Rabbit Cube

She begins by detailing the history of Ingen as a fledgling bioengineering company, with a lot of biographical information about John Hammond as the charismatic yet shady founder, complete with the anecdote about his genetically engineered dog-sized elephant ("While it may have wowed investors, Babar the elephant did not live very long, and allegedly suffered from numerous health disorders and a generally poor quality of life. Put a pin in that.")

After detailing the covered-up scandals about workplace "accidents" at the park, the youtuber goes into her own trip, which is notably disappointing, not dramatic. It starts well with her seeing the Brachiosaurs, complete with found-footage style reveal of them that hopefully manages to capture some of the majesty of their reveal in the original film, albeit from a very grounded "real person encountering big exotic animals" vibe.

But then we get to the tour of the park itself. The visitor center is half finished, with a big obvious tarp covering the wall from the reception area that hasn't been made yet. the hokey welcoming video is using scratch track music because they haven't sorted out the rights to the licensed music they want. The automated vehicles are buggy as hell - one of them snaps on the youtuber's thumb when she closes the door, bruising it terribly ("That's what you get when you partner with Tesla I guess. Spared no expense, I guess.")

The dilophosaurus is a no show. The T.rex is a no-show, even when they bring out a goat to lure it. ("Why feed it a live goat? I'm pretty sure most zoos don't feed live prey to the large carnivores both for their safety and ours. And a goat's barely more than a mouthful to a T.rex, isn't it? It's like they're not considering the animal welfare at all - put a pin in that.") The triceratops is sick. ("The veterinarian on hand, Gerry Harding, said this was a recurring problem. Apparently there was a plant in their enclosure that's toxic to them, but because the trikes haven't been spotted eating the plant, the park assumed it was alright to include because it's pretty? Anyway, it turned out that the plant's berries, which are also toxic, were being eaten by the trikes, and that's where their digestive problems came from. Spared no expense!")

Many of the other promised rides aren't in operation, and as she looks into it our youtuber protagonist learns that it's due to inability to manage the animal behavior (despite the staff trying to hide that this is the case). The aviary is closed because the cearadatyluses are wildly aggressive. The mosasaur lagoon is closed because they can't find a way for audiences to view the mosasaur up close that's remotely safe. The river ride is closed because the dilophosaurs SPIT VENOM! at people when they pass by. The velociraptors have been moved to an extremely tiny quarantine pen because of their vicious behavior ("Yeah, keeping predators that are built to run at cheetah speed in a tiny pen is going to do so much good for their behavioral issues. Spared no expense!").

On her last day she finally manages to see the Tyrannosaur in its exhibit ("Why did they put it in a paddock filled with thick foliage? It's a nine-ton carnivore, it needs a much more open space! This can't be comfortable for it - hell, I'm halfway convinced the reason it didn't show up the first two days is that it was struggling to find its way through all those goddamn trees!"). She takes note of its odd, toad-like eyes, and its near inability to capture the goat when it stands still, forcing it to roar loudly to make the goat squirm so it can finally eat. The youtuber then recalls a bit of information from the welcome video - "Remember when I said to put a pin on Frog DNA?" - and realizes that the dinosaurs's hybrid nature has severely compromised their basic biological functions, with T.rex, an animal with some of the best binocular vision in the fossil record, being hamstrung by having the vision problems of a toad. "This is a creature that should have eyes as sharp as a hawk's that's now almost functionally blind! Can you imagine how terrifying that must be for it?"

The video then turns into a takedown of Ingen's shoddy genetic engineering work, uncovering a great deal of infomation on the hybridization process and how it's negatively impacted the animals upon creation, and then focuses on how the park exacerbated this by its neglectful approach to protecting their livelihoods, caused by a mixture of stingy over-reliance on automation and a lack of actual experts on staff. "They hype these animals up as miracles of science, and yet they can't be bothered to put even a modicum of effort into considering their basic biological and behavioral needs! Spared no expense my ass!"

and she's quite up front i think about the fact that, in theory, things like bad chart formatting or weird file formats or whatever do not (in terms of strict logical necessity) affect the content of a paper. the correctness of a physics claim is not dependent on whether you typeset it in microsoft word or not. but it's a very useful heuristic, and if you have not one or two but like a half-dozen of these superficial signs of amateurishness or unseriousness in your paper, the heuristic that nobody who actually does condensed matter physics needs to bother with the contents of your paper has--in the real world--a 100% hit rate.

and this looks like smarmy gatekeeping to outsiders who want to complain that scientists don't take their crackpot theories seriously, but this isn't actually a gate being kept (it got uploaded to the arxiv! physicists are not required to respond to your paper just because you uploaded it to a preprint server; they get to choose how to spend their time). for all the failure modes scientific academia has, and even all the formal institutional barriers to access like scientific publishing (her video on academic publishing is pretty interesting--i didn't know contributors *paid to have their work published,* and quite a lot, too!) don't prevent outsiders from getting published in journals or being taken seriously.

but the crucial difference between your average crackpot and the non-scientist getting taken seriously by a peer-reviewed publication is that the latter is generally in dialogue with the field, and is able to be in dialogue with it. one thing collier always points out is that it's often obvious crackpots haven't done the reading--and in the case of LK-99 didn't notice that some of their data was characteristic of their sample being rich in copper (and thus ferromagnetic), because they just did not know enough about chemistry to recognize what was (to a chemist) obviously happening when they tried to synthesize this material.

this matters because in almost every domain of practical human knowledge we are so far from the point where a lone genius could reinvent everything they needed to know based on first principles that it's hilarious. nowadays you often need huge teams of experimental physicists collaborating on projects that cost gajillions of dollars to push forward the frontier of knowledge; you are very unlikely to do so in your garage, and still less so if you can't engage with the larger state of the field.