This should not be flagged. Bret and Heather both have PhD's in biology and the episode in question with Dr. Kory also featured Dr. Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology. This is science not politics.
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Scientific conversation happens between people who are actually practicing in the field. Scientists on social media are just engaged in promotion.
When Neil Degrasse Tyson talks on YT, I consider that a combination of promotion and pedagogy. But that's not science. He's not engaging in scientific conversation with fellow colleagues. This is not an indictment on Dr. Tyson's expertise, but it is a criticism on confusing scientific discourse with mass media promotion.
Another difference I'd draw between any other scientific field is that astrophysics is largely orthogonal to matters of public health or finance. Likewise, a math crank is much less likely to cause damage than a doctor promoting a drug, or a finance expert promoting an investment.
Health and finance are very special fields, and they deserve to be treated so in the arena of mass media promotions.
You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens.
This statement, "You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens," is anti-scientific. I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's description in _The Demon-Haunted World_ of people who make profoundly unscientific statements using the words of science, because they want the authority and respect accorded those words, not realizing that the authority and respect comes from the methods of science, not just the words.
You don't "decide" "where" science happens. It's not a question of rights. It demonstrably does not happen at your will or on the basis of your decision. It happens the way science happens, because that's what science is.
A scientist eating a sandwich is not doing science. A scientist talking on YouTube is not doing science. A scientist doing science is doing science. That's not my decision, it's the definition of science.
You decide for me when you censor hypotheses and flag scientific discussion as political. That is happening en mass in the name of science.
Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
Again, this is not a decision I've made, but the actual definition of the things. I can't call a lollipop a frog and then get mad when it doesn't jump, or someone licks it. It is what it is.
>Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
As a scientist, I can definitively say this is false. Both these things happen over beers quite frequently.
To further
If science only happened in labs and journals, how did we ever get to the point where those things existed?
Edit: to pre-empt the likely rebuttal
A hypotheses formed over beers but never tested outside the bar is like most other beer-centered conversation: of limited value.
Science communication, similarly, can start anywhere, but what you're describing has a very tenuous relationship with people talking on YouTube.
I'm all for people doing science having as much flexibility as they want, up to the point where what they're doing is no longer science. People forming ex post facto hypotheses based on carefully-chosen data, or bypassing any peer-review in favor of YouTube communication, that should raise serious alarms bells for anyone in the sciences.
I mean, we're talking about medicine and vaccines, right? As a scientist, what kind of medicine are we talking about here? And what kind of vaccine research are we talking about here?
Is it not obvious that some kinds of scientific and medical practice must always be severely gated in all modern societies because of its extreme and intimate relationship to public health and trust? And when we're talking about medicine or vaccines, we are talking about human research subjects. What would amateur empiricism in medicine and vaccination even mean here?
When you talk about the foundations of early medical science, you're not referring to Gray's Anatomy dig-up-the-bodies-in-the-graveyard style of original human research, right? You surely don't have a modern vision of amateur medical research with human subjects, right? In the historical context that stuff is breathtaking and pioneering. In the modern context that would be breathtaking for another reason.
I'm curious if you believe that only scientists can practice science.
Of course not! I would hope every student practices science as part of a general childhood education.
But when it comes to potentially life-saving medicines or therapies, the standard should be a bit more rigorous than sixth-grade classroom experiments.
Since we're talking about vaccines and medicine, what kind of science and what kind of scientists are we talking about here? What would amateur medical empiricism with human subjects look like? Every society has scientists and doctors, and every society must decide how to establish harmony with their professional medical groups.
> You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens.
I mean, okay.
They engage in promotion of their findings, even if only review or survey of other studies. Communicating findings enables replication.