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The War on Science (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-02 17:06:52
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Hi folks! Sorry about the delay between uploads, this one jumped to the top of the queue & as you can see it is quite the monster. 4 hours!

This version is relatively low-res & only has the bare minimum of visuals in there in order to understand what I'm talking about. I imagine some long quotes might be hard to follow without the text there, but they'll all have visuals when it goes live. It's also too quiet, apologies - I selected the wrong option on export & it takes all day to export and upload 4 hours of video so I'll just fix that for the live version.

There's also some (written, pictured) racial slurs in there at one point, I will blank those out for the live version of course.

Feedback appreciated! Also the next videos Will be shorter and come out faster. They Will. It will happen.

Thanks,

Shaun

Files

The War on Science (backer version)

ty folks!

Comments

Alex

Thanks for fighting the good fight.

George

Ooooh yeah. Gonna jump right in!

chiknnoodl

you're the best shaun

Alex Slonski

Well there goes my afternoon. Thanks, Shaun!

Izzy Killeen

I can't believe that you were the first to crack four full hours and not hbomberguy. I'm not complaining though; I *love* long video essays, and I've been looking forward to this one for ages. Tysm!

Lynn Short

Heck yeah 4 hours of infotainment fulfillment!!!

Cool Bag

Had literally just redownloaded Patreon to check if this vid was posted and saw the notification come up a minute later. Perfect!

Evan Pitkin

This work day is gonna be a breeze.

David Utter

Sweet cuppin' cakes! My commute just got more interesting!

Aletheia

THE RETURN OF THE KING

Keith Donovan

16:15 Imagining a scenario where you're surrounded by women who are barely legal, but it's okay, because for some reason, every one of them has told you how old they are. And regarding Epstein, this is all the proof you'd ever need.

Peter Barnes

4 hours is just enough to help drown out the dull of a workday

Lars Arney

(17 mins in) as someone in Krauss’ field who has seen him cited favorably as a science communicator, the approach taken to him so far is incredibly refreshing

Lars Arney

also already knowing the epstein connection makes the ? photos incredibly funny (and either way that section is incredibly effective at drawing in a viewer, excellent work)

Ronin Fredricson

I don't know how Shaun manages to be such a calming presence and speak in a nearly cartoonishly monotonous voice by himself with no or little-to-no pictures or b-roll or music or sound effects for hours and hours on end and yet is never boring. There a lots of other video essayist and podcasters whom I think are super smart and interesting but I find myself zoning out or that it drags at parts (which is understandable) but somehow Shaun is so good at... I guess keeping a steady pace? Maybe that's the secret? As well as always having interesting things to say, of course. Very good at keeping the energy level throughout.

Peter Barnes

Not far in yet but there’s a bit early on where syntax makes it sound like Trump made Kennedy into being anti-vax 😅

Pahlavan

Nice! Now if only YouTube actually allowed me to watch embedded videos...

ugdpy

god, I didn't check the runtime before 50 minutes in

Lars Arney

excellent work, love the twists throughout (don’t be afraid to ham it up more with them - jordan peterson showing up in a purportedly scientific context certainly deserves a moment to let viewers collect themselves before going further)

Lars Arney

There’s something I’m trying to pull out of the juxtaposition of this with the bell curve. A line from the Bell Curve video that sticks in my head is Herbert’s characterization of the Bell Curve as “a scabrous piece of racial pornography,” which bookends the video and plants a flag as to both the content and the significant cultural impact of the bell curve book itself (while also slyly nodding to the /actual racial pornography/ that informs one of the sources cited therein). On the flip side, despite being familiar with several of the authors involved, I had never heard of The War On Science (2025) before this video. While Shaun’s point that the book doesn’t work in the context of the authors’ allies being in power is certainly part of the explanation here, I wonder if this points to anything else about how the scientific racism movement has changed over time.

Jolene Blake

I really, really hope that the final version includes a cropped screencap of "when you measure include the measurer" before zooming out to reveal the MC Hammer tweet.

Jordan Spencer

Shaun, congratulations on the massive project upload. More importantly... shit, man, I'm just glad you're not dead.

HatMallow

keep up the good work my man. seeing a video from you is like a mini holiday.

Adrian “Origami” Cioc

That “next videos will be shorter and come out faster” part, I believe it’s called the “HBullshit”.

Alexander Taylor

Really nice video so far, Shaun! A bit painful to re-live the online atheism schism about whether it's really rational to say sexism is bad. I remember sexual misconduct allegations being victim-blamed away by the future-gamergaters. What a shit time. Looking forward to watching the Dr. Fatima video afterwards, too! I had no idea that was all BS.

PotentPinion

Researchers are still looking for evidence of video essayists that shorten their project runtimes, but it's currently just theoretical conjecture.

