>>11894478I think that pop science has reason to exist in a "scientific" society such as ours.
The issue is that it has an inherent tendency towards the atrocious. Good pop science would be a two hour lecture which forces the audience to engage with actual science, where they are forced to evaluate the uncertainty and limitations of the field and actually understand the issues which are being faced by scientists.
The issue is that this is very hard to do, as you need *actual scientists* AND NOT JOURNALISTS to do this and it also is far less appealing to zoomers with 5 minute attention spans.
Taking machine learning as an example, it is very easy to present "X cool thing you can do with it", but there is absolutely zero educational value in that. What is much harder, but *actually important* is to give people a basic sense for how machine learning works and where it's limitations currently are, but that is very hard...
Especially as it involves mathematics and I don't think society will be actually able to admit that serious mathematical education, like it is happening in Asian countries is *very* important if you care about scientific progress.
With this discussions I am always reminded of a boomer politician, for whom "digitalization" meant strapping VR headsets to school children so even if they were poor they could see Versailles. That is exactly the retarded boomer attitude to science that does not work.
