiments yet exist.

On the other hand it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper or review about some of the stuff they just spoke of. It'd be trivial for them to name a paper or two that they find dominating their perspectives here.

ivarrr
>it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper or review about some of the stuff they just spoke of.

Great idea! We'll put it unto the to-do list.

toufka
And as a spur to kick scientists in their own rear, I'd also link to their own lab websites. It might be a bit of a shit-show at first, but we/they really need to get with the times, and this is a good place to start.
ivarrr
We will improve this side as well.
tokipin
something easier to fix in the short term is your logo, which was saved as a lossy JPG. the artifacts are subtly visible and it looks ugly. or it might be an antialiasing issue. part of it might also be the border/thinness but thats another discussion. if you have the source as a vector and saving to PNG doesn't improve it, try saving it as a very large bitmap and resizing it down.
hengheng
I kinda want this as a Podcast. Or do you monetize exclusively via YouTube?

PS: Also the "subscribe" page can, for now, just link to the youtube channel. At least I could subscribe there.

patrickyeon
So do I, and I wonder if there's a more reasonable way to monetize this than youtube (assuming it's meant to make money). I'd much rather sign up for an RSS podcast than set up a cronjob to download the video and rip the audio (which would also mean no money from youtube for them).
ivarrr
No, we do not expect to monetize it this way. We will open mp3-podcast later.
possibilistic
My roommate and I are working on a very similar video series. We have a differet angle (short breadth survey => depth on a novel or interesting discovery or inquiry; informed by paper review, but no PIs.)

I'll watch how you guys evolve closely.

Good job.

renox
I don't get the point of videos here, it doesn't seem to bring much benefit and text would be much faster to read..