Stef Korporaal

Maybe a bit of a nitpick, but... @2:30:40 The etymology of "Ashkenazi" is entirely separate from that of "Nazi", and the last syllable is pronounced differently. Considering it describes a group of Jewish people, I can imagine people taking issue with it, especially with the current political climate.

Daniel Thewes

Not a big point, but at 2:22:52, actually show Elon Musk doing a Hitler Salute

Berry

4 hours long and it still ends rather abruptly! Not that it really needs a big summary & conclusion, you've made your point several times over. That said, I wouldn't mind a lightning round of the unnamed essayists, they deserve some scorn too.

Matthew

jerry coyne

Gynedroid

49:00 i dunno, something about the case being made here makes me squirm a bit. I am a physicist (and a woman), and number of papers published is often a huge metric - "publish or perish" as it were. On top of that, the h-index - essentially a measure of how many papers you've published and how "high impact" those papers are, as judged by the number of times they're cited - really is used pretty universally, at least in my specific subfield of physics. It might not be a great system, but he isn't exactly unique for using it. and each sub field kind of has an understanding of how much papers is relatively expected of people. It's not so much that "more papers = better scientist", but a lack of papers tends to point to the opposite. I have no idea of "response" papers count as citations, trying to correct the record, but you don't tend to have 1000 people all writing papers on why you screwed up. once one is out, in my experience, people just cite the correction paper. It's compounded at universities, were one of the reasons they want to hire you is if you can a) publish papers to make them look good, and b) get students involved in research ensuring they'll go onto successful careers. Published papers just...really are important, and really are one of the major metrics used. If, indeed, women were hired at the rate and for the same pay as men with equivalent h indexes, I WOULD be impressed. And surprised. (that doesn't mean they'll get treated well or not have to take the shit, non-research-progressing tasks the men won't do, of course. and it obviously doesn't touch on whether or not women's contributions to any given paper were excluded in the first place, suppressing their h index).

corycatte

jordan peterson coming in at the very end was like a marvel post credit scene i also had a good laugh at the mystery island owner in the pictures incredible work as always shaun

Phizzy

I think you need to re-record at 2:30:40 where you've pronounced "Ashkenazi" with "nazi" at the end. I can see people taking that badly.

Zebedee Weetaluktuk

Hi, I would like a Jordan Peterson impression at the end, as a little treat for sitting through 4 hours of video

Athina

I'm going to surprise you and say I hope your next video is 26 hours long and comes out in 2029. Fuck it, I can wait for good content.

Noam Siebert

32:40 made me sigh a very long sigh

yournewinternetboyfriend

I have the feeling you decided to finish this now so you would have a clear schedule to play Silksong

Phizzy

smart

Theodore Hall

Good stuff! One note I have: Davide is pronounced Dàviday (like saying ‘da vid is good, eh?’)

Tom

46:43 -- "led to his first being censored, then sensored"... I believe the second word should be "censured"

Tom

I'd be curious to know the h-index of the fictional lady scientist that Ott invented.

KATEY SHEPPY

yayyyy new Shaun video! 🩷 your voice is such a comfort. this one made me laugh and go “what the fuck!!” a lot. appreciate you.

Tom

3:05:47 "...is his wife." 🧑‍🍳💋 I don't have words, but this is a very rare pleasure and I just can't even

Tom

Umberto Eco has a funny bit along the very same lines in Foucault's Pendulum, about the internal rules of (IIRC) the Knights Templar.

Tom

I pray to Schopenhauer that the phrase "the rich person justice special" enjoys a permanent home in the mainstream lexicon.

Tom

Would it be wrong for the thumbnail of this video to mirror the one Dan Olson used for his geocentrism video? ;)

Tom

I am speechless but very impressed.

Tom

I see a continuity: the Pioneer Fund pursues their longtime strategy of borrowing any megaphone they can, preferring those with greater stature and respectability. Shaun shows us practically their own war plans here, but it came up in his vid about Kelly J, too. And elsewhere. Their whole project is to rehabilitate eugenics and racism (which they regard as the only remaining barrier to establishing a white ethno-state in the U.S.), so they are dignity wraiths. They are trying to clothe the Hitler's atrocities, so they need to get all the dignity that has ever or will ever exist. And it's a sad fact that people who have been canceled by society still need to eat, and some of them are willing to let neo-Nazi dignity wraiths feed on them, historically for money, but increasingly often for sexual services. There's a great passage from American constitutional history, which escapes me at the moment, in which the author worries about the danger of a popular figure who knits together society's discontents to form a bare political plurality, conquering the more wholesome and fair-minded society that had earlier rejected each of those individuals (for being individually worth of pretty extreme censure, let's bear in mind). I don't know that I disagree with many mainstream "cancelings" (to the extent I'm even aware of them, hermit that I am), but I am certain that practically excommunicating people for being shit-heels is just as unsustainable as our carceral "justice" system. Even incorrigible people need to eat. Maybe instead of putting people in prison for drug use, civil society should put people who have been canceled on some kind of welfare so they don't have to go begging for scraps from the Kochtopus.

