I feel differently about her work. I think she is doing the less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there. She spends time deflating amazing claims. The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy expositions and is definitely not academic grade but it shouldn’t be! She is making pithy responses to headline grabbing sensational mainstream hype reporting. There is an audience for that and she caters to it. You don’t like her aesthetic, fine. That’s a valid opinion but it doesn’t invalidate her work or make her the equivalent of what she is criticising. Headlines are to grab attention and sorry but that’s a fact for YouTube, trade books and even peer reviewed papers. The content is what ultimately should be judged and her content is high quality for what it aims to be. Want academic level peer reviewed literature? Go read a paper, text book or take a course.
The issue for me with her videos is that she mixes two very different kinds of criticism.
The first is criticism of things that are clearly wrong, such as the aforementioned science journalism. This is a good public service, I agree.
The second is criticism of other physicists’ ideas. i.e. her personal opinions and professional disagreements with other physicists.
She doesn’t delineate the two clearly enough to her audience, so some of her viewers may come away thinking that views that are held by physicists who are her peers, are in the same bucket as junk pop science articles. Just read the comments on her videos, they are full of “physics is a scam” type people who feel vindicated.
On top of that, in her more recent videos I get a weird feeling of her leaving some things purposefully ambiguous for that audience.
For example in the video to this article she was using a lot of climate science examples, which will be interpreted in a certain way by the "science is a scam" crowd. I'm not sure she is doing this on purpose (I have the impression she strongly believes in climate change), accidentally or if I'm just oversensitive to some things.
I think it's normal and expected that people who are skeptical are looking for people who will take their questions and concerns seriously.
I am very personally convinced of anthropogenic climate change and that it's a serious risk for humanity. I still believe that it's important to take people's questions seriously, and to respect that people who aren't convinced have been making their best attempt at understanding the world. For these people, biased stories that don't put numbers in context are seen as deceptive, and I think that perception is legitimate. The only way to actually meaningfully reach them is to credibly demonstrate that you're actually checking the evidence that disagrees with your conclusion.
I really don’t think it’s her problem to fix that the crazies latch on to it. I have no problem getting when she is offering a view or criticising consensus. And to be honest it seems you don’t either.
I sort of agree and disagree with you. I think generally you are correct we do need more Sabines not fewer.
However, I disagree that what she does is the "less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there". The sort of takedowns she does are quite popular and very easy to do. However, my criticism is that quite a few of them are superficial and fall essentially into the same traps that she criticises, i.e. the actual topic is much too complex to either present or take down without a more comprehensive in-depth discussion (which would be much less popular).
Now this is still somewhat ok if she's the expert on the topic she is talking about as she has the expertise to know how good/bad the simplifications she makes are. However, recently she has started weighing in on topics where she not an expert at all: diesel fuel, antibiotic resistance, light pollution to name just 3 from the front page of her youtube channel. In this case things become quite problematic, because she is simplifying things that she might not have a full grasp of herself but still talks about like an expert.
> The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy expositions
I've actually found a couple channels on YT specialising in lengthy reviews/essays, which I find very good. Off the top of my head:
1. Whitelight[1] - game reviews/critiques/analyses. Particularly worthy of note are the Assassin's Creed Unity[2] (1.5h), Batman Arkham City[3] (3h 10min) and Watch Dogs[4] (1h 15min) reviews.
2. MauLer[5] - critiques of mostly Star Wars, but sometimes also other mainstream films. The ongoing series of TFA critiques has 4 parts so far (there is going to be at least 6 total), each part taking anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.
I also feel that I'm forgetting some, which I don't watch regularly, but periodically am reminded about their existence and then after a long break spend several days watching, to then forget about them again.
But the channels I listed aren't fringe. Quite the contrary, they're quite popular. I think it's also interesting that one of, if not the most popular Vsauce video is the one about the Banach-Tarski paradox[6], which is almost 30 minutes long. His other videos also show this trend, where the long-form ones seem to get more views in general.
And those are just essays/reviews/etc. There is a whole genre of podcasts on youtube dedicated to 3-4h in-depth interviews. Everybody knows a whole bunch of them, therefore I don't even need to list any examples here to support that.
So it seems that YouTube is a pretty good place for long-form in-depth exploration of whatever topic (as long as you don't say "fuck", "murder" or show a human body).
We need more Sabines not fewer.