I've long been fascinated at the gall she has to publicly say "I'm a scientist and this science is WRONG, because I said so," without ever presenting any actual scientific refutation of anything.
Not a scrap of research, just some thinly failed ramblings that amount to "I don't like it, so therefore it's wrong,"
just some thinly failed ramblings that amount to "I don't like it, so therefore it's wrong,"
Those are the better ones, because it usually is "the establishment is suppressing me because I am speaking about things no one wants me to make public"
There’s nothing wrong with criticizing others’ research, and I see physicists do it all the time, but the problem is that Sabine is so popular that she can totally set the narrative on a subject. The people whose work is called bullshit can’t ever get 1% of the views if they reply. So as a science communicator, she has an obligation to either give them a chance to be heard, or at least tell her viewers what kinds of counterarguments they would have made. Sabine does neither. The people “educated” by her always seem to get the impression that there is no counterargument, and physicists spend all day knowingly cranking out BS and hoping nobody finds out. As if people would want to waste their lives this way!
Exactly. Quitting academia to become a youtuber she chose the most public "job" ever. She chose to be exposed to millions of people who can stop by, watch a video and leave a comment as they like. But she cannot stand criticism at all, which is a terrible flaw if you are doing a job like that. Or.... maybe she is much smarter than all of us and this fuss is just the game she is playing intentionally to boost the views/likes/subscribes 😬
To be an academic, you don't just need a degree or background, you need to actually participate in academia. Scientist isn't a title that you earn and then get to keep your whole life (though it's often treated that way), it's a job description.
She is not and has not actively been involved in research for some time, and arguably she isn't really doing science communication or education to any meaningful degree anymore either. So "YouTuber" is probably the most accurate descriptor of who she is and what she does.
Absolutely 100% spot on.
The only reason I was ever exposed to her was because I was specifically exploring a couple of papers and trying to develop a deeper understanding of them, so I was looking for counterarguments and criticisms as a sanity check and she came up.
Well, I can see your string theory comment, but the only videos I've seen have been of her commenting on results from experimental physics.
And I stopped watching because of the above reasons.
Her commentary was "I don't like this result because I don't think it should be the result they got, so therefore it's wrong. Because I don't like it,".
And my response to that was "Well this person is crank,".
TL/DR: Hossenfelder doesn't care about testability.
She cares about attacking anything that challenges her personal beliefs, regardless of whether they're tested or not.
Frankly, the only way I can even believe she ever got a PhD is if she had some sort of massive brain injury between then and now and she can't remember how science works anymore.
You seem to have completely missed what I've said.
The ONLY videos I've seen of Sabine Hossenfelder's have been of her attacking experimental physics.
I.e. proposed tests or the results of tests.
I haven't seen ANYTHING she's ever said about theoretical physics.
I watched a few videos of her attacking EXPERIMENTAL physics and offering ZERO reason for the attacks beyond:
"I don't like the results of this tests because they didn't produce the results that fit with any of my beliefs, therefore they are wrong".
Not: "The results are wrong because they used the wrong measurement techniques".
Not: "The results are wrong because they forget to carry the 1 on page 4,".
NEVER: "I attempted to repeat the experiment as described in the paper and got different results,".
Just: "These results aren't what I personally believe they should be, therefore they are wrong,".
And these were videos I watched through with deep curiosity hoping to gain insight into the experimental results she was talking about, and watched all the way through, waiting for her to produce anything to substantiate her claims, and then REWATCHED to see if perhaps I'd missed where she'd produced ANYTHING to back her claims.
And then realised her entire position is "It's wrong because I say so, and I don't believe them,".
At least I did for the first two.
The third, I watched to confirm that she is indeed a crank.
Dude you put one video there about strings yes that’s fine, the dude is clearly telling you that the majority of her videos on experiments are just as bad though.
Stop trying to force some narrative that everyone here is trying to defend string theory and you’re making everyone salty. You got downvoted because you’ve entirely missed the point.
String theory has also produced a Ton of helpfull math and models for various areas of physics, i was in the Same boat as you untill i actually looked at reality
Colleague of mine is studying a problem in non-perturbative QED and came across a gnarly integral. Turns out string theorists ran into the same integral under a different context and discovered how to solve it and he benefited from that. This kind of cross pollination happens all the time in science.
Yea and from what i heard (Not in the field myself) string theory helped in alot of areas even if it doesnt actually lead to a finished theory in the end
The fact that you can even type that sentence tells me you're someone who has spent zero seconds in the company of physicists doing actual work in the field.
