It's an organization with an unpredictable return on investment, in practice, they don't really have any negative consequences if they waste public money, or if it was actually useless (unless too obvious to external people).
It's somewhat part of investing into experimental science.
In the eyes of the taxpayers, there's not that much of a difference between particle physicists who have been spending billions of dollars on bigger and bigger colliders, and psychologists who popularized non-replicating studies based on a sample of 35 university students but refused to touch IQ (one of the most, if not replicated psychology concepts ever), or biologists who invented new species out of thin air based on the most minuscule differences between population just to stop a development project they oppose for ideological reasons. All of this will cause severe backlash. Baby will be thrown out with the bathwater, trust and funding for science as a whole will suffer for decades.
> The current US Presidential administration is in the process of throwing the entire bathroom out, tub and all.
Are they, maybe, I have not seen any popularized document detailing their plans and they are taking large steps that will have consequences. Since there is not well popularized plan uncertainty and doubt is filling that void, a consequence which is easy to anticipate(as are some consequences of uncertainty and doubt).
> We're going to have substantially less reliable data over the next decade.
With no well popularized plan, hard to tell, and even harder because there are people hard at work on their own vision of the future that do not 100% line up with the current administration's plans and those people will influence the next decade as well.
National funding agencies are fundamentally in the business of choosing "this not that" because of the constraints of finite funding. Just like with VC math, it's difficult to imagine the benefits of the billion dollar collider outweigh the opportunity cost of investing in a large nation's worth of researchers to explore smaller, cheaper ideas.
I've seen her writings here and there over the years, and I remember she was generally respected as an opinionated expert. What happened?
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[0] - I've seen my share of dramas which started with a message like this video, and where I thought I had a good picture, until some time later some critical details came to light and I ended up flipping my stance on it 180°.
Respected and opinionated experts gotta eat
(I'm not just reacting to the existence of a sponsorship section alone - more to the choice of the sponsor, the presentation, and the very juxtaposition of a "trust me while I quote from private conversation" and "this video was sponsored by a data broker company".)
You can find ways to dismiss opinions you don't like, but targeting individual contributors that use sponsorships to maintain or alleviate financial stability is an interesting attack. I guess if that's your only critique, you have no claims to any other negative critique about her points? Just a literal ad hominem? "What happened" to actual discourse?
It would be merely off-putting if it was tacked onto a video about hard, verifiable facts - but to make a video that explicitly asks the audience to trust her on her world, and then end it by saying the video itself was sponsored by a company? Surely she's aware of the optics? Even the regular YouTube influencers usually know better and skip the sponsorship section when making a complaint video.
I'm also not committing an ad hominem here (if anything, maybe some adjacent fallacy). This is the lens through which I view all YouTube channels, and it applies here, and doubly so given that this is not a video about independently verifiable facts - it's all based about an e-mail she claims she received, and she acknowledges that directly. We have to trust her at her word.
Now, I don't know about you, but if someone in one moment tells me some information, and then in the next moment starts giving me "capitalist brand advertisement speak" about some dubious product, I'm going to take it as a sign that someone doesn't actually care about my well-being, as manipulating someone into a bad deal for profit is plain malice[0]. Additionally, I might question that person's integrity - depending on obviously they're knowingly pushing a bad product, or how indifferent they are to what they're promoting. Which, in turn, will make me question everything they just told me before - after all, if they just demonstrated they're fine with lies or bullshit now, why should I assume they held themselves to the highest standards of scientific and personal truth moments before?
I'm honestly done complaining over YouTube creators; I just accepted that many of the well-known pop-sci channels turned into content marketing schemes. At least I stopped being surprised by exaggerations and inaccuracies in the main parts. I commented this time only because I totally didn't expect to see a reputable scientist doing this kind of stuff.
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[0] - Yes, I stand firm on this, and yes, if you scale this view up, you end up considering the entire field of "marketing communication" (covering a subset of intersection of sales, marketing and advertising) as a cancer on modern society. I wrote an article about this some time ago, which I've been told has apparently popped up on HN last week.
> Just a literal ad hominem?
I do not read what in the comment as an attack, but an outsider to the field trying to judge the opinion they are absorbing.
Some people are going to expect an experts to have an outside money stream that comes from their expertise so in video adds are not necessary. That is not a heuristic that is going to be right 100% of the time, but is is not the worst heuristic or an attack.
I'd say, my own emotions aside, she made a pragmatic mistake here - first delivering a quite powerful bomb that she explicitly acknowledges we need to trust her about (as it's an excerpt of a private conversation, not possible to independently verify), only to tell us - also explicitly - that the video was sponsored by a company. This is the kind of stuff you find in late-stage capitalism jokes, or movies about corporate utopia where this juxtaposition is exaggerated for effect. I did not see it coming, and I struggle to understand why it did.
But more generally, while I wouldn't describe it as "targeting individual contributors that use sponsorships to maintain or alleviate financial stability", I do believe that what kinds of sponsorships people choose and how they fulfill the sponsor's conditions does directly reflect on trustworthiness of the entire message - to think otherwise would be to believe that humans are capable of compartmentalizing their activities into high-integrity and low-integrity parts, which is something I don't believe humans are capable of over long-term. Maybe I'm wrong about that - if psychology says it's normal, then perhaps I need to reconsider my heuristic. But if I'm right, then this is directly on-topic and I believe it's right to bring it up, to the extent the creator/speaker is asking the audience to take them on trust. Aka. on authority. Which means it applies doubly so to the experts - their choice of what and how they advertise matters more, because they're lending their credibility to both the message and the ad that pays for it.
I agree here. I would say historically this was a more common view. What I observe is that more people are disregarding this and it is in part due to feedback loops between the very large audiences that web platforms provide today and the creator. If you message connects with a large enough group of people with enough loyalty/trust(that say weird sponsor messages do not effect there viewership) you can safely disregard the rest of audience to a large degree. Delivering with emotions, "delivering a quite powerful bomb"s, etc help build that loyal group of followers but also lead to a feedback cycle that can make things more one side/hyperbolic/etc.
This has a knock on effect in people, at least those like me, who now devalue many similar emotional pleas without evidence for both good and ill. After all if people are incentivized to be delivering impassioned speeches and "bomb"s, statistically there are going to be more people who do so inappropriately, sometimes it seems somewhat normalized just due to how much I see it. To me the message she delivered had little to no impact on me because it was not delivered with either reasonable evidence or at least a start of a plan or solution to the issue she is describing. This knock on effect just makes things worst to some extent though since creators already in that feedback loop have even less incentive to reach out to someone like me because they have to overcome the additional barrier, and would not when the same level of loyalty even if they did.
> But if I'm right, then this is directly on-topic and I believe it's right to bring it up, to the extent the creator/speaker is asking the audience to take them on trust. Aka. on authority. Which means it applies doubly so to the experts - their choice of what and how they advertise matters more, because they're lending their credibility to both the message and the ad that pays for it.
I agree it is on topic and relevant, but it did not register to me at all in this video because the trust was lost when there was only the impassioned deliver without hard evidence or an action plan to help address the issue. It likely also does not register to those in the loyal impassioned group of followers either.
Independent of potential regulation, creating more high trust, potentially collaborative, sources of information seems like like a partial way to counter balance some of this.
Yes, science has extremely unpredictable return on investment.
What's your suggestion? Don't try?