Yes and no. This is… so… a lot of kids complain about not being able to use Wikipedia as a source too. At some point most of us are taking someone’s word for it. Very few people go straight to the original source of information, and when it comes to things like science and history and mathematics and such- most people don’t have the skills and knowledge to read things like the actual academic paperwork and raw data. IF it isn’t behind a paywall and IF you have the time and patience even.
Beyond that- even at that most papers require some level of interpretation by the author, not just the findings, even the results can be open to interpretation. You’re trusting their measurements and observations and methodologies etc. in that sense it doesn’t matter so much where you get the data so much as that the data is good. I mean- if your cereal box said that atmospheric pressure at sea level averaged around 14.7 lbs/sq in it wouldn’t be wrong…. But there is a question of credibility.
Your cereal company probably didn’t measure it themselves and likely doesn’t have a crack academic team writing their box facts. More likely they took the fact from somewhere else. Where? Who knows. Unless the cite the source and you go back to the source, and it is unlikely they browse scientific journals and such to get “fun facts” so their source probably has a source and so on. So yes, who is providing the data can factor in to credibility based on what their qualifications are and what confidence we can place in their methods. It is also true that the further you get from a direct source, the more suspicious data gets, so indeed that is a matter of credibility too.
But…. Who checks the citations? If you cite harpers press book of science, where did harpers press get the information? If they got it from Penguin books book of science, where did penguin get it? The Bridges 2020 almanac of sciences? Where did they get it? Regardless, most people won’t actually go all the way to the original, often dry academic source, and confirm the information to that level. What’s more- the original source, even if academic, isn’t necessarily credible. You know that anyone can call themselves a scientist and learn or look up how to write a paper right? We’ve seen several very high profile hoaxes exposed from false publishings about cloning and stem cells to the Theranos scandal that took in many. Peer review itself is only as credible as the peers, but even if you check the source, did you check that the peers were credible and the methodology of the review was credible?
Probably not. What we are talking about is a tolerance. At SOME point we have to, for lack of a better word, employ faith.
Even if you yourself made a finding- there are plenty of high profile or every day and obscure cases of researchers findings not being reproducible even by the originator. Almost always an error in the observations or methods and processes that produced a result that was anomalous.
The question is how much scrutiny you’ll apply before your tolerance satisfied to take the rest on faith.
So there is where it gets interesting.
You can find everyone from arm chair loonies and literal children on YouTube to accomplished and accredited academics or strong amateurs.
Most lab experiments aren’t filmed start to finish and most people can’t watch them- on YouTube you can often actually watch the process and methods and results in real time with your own eyes. As far as being close to the data, in many cases it is as close the layperson can get to actual first hand
results. So I’d say it is 50/50. If Carl Sagan had a YouTube channel and filmed himself making breakthroughs, yeah- I’d accept that source.
If we are discussing something like if it were practical to lift a human in a chair using helium balloons then some creator like Mr. Beast or mythbusters might be acceptable sources. Watching someone create a running combustion engine using just what you find in lunchables packages would be a more credible argument than any theoretical paper or reading about it in a lab sheet.
But also- no. I mean, obviously most YouTube videos are edited. Of course people could manipulate what you see or omit critical parts. They can make mistakes or put forward fallacies, and someone just talking about something isn’t the same as seeing them do it, so an hour video by a guy explaining why or how it would be possible to do something using math and slideshows only holds as much weight as the guy saying it, which even for Einstein his “word” wasn’t good enough-
The math and theory needs to check out but we still need experimental evidence or real world application to support a theory or hypothesis.
And of course there is the negative. If someone tries to build a plane and it doesn’t fly, that doesn’t prove flight isn’t possible or that you’ve been lied to about aerodynamic principles. Asides outright manipulation and hoaxes their methods and processes are still under scrutiny and your average YouTube video doesn’t meet a very stringent standard for conformity.
So like many things I’d say it is contextual. The levels and degrees of proof required to support a statement like “earth is a cube” would be magnitudes greater than to put forth that you can light a fart with a Chevy spark plug.
Beyond that- even at that most papers require some level of interpretation by the author, not just the findings, even the results can be open to interpretation. You’re trusting their measurements and observations and methodologies etc. in that sense it doesn’t matter so much where you get the data so much as that the data is good. I mean- if your cereal box said that atmospheric pressure at sea level averaged around 14.7 lbs/sq in it wouldn’t be wrong…. But there is a question of credibility.
Even if you yourself made a finding- there are plenty of high profile or every day and obscure cases of researchers findings not being reproducible even by the originator. Almost always an error in the observations or methods and processes that produced a result that was anomalous.
The question is how much scrutiny you’ll apply before your tolerance satisfied to take the rest on faith.
So there is where it gets interesting.
You can find everyone from arm chair loonies and literal children on YouTube to accomplished and accredited academics or strong amateurs.
Most lab experiments aren’t filmed start to finish and most people can’t watch them- on YouTube you can often actually watch the process and methods and results in real time with your own eyes. As far as being close to the data, in many cases it is as close the layperson can get to actual first hand
If we are discussing something like if it were practical to lift a human in a chair using helium balloons then some creator like Mr. Beast or mythbusters might be acceptable sources. Watching someone create a running combustion engine using just what you find in lunchables packages would be a more credible argument than any theoretical paper or reading about it in a lab sheet.
But also- no. I mean, obviously most YouTube videos are edited. Of course people could manipulate what you see or omit critical parts. They can make mistakes or put forward fallacies, and someone just talking about something isn’t the same as seeing them do it, so an hour video by a guy explaining why or how it would be possible to do something using math and slideshows only holds as much weight as the guy saying it, which even for Einstein his “word” wasn’t good enough-
And of course there is the negative. If someone tries to build a plane and it doesn’t fly, that doesn’t prove flight isn’t possible or that you’ve been lied to about aerodynamic principles. Asides outright manipulation and hoaxes their methods and processes are still under scrutiny and your average YouTube video doesn’t meet a very stringent standard for conformity.