4 ms·

I understand your complaint, but this isn’t a formal proof or a research paper seeking peer review. This is an educational demonstration of physics concepts tha

by baddox 9y ago

I understand your complaint, but this isn’t a formal proof or a research paper seeking peer review. This is an educational demonstration of physics concepts that have already been very well-established through the much more rigorous methodology and peer review you are asking for. Of course the educational demonstration won’t have the same rigor, and it shouldn’t be expected to.

sago 9y ago
With respect, I don't think that was his complaint. The problem is pretending to demonstrate by experiment something that involves abstractions to the real world. It's the same thing with 'demonstrations' that a heavy object will fall at the same speed as a light object where inevitably its 'close enough,' but not actually true (they do in perfect vacuum, but not in a simple experiment). This happens a lot in demonstrating science, because science is really messy. And even relatively simple physical phenomena we don't understand fully (a recent topical example is we don't properly understand why curling stones curl the way they do). The problem is pretending the answer is simpler than it is. Which inevitably leads to motivated 'pseudo-experiments'.
- lisper 9y ago
  > The problem is pretending to demonstrate by experiment something that involves abstractions to the real world. Not quite. My complaint is pretending that the result of an experiment was something other than what it clearly was and saying, implicitly, "despite the fact that you could plainly see that the result of this experiment was NOT what I said it would be, you should nonetheless believe what I tell you about the laws of physics because I'm the professor and you are the student and I know what's what and you don't. Pay no attention to the actual outcome of the experiment that you saw with your own eyes and instead trust my authoritah." > This happens a lot in demonstrating science, because science is really messy. That's no excuse here IMO. In this case the demo was simply very poorly designed. It's just not that hard to construct a friction and moment-of-inertia demo that actually shows what it is intended to show.
  - exodust 9y ago
    Obviously he is gearing up to demonstrate the significant difference between hollow and solid cylinders. It's the only race out of all that anyone could place a confident bet on the outcome, and this is what matters. Kids learn that weight and size make no difference. Kids would probably call out the differences on the day and then that could be explained and repeated if needed.
    - Judgmentality 9y ago
      I think you're glossing over something very important though - which is that he visibly demonstrated that he was wrong. I understand his intention and how he was building up towards the end, but this video makes me question everything he says rather than believe him. He is very much telling us to ignore what we saw with our eyes because it disagrees with his prediction, with very little explanation as to why. He made a prediction, he demonstrated for us that his prediction was wrong, and then he told us he was still right. If that's not an appeal to authority then I don't know what is.
      - lisper 9y ago
        Exactly right.
      - baddox 9y ago
        I just don’t think it’s anywhere near as egregious as you make it sound. If he had literally told us to ignore our eyes, yes that would be bad. But he explicitly said that things were close, and that variations in the plank can cause slight differences, and that averaging a few trials would show extremely close results. Sure, you have to “take it on faith,” but it’s a very reasonable explanation, and by the end of the demonstration (when you see the much larger difference with the hollow cylinders) it becomes clear (or at least extremely easy to believe) that the tiny variations in earlier experiments were indeed the result of “impurities” in the physical medium rather than attempts to conceal inaccuracies in the physics claims being demonstrated.
        9y ago
mncharity 9y ago
Content for science education commonly mixes aspects done with great care, aspects done with less, and aspects that are... artistic license and trippy psychotic bogosity. Regrettably, students are often unsure which aspects are which. Unsurprisingly so - they're new to the area. This feeds and diversifies their rich ecologies of misconceptions. So some lecturer might think of themselves as demonstrating only friction. But they're also demonstrating how to present material, how to do lab safety, and perhaps also how to silently subordinate observation and data to expectation and narrative. When doing a demo, one can easily acknowledge and flag a divergence with a "<expectation>... more or less". And it's not just a problem for students. In the context of science education research, a first-rate stone-cold-empircial experimental physicist, when thinking about their teaching, might be "like, I have gut feel for what works - I trust my gut". Sigh. I know a biologist, who does respected work, but get them started on <other thing that's not their research focus>, and it's a bizarre sidestep into earthy-crunchy crystal-crazy land. Pity the poor student trying to figure out which of all these are the behaviors to emulate, and which not.
tripzilch 9y ago
Yeah, no. I actually paused the video at that point and said "what the hell?? that was 12 degrees (as someone in the crew predicted), not 16-17 degrees!". It wasn't even 15 degrees, which was clearly when the object actually started sliding in the first experiment. I wanted to continue watching the video because I should watch the whole thing if I'm gonna criticise it. But then he lied about the stapler. Just because he skipped counting "15, 16, 18, 19.." doesn't mean it didn't start sliding at 17 degrees, which is in fact within one degree of the unweighted yellow box (if you take his word for it, or within two degrees if you go by what you saw), either way definitely closer than when the weighted yellow box started sliding. If there's one thing this video tells me it's that the angles that he measures are accurate to no more than +/- 5 degrees. Therefore drawing conclusions about differences that are less than that is FLAWED. What he is demonstrating is how NOT to do a physics experiment. It's terrible! If he just wanted the audience to take away from this video that friction is independent of weight or whatever, it would have been better if he had just told the story in front of a blackboard or something. I stopped watching when he claimed the two cylinders of different length made "no difference". https://i.imgur.com/SXg4FRk.png https://i.imgur.com/SXg4FRk.png FFS this is just embarassing. It's pretty obvious that this guy is just going through the motions telling a rehearsed story that has not much to do with the actual outcomes of the "experiment" he is trying to make us believe he is performing. If you think that's okay, then imagine replacing this "demonstration" with an animated cartoon of the very same. How convincing would that be to you? Because he does say "you just gotta take my word for it", a lot. > this isn’t a formal proof or a research paper seeking peer review No but it is a youtube video of a physics experiment. They don't get peer reviewed. What is it exactly that you are trying to say? Am I not allowed to expect some amount of rigour and honesty unless it's a research paper seeking peer review? If it intends to be educational, at least don't show that apparently it's okay to fudge results in a physics experiment as long as you're a MIT professor and say "just take my word for it". Because that's my takeaway from this video: "this guy probably shouldn't do physics experiments". Because most Youtube videos on scientific topics I've seen, they either perform the experiment correctly, but if they don't get the results that they "should", they own up to it. Sometimes they record the experiment again, and they TELL you it failed at first and what they changed. Sometimes I even hear them lament that they filmed a great experiment, got the results they wanted, but had to trash the video because it just looked fake and unconvincing (because of the angle, timing, just didn't work on camera, etc)[0]. It sucks for their time and effort but they know they can't use it because it would completely undermine their point when the comments point out how fake it looks. Guess who disabled commenting on their video? You're absolutely right about not seeking peer review, or in fact any review. Quick check of some other vids on that Physics World youtube-channel, in particular a few videos with a professor or PHD talking or doing an experiment: NONE (of the ones I clicked so far) had their comments disabled! So what I'm guessing happened here is, a LOT of people had issues with the fudging of the experimental results and dis-ingenuity of what they supposedly demonstrate. They commented and pointed out that what the man says is happening isn't actually what they see is happening, and that makes it really hard to "just take his word for it". I doubt it even got really ugly before someone's ego got a dent in it and instead of deleting the crummy video, they took the much easier road of deleting the criticism. If he's doing this all the time in Skype demonstrations all over the world, why put up a video where the first couple of experiments clearly don't show what he's saying they show? [0] That example btw, was Tom Scott a couple of times, huge respect. Not only owning up to failed experiments, but clearly talking about the experiments he DID do, that DID NOT work out as he hoped, so much that he didn't want to publish them (on YouTube), but he still said he did the experiment. That's a HIGHER STANDARD actually than a proper scientific formal proof or peer-reviewed research paper is held to!!!! Peer review doesn't check for publication bias.

