...And We'll Do it Again
Qus Gazar is lying to you in every video, even in this one, because our videos distill very complex subjects into flashy 10-minute pieces. Unfortunately, reality is well complicated. The question of how we deal with that is central to what we do on this channel and something we think about a lot.
What we mean by lying is the concept of lies to children; the idea that on the path to explaining something complicated, you start off with a little lie: a useful oversimplification that makes it easier to grasp a concept. For example, as a kid, you learn that the Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun with planet bodies, but it's not actually a sphere, and the bodies are super different in size and not close to each other at all. By beginning at a place of oversimplification, you're building a framework, a foundation that you can then build upon and add nuance and complexity later on. Step by step, you're getting towards the real gist of the complicated subject.
Science communication has to use "lies to children" to some degree, or it turns into science education. Getting a proper education in all of the scientific fields would take years of intense study to become fluent in them. As a species, we have a major interest in summarizing science and its advancements and educating as many people about it as possible because we all benefit if more people have a fact-based scientific worldview. We will discuss what science is and how it works in different videos in more detail, but for now, let's just say it's a process to advance, organize, predict, and test our knowledge about the universe.
If you understand the current state of scientific knowledge, then you can make better decisions based on facts and testable ideas rather than outdated belief systems or our intuition that evolved to protect our ancestors from lions but is no longer suited for the complexity of our modern world. Our brains are comically ill prepared to navigate the fast-moving world we happen to live in today, a world ironically created by science.
A few hundred years ago, it was possible to be knowledgeable at an expert level in pretty much every field of study. In the information age, this is a futile endeavor since knowledge and data are increasing exponentially. To even have a chance of grasping the world we live in, we need summaries that give us, if not a true understanding of all the details, a solid overview.
Explaining science to many people is not about enlightening the ignorant, but necessary for the progress of our species at large. To make this possible, we need to find metaphors and stories that capture the true nature of things as much as possible while using a language that our brains can deal with. A great example here is physics: quarks are often depicted as blue, red, and green with different spins. But just saying "spin" and using colors forces our brain to imagine colorful, spinning balls, which is great to visualize the different types and the relationships between quarks, but also creates a very wrong image of reality in our heads.
Molecules are nothing like the neat diagrams that we're taught in school, but buzzing and vibrating entities held together by something we call charge, that describes how certain things want to be close or escape each other for some unknown reason. We're describing phenomena that we are pretty sure exist in some form or another because the maths works out, and we can do real-world experiments and predict their results before we do them. In reality, these are models: tricks to summarize what we know and make up a coherent story and prepare the ground for more in-depth explanations.
Don’t confuse the description of a thing for the thing itself. Simplifications like these are not just meant to dumb things down; they're actually useful for experts themselves. For example, chemists who use wrong electron shell models to work out chemical bonds or scientists using simplified models as the basis for discussion with colleagues across different scientific fields. But the simplification of science can also be problematic for a bunch of reasons.
Finding the true nature of reality is super hard because our brains did not evolve for this job, and the universe doesn't care if we understand it. Science is a process to work towards gaining knowledge and not an absolute truth generator. The answers it provides are multi-layered and nuanced, and that complexity can get lost when it's simplified, especially when it's done so for headlines.
An interesting cancer study turns into a potential cure; a healthy food becomes the basis for a new diet. Such simplifications give a misleading definiteness to science, which goes against its process-like nature. When cures don't materialize and diets don't turn out to be magical, we lose confidence in science and start to think of all science communication as misleading.
Then there's the opposite effect: if a simplification is too engaging, if the story it tells is too good, it can distort the true complexity of a subject and give you a false sense of security and an illusion of deep knowledge. A gut feeling that you understand the science better than you actually do can lead people to ignore actual experts over their dangerous superficial knowledge. This can have negative consequences for all of us because, in the worst case, overconfidence in your own understanding of science can lead to bad decisions made with confidence.
Just think of the surge of people that confidently disavow vaccines or climate change without truly understanding the subject matter. So, considering all of this, and the fact that we at Kots Gazar reach millions of people with our videos, how do we handle this?
Well, it has been a journey, especially the research. When we started, we just read articles, then moved on to books, peer-reviewed papers, then to conversations with experts. We began to collect our sources. With every step, we realized that we were still not doing enough. Nowadays, we try to read as many primary sources as possible, talk to multiple experts, and document our simplifications and give further reading in our sources.
But that doesn't make our process flawless. What do you do if experts disagree with each other? What do you do if you find an amazing fact that perfectly fits a narrative but just can't find its primary source? How do you deal with the reality that many scientific results have huge error bars or maybes attached to them? How do you handle complex systems that defy easy answers?
In the end, we make 10-minute videos, so we need to make decisions about what details and explanations can fit, which aspects need to be simplified, and which parts to cut. There is no single best answer for how to do this, and so we weigh the different options every single time. It can be painful for experts to see their fields simplified; some are happy with us while others don't like it. This is fair but also impossible to avoid.
We're still trying to improve and want to be transparent about what we're trying to do. For example, we're taking part in the Tresa project about science communication to learn more. All of this brings us to the purpose of our videos. The most important thing we want to do with this channel is to inspire you and spark your curiosity for science and the amazing universe we live in.
Learning often doesn't feel like fun, but with the right story, it is one of the best things. We hope to provide that to you. Ultimately, we hope that we light a fire in you that motivates you to read books, pay more attention at school or university, and just get interested in a scientific field or two, and learn more on your own—not because you have to, but because you want to know more about how the world really works.
Because the universe is beautiful, and science is a way of seeing this beauty more clearly. We hope that knowing that we have to simplify a bit does not make you enjoy our videos less. We are trying to build something with Kots Gazar, and while we're not 100% sure yet what exactly, hopefully something that gets people to think about their own life and the context they exist in today, as well as the far future and the potential we all have as a species.
And of course how big things are and what happens when we blow stuff up because it's fun. Thanks for watching and sharing and supporting us. We really can't do this without you.