

Serious Science - agrostis
http://serious-science.org
A science popularization site featuring researchers giving video talks about their respective areas of study.<p>(Russian readers of HN might happen to know the site postnauka.ru, of which this is an English-language spin-off.)
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jesuscrust
It's called "serious science" but its articles don't even cite sources for
their claims. So it's actually less serious than wikipedia. Why should anyone
use this over wikipedia?

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toufka
I don't think this is a serious question _here_. On the other hand, I think
it's an intriguing question in general.

There is nearly no way for a PI (head scientist) to cite everything that they
say. Knowledge at the forefront is cobbled together from little whispers,
tastes of failed experiments, hearings-ons from colleagues, intuition, guesses
and literally decades of thinking. And so when speaking abstractly (as these
videos are), they are often _less wrong_ than anyone else (Clapper, this is
how you use that term...). If you were to press them on specifics, they would
become _mostly correct_ and dig up where they got that nugget of wisdom,
though simultaneously losing much of the power of generalization. In that
sense - the generalities are always slightly suspect, but of far greater
quality than anyone else's generalities. And usually the generalities you'd
like to hear about from the cutting edge are those that there is no consensus
about anyway.

So in that respect, I'd say the generalizations of cutting edge scientists are
usually the _least wrong_ , rarely perfect, always insightful, and nearly
impossible to source. They are the tenuous 'hypothesis' writ large to which
their career is attesting. Citation of such is nearly a moot point, as no
generalizable experiments yet exist.

On the other hand it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper
or review about some of the stuff they just spoke of. It'd be trivial for them
to name a paper or two that they find dominating their perspectives here.

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ivarrr
>it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper or review about
some of the stuff they just spoke of.

Great idea! We'll put it unto the to-do list.

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toufka
And as a spur to kick scientists in their own rear, I'd also link to their own
lab websites. It might be a bit of a shit-show at first, but we/they really
need to get with the times, and this is a good place to start.

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ivarrr
We will improve this side as well.

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hengheng
I kinda want this as a Podcast. Or do you monetize exclusively via YouTube?

PS: Also the "subscribe" page can, for now, just link to the youtube channel.
At least I could subscribe there.

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patrickyeon
So do I, and I wonder if there's a more reasonable way to monetize this than
youtube (assuming it's meant to make money). I'd much rather sign up for an
RSS podcast than set up a cronjob to download the video and rip the audio
(which would also mean no money from youtube for them).

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ivarrr
No, we do not expect to monetize it this way. We will open mp3-podcast later.

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a_olt
Just wondering, do you know about [http://edge.org](http://edge.org) ? They
also do something similar.

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possibilistic
My roommate and I are working on a very similar video series. We have a
differet angle (short breadth survey => depth on a novel or interesting
discovery or inquiry; informed by paper review, but no PIs.)

I'll watch how you guys evolve closely.

Good job.

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ivarrr
thanx!

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renox
I don't get the point of videos here, it doesn't seem to bring much benefit
and text would be much faster to read..

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ivarrr
thumbs up!