by baddox 9y ago

sago 9y ago

With respect, I don't think that was his complaint. The problem is pretending to demonstrate by experiment something that involves abstractions to the real world. It's the same thing with 'demonstrations' that a heavy object will fall at the same speed as a light object where inevitably its 'close enough,' but not actually true (they do in perfect vacuum, but not in a simple experiment). This happens a lot in demonstrating science, because science is really messy. And even relatively simple physical phenomena we don't understand fully (a recent topical example is we don't properly understand why curling stones curl the way they do). The problem is pretending the answer is simpler than it is. Which inevitably leads to motivated 'pseudo-experiments'.

lisper 9y ago
> The problem is pretending to demonstrate by experiment something that involves abstractions to the real world. Not quite. My complaint is pretending that the result of an experiment was something other than what it clearly was and saying, implicitly, "despite the fact that you could plainly see that the result of this experiment was NOT what I said it would be, you should nonetheless believe what I tell you about the laws of physics because I'm the professor and you are the student and I know what's what and you don't. Pay no attention to the actual outcome of the experiment that you saw with your own eyes and instead trust my authoritah." > This happens a lot in demonstrating science, because science is really messy. That's no excuse here IMO. In this case the demo was simply very poorly designed. It's just not that hard to construct a friction and moment-of-inertia demo that actually shows what it is intended to show.
- exodust 9y ago
  Obviously he is gearing up to demonstrate the significant difference between hollow and solid cylinders. It's the only race out of all that anyone could place a confident bet on the outcome, and this is what matters. Kids learn that weight and size make no difference. Kids would probably call out the differences on the day and then that could be explained and repeated if needed.
  - Judgmentality 9y ago
    I think you're glossing over something very important though - which is that he visibly demonstrated that he was wrong. I understand his intention and how he was building up towards the end, but this video makes me question everything he says rather than believe him. He is very much telling us to ignore what we saw with our eyes because it disagrees with his prediction, with very little explanation as to why. He made a prediction, he demonstrated for us that his prediction was wrong, and then he told us he was still right. If that's not an appeal to authority then I don't know what is.
    - lisper 9y ago
      Exactly right.
    - baddox 9y ago
      I just don’t think it’s anywhere near as egregious as you make it sound. If he had literally told us to ignore our eyes, yes that would be bad. But he explicitly said that things were close, and that variations in the plank can cause slight differences, and that averaging a few trials would show extremely close results. Sure, you have to “take it on faith,” but it’s a very reasonable explanation, and by the end of the demonstration (when you see the much larger difference with the hollow cylinders) it becomes clear (or at least extremely easy to believe) that the tiny variations in earlier experiments were indeed the result of “impurities” in the physical medium rather than attempts to conceal inaccuracies in the physics claims being demonstrated.
      - 9y ago

