This comes after blatant science denial (this is a link to another one of Farina’s videos because it can’t be summarized by just one video of Sabine’s), attributing academia to “communism” as a fear mongering tactic (her whole point on this was that academia is a form of planned economy or something), and making a video in support of capitalism.
She went downhill fast.
Her video on trans identity was were i hopped off the train. It was needlessly dismissive and not well researched.
I watch a lot of science channels and videos on YouTube, there’s just so much extraordinary content out there, going deep into the math and formulas of cosmology and physics.
Sooner rather than later, the algorithm started pushing this woman’s videos on my homescreen. She most definitely leans towards the clickbait titles and bombastic controversy, two things that I hate, so it was again time to take out the digital machete and hack away at the algorithm, as I do nearly every day. But then she just keeps on popping up in other people’s videos and podcasts, some trustworthy content creators seem to have a high regard for her academic work.
But just like assholes like James Woods or Joe Rogan have made themselves unbearable for me, even retroactively, just their presence and voice take me out of whatever I’m watching, put me in a bad mood, so too it is with Hossenfelder. In an age of the digital smorgasbord, a never-ending stream of science and math educational content of a high level and mind-blowing quality, I can survive and thrive just fine while avoiding the assholes.
Well I guess she looked too long into the abyss. Sad to see.
I had appreciated her having a different perspective than my own, still rooted in scientific thinking. Then I started noticing her commenting on things authoritatively, where she had no expertise here and there (especially outside of STEM, where my special interests lie).
And then I stopped watching her after I had noticed more and more hints of that, where she seemingly acted like a high IQ and knowledge in her own field means she is qualified to disregard other perspectives outside her field. I am sad it got that bad, but I am not too surprised.
In a weird way, I appreciate her. I’m a scientist who has been drifting ever closer to science communication. I enjoy situations where I’m able to be in the role of a scientist who is able to “translate” dense scientific ideas so that other people can share in my enthusiasm. I feel pretty capable at situating my perspective within the wider sciences and making it clear when I’m talking about cool science stuff outside of my field. However, the more that I find myself nerding out in this manner, the more nervous I feel about being opinionated on non-science things; being a scientist gives me a weird kind of epistemic privilege because of how science is disproportionately valued by society, and I don’t want to inappropriately exploit that (even unintentionally). However, it’s not reasonable to expect scientists to just not hold and/or share their opinions on stuff like politics or history.
I concluded that I just need to make sure I continue to do what I already do when I (a biochemist) talk about physics stuff adjacent to my stuff — just to a much greater degree. Sabine Hossenfelder is a great example of what not to do in this respect. I don’t believe that people should be forced to “stay in their lane”, but if you’re going to go wading into waters that are not your own, you gotta stay humble.
I don’t believe that people should be forced to “stay in their lane”, but if you’re going to go wading into waters that are not your own, you gotta stay humble.
Yes. And I can even sympathise with that being hard. It’s genuinely hard to do so and takes work and emotional stress, people potentially dogpiling on you from both sides doesn’t help either. But it sadly is the only way to arrive at something approximating truth. Influencer culture, atomised society and increasing isolation and social media in the context of a “presenting the most interesting you” culture sadly make this even harder. And even without that, there is always, and will always be, the danger of getting caught up in defending a point that is just wrong, because our psyche as humans latched onto it for reasons of identity/ego preservation or otherwise emotional wellbeing. Discourse culture ideally has to account for that with respectful arguing in good faith, even when the other side is wrong. Of course, that is an ideal that cannot always be reached, especially with more fuzzy, non-empirically provable points, or discourse that has very direct and tangible effects on our lives (politics, mainly, which is one reason it can be so draining).
Your perspective is valid as your perspective in the discourse, as long as it can be viewed as authoritative where you can rightfully claim you have knowledge and expertise (and even then, of course, it can be contradicted with proper arguments or newly emerging facts), as well as an outsider estimate where you just have an educated guess. And the latter isn’t worthless, but should be distinguished from more confident takes for the sake of discourse. Even just vibes-based perspectives are valid as a part of a discourse, but they have to clearly be able to be put into context and qualified, and have to stomach being superseded.
Absolutely surprised. Yep. So surprised.
She always gave me off vibes. I didn’t really understand why she got the recognition she did
Who the hell is this random chick, and why would anyone care what she says?
When she started she was a pop science channel, relaying new physics research to a general audience. Apparently that wasn’t enough and she dove head first down the conspiracy theory and pseudoscience slide to ad revenue and clicks, abandoning all reason and peer review standards.
Let me guess, someone was mean to her on twitter and now shes gone full right wing nutter.
I watch a fair bit of YouTube and definitely some scientific video content is consumed and always in my feed… Who is this person? Never heard of her.
she’s a theoretical physicist but thinks she’s an expert on everything.
She used to be a pretty popular popsci content creator and still continues to be one to this day, though the reason for her popularity now is that she has started feeding conspiratorial narratives.
Sabine is a very bright and well-informed lady. I enjoy listening to her trash the well-paid real grifters. They’ve started attacking back? That figures. I guess hearing that you’ve been under-performing for decades makes it hard to stay focussed on the string theories and the ‘new particle!’ theories.
She doesn’t just talk about String Theory, she acts like an authoritative figure on everything. And I could hardly say that Professor Dave is a grifter.
she acts like an authoritative figure on everything. Worked for Kneel de Grass…
Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t make unhinged statements like “I don’t trust scientists” and “Most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit” though, at least as far as I know.
True that about him. (Altho he has confidently misstated the facts a few times.) Sabine definitely has her on days and off days. Maybe I missed her saying exactly those two things you put quotes around. As for the productivity of Big Science, I think she’s right to suggest that it has not delivered the way that it once did, and right about how many of its top-rated people have lost its way (while there are still small, almost daily discoveries being made). (HYUGE topic for this little container.)
If only it was as innocent as “on and off days”. Those statements can be found in this video’s first minute. And I hope you’re saying “Big Science” satirically as science is not a conglomerate, nor does the worldwide scientific community have any ties to a specific corporate entity/state/nation. And she doesn’t “suggest” that “scientific research hasn’t delivered as much as it once did”, she clearly states that in all fields of science, most of the research paid for by your taxes “is almost certainly bullshit”, and that one should not trust scientists. Then after she gets called out for this, she just acts like she was actually only talking about the fundamentals of physics, not every field.
And her defending Eric Weinstein — a man literally directly funded by the Peter Thiel behind the Dark Enlightenment movement — for his pseudoscientific “theory” of everything with obvious fake outrage, saying that “If you take away one thing from this video, let it be that Sabine said Eric’s a good and fairly normal person”, implying that a theory of everything is something that everyone in her circle has, saying that she hasn’t looked into the theory (which is a lie, this gets exposed in the video linked on the original post) and that she “is not interested in unification ideas”. Unification in physics by the way is the thing that has been wildly succesful twice and that has allowed her to post her shitty propaganda online. And this is only the first one and a half minutes of that video of hers. As such, I would recommend being skeptical of her opinions on the fundamentals of physics too.
Edit: My apologies if this reply sounds rude or condescending, that was not my intention. It’s just a side effect of having to describe people such as Sabine.
I’m certain that she didn’t mean that -all- fields of science were scams … it’s always been physics that she’s PO’d at. And I understand that point 'cuz I’m very familiar with the history of physics, so I don’t need your recommendations. The position you’ve taken is clearly unassailable; I appreciate her news reports and chuckle at her sarcasm, so I guess we’re done.
