This article was written by STDX
On the morning of the 23rd, Rao Yi published an article on the personal public account “Rao Yi Science” “Faithful, Expressive, Elegant: Easier said than done…”, pointing directly at Huada Group Yin Ye, the CEO, said that the biological science content he did was “very imprecise, and there was quite a lot of deliberate grandstanding… There was a lot of pseudoscience… Yin Ye’s behavior was tantamount to taking the initiative to lie. He cheated, talked nonsense and cheated. The content goes beyond the life sciences.”
Image source: Rao Yi Science
The next day (24th), Rao Yi once again issued an article “Intelligence Quiz”, proposing that “continuing to watch and listen to Yin Ye more is to reduce intelligence”. The article quoted one of Yin Ye’s Meng’s popular science video, and said “to watch Yin Ye is to be deceived.”
Image source: Life Cognition
Image source: Rao Yi Science
An hour later, Yin Ye responded to the matter on his personal account “Yin Ge Liao Gene”: Thank you for your advice.
Image source: Yin Ge Liao Gene
Influencers, company executives and scientists
Yin Ye, who are you?
Public information shows that Yin Ye joined Shenzhen BGI Gene in 2002 and is currently the CEO of BGI Group. His titles include a PhD in bioengineering from the University of Copenhagen, a genomics researcher, and Dalian University of Technology. Adjunct professor, published more than 50 papers (including co-authors) in famous journals including Nature, etc.
Screenshot of BGI official website
However, what makes Yin Ye really active in the eyes of the general public is mainly the identity of “science blogger”.
As early as March 2016, Yin Ye released the first audio popular science content in Himalaya; now this program named “Tian Fang Ye Tan” has been updated on the Himalaya App for 2000 + episodes with nearly 266 million views. At the same time, Yin Ye also publishes popular science content on public accounts, Weibo, and Douyin, with nearly 2 million Douyin fans and 860,000 Weibo followers.
Yin Ye popular science audio column “Tian Fang Ye Tan”
Yin Ye’s last “out of the circle” in the public eye was the recording of the last two episodes of the fifth season of “Round Table School” he participated in in 2021. Technology, Humanities and Consciousness, etc.
Image source: Screenshot of “Round Table Pie” video
With the frequent occurrence of golden sentences in these two episodes, Yin Ye has become a fan of countless fans for a while, and his production of various content has also become a phenomenal existence. After watching Yin Ye’s “Round Table School” program, some viewers called Fengshen God, and many people said that they were liberal arts students and felt the beauty of science for the first time.
But there are also related majorsPeople gave completely the opposite evaluation, calling it “running the train with a mouth full of people”.
Some netizens commented on Yin Ye’s speech
However, despite the controversies, the traffic brought by Yin Ye Science continued to be realized.
In the video account “Yin Shuo listen”, a video of Yin Ye sharing “emotions can change gene expression” has up to 10W+ likes, and Yin Ye’s personal books are also sold in the window of the video account , BGI’s self-developed products, etc.
Source: Yin said listen
In another video where he talks about obesity, the message area directly leads to the purchase of BGI’s self-developed probiotics.
In this way, in Yin Ye’s popular science, some conclusions that may still be controversial in the academic world, but more easily accepted by the public’s values, are output after their own packaging. .
For many researchers, however, these exaggerated or popular definitions are not rigorous enough and need to be viewed critically.
What is good science?
In fact, this is not the first time Rao Yi has “confronted” with BGI.
As early as 2012, Rao Yi and Wang Jun, the former CEO of BGI Gene, had a public exchange. At the academic forum on interdisciplinary biology held by Peking University that year, Rao Yi and Wang Jun discussed BGI with Wang Jun. Whether it is benefiting the common people, whether it is a waste of the country’s money, and how BGI does academic work is openly debated.
Since then, Rao Yi also publicly bombarded Yang Huanming, one of the founders of BGI, on his blog, questioning his identity as a scientist, and calling him a “rogue entrepreneur”.
Screenshot of Rao Yi’s personal blog
However, Yin Ye praised Rao Yi for his attitude. He once quoted Rao Yi in the “Round Table School” program and compared Rao Yi to a “Kant” type character. And said, “Three people, there must be my teacher.”
Image source: Round Table Pie
Going back to Rao Yi’s article at the beginning, it actually pointed out the core contradiction of this controversy: what kind of science is “good science”?
Rao Yi bluntly stated in his article that his level of popular science is lower than the average level of Chinese popular science today, so he basically quit the work of popular science; :
Science, of course, would be the best if it could be both intelligible and elegant. If you can’t, the bottom line is “faith”.
If you can’t achieve “Da” and “Ya”, you can still popularize science. If you can’t “believe”, you should avoid doing science popularization.
Only enough to understand science, can metaphors, extensions, gags, jokes and “everything change” and keep the core content. If you don’t know enough about science itself, it’s easy to make mistakes when you use metaphors, extensions, and jokes. The layman does not know it, but the expert knows it is a mistake when he hears it.
Therefore, Rao Yi further proposed that Yin Ye’s popular science content sacrificed too much scientificity in order to spread and incite public readers. What is the use of “Da” and “Ya”?
In fact, the debate between “communication” and “scientificity” in the field of popular science has always been one of the biggest contradictions in popular science communication.
Cao Tianyuan, another famous popular science writer in my country, whose book “Does God Play Dice: A History of Quantum Physics” is one of the most influential local popular science books in the past two decades.
For the first time, this book brings the difficult and difficult quantum mechanics to Chinese readers in a relatively accessible manner. criticized by industry insiders.
In 2017, in an interview with Shanghai Book Review, Cao Tianyuan stated:
A big problem with popular science in China is that people fundamentally do not have a correct understanding and positioning of “popular science”. Many people have unrealistic fantasies about popular science, and always hope that it can be as rigorous and accurate as science, and can be popular and widely disseminated. Then many popular science writers will be entangled between the two, thinking too much that “both hands should be hard”, but the result is often that both ends are not supported.
Cao Tianyuan believes that if the public does not have certain scientific literacy, how manyIt is almost impossible to “correctly” understand scientific statements, which also makes it difficult to disseminate scientific knowledge that is overly rigorous and accurate.
This status quo makes science popularization work gradually become a “dispute for the right to speak”, and science popularization workers often need to make their own trade-offs between the two.
Obviously, in this dispute, Yin Ye chose “entertainment”, while Rao Yi still insisted on “rigorousness”.
Planner: Lnysay｜Producer: gyouza
Image source: BGI official website, screenshot from youtube video
References:
1. Rao Yi: “Public-Private Partnership” Questions: Institute of Genomics and BGI, Science Network, Rao Yi’s personal blog,
2. Cao Tianyuan: “Political Correctness” Makes China’s Popular Science Market Difficult, Shanghai Book Review, 2017-08-07
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