mncharity 9y ago

Content for science education commonly mixes aspects done with great care, aspects done with less, and aspects that are... artistic license and trippy psychotic bogosity. Regrettably, students are often unsure which aspects are which. Unsurprisingly so - they're new to the area. This feeds and diversifies their rich ecologies of misconceptions. So some lecturer might think of themselves as demonstrating only friction. But they're also demonstrating how to present material, how to do lab safety, and perhaps also how to silently subordinate observation and data to expectation and narrative. When doing a demo, one can easily acknowledge and flag a divergence with a "<expectation>... more or less". And it's not just a problem for students. In the context of science education research, a first-rate stone-cold-empircial experimental physicist, when thinking about their teaching, might be "like, I have gut feel for what works - I trust my gut". Sigh. I know a biologist, who does respected work, but get them started on <other thing that's not their research focus>, and it's a bizarre sidestep into earthy-crunchy crystal-crazy land. Pity the poor student trying to figure out which of all these are the behaviors to emulate, and which not.

tripzilch 9y ago

Yeah, no. I actually paused the video at that point and said "what the hell?? that was 12 degrees (as someone in the crew predicted), not 16-17 degrees!". It wasn't even 15 degrees, which was clearly when the object actually started sliding in the first experiment. I wanted to continue watching the video because I should watch the whole thing if I'm gonna criticise it. But then he lied about the stapler. Just because he skipped counting "15, 16, 18, 19.." doesn't mean it didn't start sliding at 17 degrees, which is in fact within one degree of the unweighted yellow box (if you take his word for it, or within two degrees if you go by what you saw), either way definitely closer than when the weighted yellow box started sliding. If there's one thing this video tells me it's that the angles that he measures are accurate to no more than +/- 5 degrees. Therefore drawing conclusions about differences that are less than that is FLAWED. What he is demonstrating is how NOT to do a physics experiment. It's terrible! If he just wanted the audience to take away from this video that friction is independent of weight or whatever, it would have been better if he had just told the story in front of a blackboard or something. I stopped watching when he claimed the two cylinders of different length made "no difference". https://i.imgur.com/SXg4FRk.png https://i.imgur.com/SXg4FRk.png FFS this is just embarassing. It's pretty obvious that this guy is just going through the motions telling a rehearsed story that has not much to do with the actual outcomes of the "experiment" he is trying to make us believe he is performing. If you think that's okay, then imagine replacing this "demonstration" with an animated cartoon of the very same. How convincing would that be to you? Because he does say "you just gotta take my word for it", a lot. > this isn’t a formal proof or a research paper seeking peer review No but it is a youtube video of a physics experiment. They don't get peer reviewed. What is it exactly that you are trying to say? Am I not allowed to expect some amount of rigour and honesty unless it's a research paper seeking peer review? If it intends to be educational, at least don't show that apparently it's okay to fudge results in a physics experiment as long as you're a MIT professor and say "just take my word for it". Because that's my takeaway from this video: "this guy probably shouldn't do physics experiments". Because most Youtube videos on scientific topics I've seen, they either perform the experiment correctly, but if they don't get the results that they "should", they own up to it. Sometimes they record the experiment again, and they TELL you it failed at first and what they changed. Sometimes I even hear them lament that they filmed a great experiment, got the results they wanted, but had to trash the video because it just looked fake and unconvincing (because of the angle, timing, just didn't work on camera, etc)[0]. It sucks for their time and effort but they know they can't use it because it would completely undermine their point when the comments point out how fake it looks. Guess who disabled commenting on their video? You're absolutely right about not seeking peer review, or in fact any review. Quick check of some other vids on that Physics World youtube-channel, in particular a few videos with a professor or PHD talking or doing an experiment: NONE (of the ones I clicked so far) had their comments disabled! So what I'm guessing happened here is, a LOT of people had issues with the fudging of the experimental results and dis-ingenuity of what they supposedly demonstrate. They commented and pointed out that what the man says is happening isn't actually what they see is happening, and that makes it really hard to "just take his word for it". I doubt it even got really ugly before someone's ego got a dent in it and instead of deleting the crummy video, they took the much easier road of deleting the criticism. If he's doing this all the time in Skype demonstrations all over the world, why put up a video where the first couple of experiments clearly don't show what he's saying they show? [0] That example btw, was Tom Scott a couple of times, huge respect. Not only owning up to failed experiments, but clearly talking about the experiments he DID do, that DID NOT work out as he hoped, so much that he didn't want to publish them (on YouTube), but he still said he did the experiment. That's a HIGHER STANDARD actually than a proper scientific formal proof or peer-reviewed research paper is held to!!!! Peer review doesn't check for publication bias.