The Problem with the 'Yay Science!' Crowd

What is 'soft scientism'?
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What is 'soft scientism'? Well, you probably won't know, because I just made the term up. I have a lot of thoughts about scientism and science communication. These are just a few of them, with a particular focus on 2020 and the pandemic.

Watching this back, I am wondering if I need to stop making videos at 3am because I'm not sure I got my point across at all. I'm just a bit fed up of people giving the impression that science is a magical entity that knows all the answers. Of course all of this pre-dates COVID, we're awash with YouTube channels, blogs and social media accounts which fetishise science in harmful ways. People praise crackpots that "cite sources", which is a meaningless term. Cherry-picking data that supports your argument isn't "citing source" accurately. A quack talking about cosmic energy is easy to spot. A qualified doctor talking about vitamin D, autophagy, telomeres, cryonics, magnesium, ions, keto etc etc *might* be just as big a quack as the first guy but will appear totally legit to most people (NB - all those areas have interesting avenues of investigation, but are prone to attracting people who are unable to appraise quality of data).
Links to those talks (both will be on YouTube later anyway)

UCL
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/science-communication-during-a-pandemic-are-we-part-of-the-problem-tickets-132426267531

@The Royal Institution
https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/events-2021/january/public-how-far-can-we-push-the-human-body

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References:

Great starter essay into scientism, from Thomas Burnett:
What is Scientism? https://www.aaas.org/programs/dialogue-science-ethics-and-religion/what-scientism

That excellent article from Jane C Hu about Eric Feigl-Ding and the rise of sensationalist science during the pandemic (ie Feigl-Ding is just one example - he's not alone):
Covid's Cassandra: The Swift, Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding https://undark.org/2020/11/25/complicated-rise-of-eric-feigl-ding/

Видео The Problem with the 'Yay Science!' Crowd канала Medlife Crisis