[darby_nine]

> are kind of like a junk food version of science

While I have long agreed with this sentiment, I'd like to gently push back against the idea that "science" is itself coherent, reliable, monolithic, or able to be digested by a single human at all. I suspect what you're actually comparing to is in-depth reading of published papers from which you draw your own conclusions—reliable or not—drawn arbitrarily from a pool where there's basically zero way to actually verify the quality of the papers you're reading. In this light I don't think it's a bad thing that people are given a glimpse of scientific understanding through pop-literature because the vast majority of people—even those that read papers—grossly overestimate the certainty of knowledge that they have not specifically specialized in.

This is a long-winded way of saying basically nobody interacts with "science" directly. It all comes down to trust, and I strongly suspect that the trust in a give pop-literature writer isn't that much worse-placed than the average person writing the academic papers in the first place—outside the topic of the paper, of course. It's incredibly difficult to aggregate knowledge without serious evidence about how trustworthy the publishers and writers are, and sadly credentials and brand prestige tend to be piss-poor evidence.

[Barrin92]

>In this light I don't think it's a bad thing that people are given a glimpse of scientific understanding through pop-literature

It is when you're doing "Huberman Math" https://x.com/bcrypt/status/1788406218937229780

This isn't a "glimpse into science", it's mostly the techbro version of Oprah trying to sell people vitamin supplements.

[loveparade]

What the... I was expecting some kind of math slip up, which can happen to all of us, especially in front of a camera. But this is just scary. No matter how tired or nervous you are, this isn't a mistake an educated person should make.

[darby_nine]

The curse of liberal society is that we will always struggle with defining who exactly is allowed to gatekeep knowledge. The liberal version of collective censorship comes from widespread consensus among publishers and distributers (and even that is rarely absolute, and I believe only a minority truly think this is possible).

For all we lament cancel culture and divisive discourse, our bookstore would look a lot worse without them, and I believe it's your patriotic duty to mock and decry people whom you perceive as harmful to society.

[haswell]

> I believe it's your patriotic duty to mock and decry people whom you perceive as harmful to society

I do think it’s our duty to engage in dialogue about the things that we feel are harmful to society. Dialogue is all we have to address issues peacefully, and how we use it is critical.

I disagree that mocking and decrying people is the answer. This may feel good for the person or group doing it, but does little to actually move the needle in terms of actual change. What it does do is drive a wedge between the people doing the mocking and those being mocked, and I’d argue this is at the heart of the increasing polarization we see across almost every subject.

The reality is that good people have questionable or downright bad ideas/beliefs and do things that are harmful. Attack bad ideas, yes. Argue for good ideas, even forcefully when necessary. Don’t attack people.

Almost nothing of value comes from mocking and deriding people when the end goal is to coexist in a free society, especially when achieving actual systemic change via legislation depends on people agreeing/coming together and is directly harmed by creating a zero sum mindset.

[darby_nine]

> This may feel good for the person or group doing it, but does little to actually move the needle in terms of actual change

I disagree completely. I find it's the idea of persuasion that has proved itself to be largely useless when people largely act irrationally and ground their worldviews in incoherent values and aesthetics. Meanwhile mocking people is an extremely effective form of communication.

[al_borland]

While the math might be a little off, telling people not to run to the OBGYN after not getting pregnant after one or two attempts isn't bad advice.

[cassianoleal]

Legit question, I've always wondered... Why do people in the USA spell and pronounce that word as if it were an initialism? I mean OBGYN or OB-GYN as I've seen spelled elsewhere as well. As far as I can tell, it's not 5 words but rather 2: Obstetrician and Gynecologist.

[al_borland]

We generally spell out titles for doctors or others in the medical field. PHD, MD, DDS, DO, OBGYN, etc.

It could also be, in part, because if it was lowercase people would try to say it instead of spelling out the letters.

People will often say “gyno” instead of gynecologist, if just talking about that.

[cassianoleal]

> PHD, MD, DDS, DO, OBGYN

PhD is an "almost initialism" :P and would be very hard to read without spelling out the letters.

MD, DDS and DO are initialisms and there's no other way to read it.

ObGyn is more of an acronym and it would make sense to read it as a word.