mungal

I’ve seen this sort of reactionary response in mathematics and music as well.

When talking to a musical educator complaining about struggling students just starting out I’ll say “I found it extremely helpful to paint the C major scale on my guitar when learning music theory.”

And they respond “Well what about chromatic 12 pitch atonal music?! What would Anton Webern say?!”

I made sure to say “outreach” stead “education”.

I think it’s a paradox to say “you need to be fully educated on a subject to engage with an explanation intended for lay people”.

I wonder if we’re in agreement?

The key word is ‘numerical’.

Maybe you’ve yet to see or do numerical analysis of both general relativity and quantum field theory but they are in fact both linear algebra.

Which as you point out is “fundamentally more accessible”.

I’ll add to this to give an example of someone who I feel is doing a great job of satisfying this very request in the field of mathematics: Timothy Gowers.

His yt channel is an excellent resource of theoretical understanding through numerical methods.

Here’s my favorite series where he confirms/elucidates a “strange” theoretical fact with an explorative numerical style: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs

Simply superb content.

Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space.

I like Sabine’s personality and the fact she stands in defiance of the status quo of scientific outreach, namely my two least favorite tropes: “science is fun” and “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”.

Sabine, if you’re reading this… please create more technical content.

Maybe a companion video to your more general takes.

One that shows the numerical side of things. Your experience and personality already lend itself to this effort.

You say “the math is insufficient” show us the math! Show us how it’s insufficient using numerical examples.

Scientific outreach has a real “draw the rest of the owl” problem and I think Sabine is perfectly poised to fill the gap.

There’s a George Carlin quote I’ll paraphrase ~“never talk down to your audience, they’ll catch up eventually.”

The spurious "I'm just asking questions..." style rhetoric and a link to an embarrassing study leaves me unsure why this is the top comment on an article about gut microbiome?

The first study, the one which _narrator_ attempts to use to 'suggest ... linkage', between this fungus and 'homosexual behaviour' seems embarrassingly unworthy of being brought to people's attention. Is this comment intentionally made in bad faith?

The linked abstract fails to acknowledge the study covered 12 male and 8 female rabbits, or let on that the article itself is roughly a page and a half of prose nearly completely devoid of data and analysis.

Your SageHub link only provides the abstract, but does say two of the authors only ever authored one other article, which they again share, and the third author has only ever authored this one article.

Google Scholar[0] has both a link to the article[1] which is from 1987(!) and labels it as having only 3(!) citations.

Of the 3 citations, two are in German and so I am unable to speak on their contents, but each only have 1(!) subsequent citation.

The third[2] has 29 citations, which is a 300 page survey of "Advances in Rabbit Sciences", and only briefly references the effects of infertility on the female rabbits, completely ignoring the 'homesexuality linkage' claims, and uses the very soft language of 'possibly':

> Feeding female rabbits with mycelium from Fusarium roseum produces infertility, possibly due to contamination with the mycotoxin zearalenon, which has effects similar to those of estrogen (Nilsson et al., 1987).

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C7&q=The+...

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.96...

[2] https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/688722/1344505/Cos...