Noam Siebert

Yeah this is one point that maybe would be worth reworking for the youtube upload, I know several people who tried to get various academic careers going and it's kind of hard to overstate how much focus is put on number of citations sometimes.

Aischa

Please make sure that when you quote somebody to distinguish who you are quoting. At times in this video, it was quite confusing. Apart from that, I really really loved it. I am so happy Jordan Peterson made an appearance, I am glad you went into the reasons why Krauss is publishing this nonsense, and I am glad you gave the specific subject matters the depths they needed.

Tom

Serious question: was Lawrence Krauss actually tricked by those geocentrists, or did he agree to let those cranks ride his coattails for some cash?

Anna Sedlacek

Hey Shaun, love the video! As an evolutionary psychologist, I am ashamed for my field... I knew about Dawkins' transphobia, but I'm extremely disappointed to find out about Pinker and Coyne, too — not just transphobia, but being interviewed by explicitly white supremacist publications 😮‍💨 A few notes about the science/theory: (1) It might be worth bringing up the idea that sex is *bimodal* rather than binary: this is my stance, and it can apply independently to any given feature (chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, etc.). I think it's biologically accurate without transphobic implications: gender and sexual variation is just a normal part of human variability, but that variability tends to cluster around two modes (in the statistical sense). (2) When you talk about the way evolutionary theorists "sound like creationists" using "design" language, I agree to an extent, but you might want to look a little bit at Dan Dennett's "design stance" to better understand why that kind of language and perspective can be useful (see Darwin's Dangerous Idea for a very helpful and thorough explication). TL;DR: it's a model, which is an oversimplification for specific purposes, but it captures some meaningful information about the world that might otherwise be missed. (3) This is a very minor issue, but I think you might have misunderstood the point about citations for men vs. women: I don't think the intention was to show that women have fewer citations than men on average, but rather to check if women *need* more citations to be hired to the same role as men. In other words, he was checking if there was a bias in hiring such that women have to pass a higher bar (to which his answer seemed to be no).

Gynedroid

Agreed, Noam. I just think that section could use some tweaking

Tom

Sabine Hossenfelder blurbed the book: "Higher education isn’t what it used to be. Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book. This collection of essays tells of threats to open inquiry, free speech, and the scientific process itself. A much-needed book." The other blurbers are lunatics from rw think-tanks.

spritegeist

your generation's main contribution to society is new logical fallacies

Erika

oh my god, i keep forgetting about her and then every time she pops up she's a bit further along on the alt-right pipeline

Tom

I would be grateful if you'd elaborate or point to some examples of new fallacies, friend, as I take an amateur interest in that kind of thing. :)

Tom

Loose thread: started @ 8:42: "Let's do our own science experiment today: is there bigotry and discrimination in academia and the sciences? ... sample group... 39 scholars..." I'm pretty sure you never return to it.

Erika

very well put, i did feel like that was kind of a weak point there but i don't know much about academia so i couldn't have made a real argument, thank you!

Knut Rygnestad

What a wonderful video; great job! You always manage to find a balance between matter-of-fact refutation and sarcastic dumping, which I think is a great approach! I have three small suggestions, though I do think you make your points well without them: 1. Regarding lactation being an exclusively female thing, you don't have to go as far as fruit bats, as it's actually been documented in men as well, though naturally it doesn't occur as frequently! Here's one short article about it: https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/mens-health/men-lactate-prolactin 2. Regarding Dawkins' points about intersex people being statistically insignificant due to being so few, if you want to be petty, you can point out that Dawkins also belongs to a less than 2% group, i.e. people over 80 years old. I'm sure he'd be thrilled to not be taken into consideration when matters of public interest are discussed, like the way certain delightful people talked about not prioritising elderly health when COVID was still new, since apparently they're about to die anyway... 3. A small visual suggestion: when the researcher clarified that by "woman" she meant "adult, human female", I'd put a picture of Kellie-Jay Keene with those words behind her on screen, as it's a TERF dogwhistle and could be emphasised as such that way. Like I said, very much small things! Thanks for your hard and diligent work!

Tom

Here's a question: are any of the authors honest about their past transgressions, or do all 38 authors brazenly gaslight the reader?

Andrew

What a masterpiece

Cam Ball

great video! I'm looking forward to the full version 😀 I'm a bit late, but at 3:45, you refer to "descendants of slaves". there is a push to begin using the phrase "enslaved people" instead, as it removes any indication of some inherent "slave quality" those people possess and is better framing of the truth: that they are people who were enslaved https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2023/12/14/1219329636/slave-or-enslaved

Emma Jones

Absolutely love this video!!!! YES

Saya Clarke

Never has this video been more relevant