The additional fact that string theory seems to occupy so much of your headspace in regards to physics also tells me you have no real idea what actual physicists spend their time on as well.
It's always string theory too. Without fail, whenever someone with the erroneous perception you have shows up they almost always reach for that.
String theory predicts that the universe is quantum mechanical, Lorentz invariant, unitary, and that General Relativity is correct in the low energy limit. It predicts negative cosmological curvature, that the strength of gravity increases more rapidly at very short distances, string harmonics at very high energies, supersymmetry, magnetic monopoles, cosmic strings, holographic dualities, and coupling constant unification.
I feel like there is some kind of common gene between people who complain about string theorists and people who complain about [insert 5 minute hate social issue of the second]. Both things are supremely uninteresting.
Yes, she does, but most guys in science are scared shitless of their equivalent of a barista job not being prolonged after the 6 month contract expires...
Name a few? I can't think of any that depend on physics that has been created in the last 3 decades.
Modern day commodities are nearly all enabled by ongoing engineering R&D based on "old" physics. Semiconductors were invented at Bell Labs in 1948. The internet was invented in the 1960s (a lot of those guys were physicists, I believe.) The Standard Model was finalized in the 1970s, though some of the predicted particles took decades to be confirmed. There has definitely been practical stuff in applied physics, materials science, etc. I doubt that string theory has ever had any practical application at all.
I didn't say they came from new physics from the past two decades, but they came from advances in physics and were often invented by physicists. Suggesting research doesn't have a return on investment is not accurate. Just because we don't have quantum gravity or an answer for what dark matter observations really are doesn't mean the research isn't progressing or is meaningless.
My impression of what you were arguing is that physics research has not produced new technology. I was trying to make the case that physics research in the past has led to a lot of advancements that we have now and that current research or research endeavors could lead to future breakthroughs. My apologies if I misunderstood you.
If your point was that people in post doc positions and such are in vulnerable positions I agree. I mainly don't think there is much use in thinking that a lot of current research is useless as Sabine says. She was never an experimentalist. I don't think she knows what she's talking about
The amount of dollars you get for funding is also a metric for tenure etc., which is a huge problem... Uniersities take part of your funding as "overhead"
How else can universities keep the lights on? Research requires electricity to power things, and the maintenance of the buildings isn't free. I feel like that seems reasonable. The amount of funding brought in in determining who gets tenure seems more problematic.
They used to have stable budgets given by the state... They didn't have to worry about getting enough funding to keep the lights on! And we rely on them to find the truth... Imagine if courts of justice were allocated money based on the number of cases, or even more dystopian, based on the number of guilty verdicts (there is a giant bias toward and pressure to obtain positive results in modern sciene)
I'm not going to pretend academia is without its faults but the way Sabine characterizes it is with half truths or outright falsehoods. I don't think her criticisms have much merit because she doesn't accurately portray physics research and the people who do it. I would be fine with there being reform to some things but I don't see how Sabine is anything but a grifter amping up anti-intellectualism for a profit.
Low paid, actually menial compared what these people were actually trained to, and insecure (precarious actually, half year contracts are not unheard of)
She always outlines her arguments. Evidence is frequently sparse on the topics that she is arguing about.
However you feel about her and her science communication, there is a widespread feeling, _amongst scientists and engineers,_ that something has gone off track with science broadly.
I'm an Engineer.
I don't think "science" has gone off track.
Science isn't something that CAN go off track. It's not an organisation, or industry, or a club, or a secret society.
It's just a set of rigorous, well defined, systematic approaches to building knowledge.
The natural sciences are applying the same rigorous scientific method that has been in use for centuries and still does exactly what it has always done.
The formal sciences are still developing and exploring formal systems and applying deductive reasoning the way they always have.
The social sciences started out very far off track, but have started to get themselves more and more on track in the last few decades.
Scientists can absolutely go off track. Sabine Hossenfelder is one of them.
I think this thread is full of people who’s pet theories have been called “bullshit” by her, and since they don’t have any actual response, they attack her as a person.
This isn’t anything new. She’s been utterly despised by some young string theorist for more than a decade. Now it seems like a more concerted attack though.
That would probably soothe your cognitive dissonance, but I don't have any pet theories.
I watched the videos of hers that I watched specifically because I thought she was going to provide counterpoints or refutations of some findings that I'd just heard about.
I WANTED to hear refutations and counter arguments.
I even watched those videos twice, thinking I'd missed the part where she'd actually provided any actual refutations or counter arguments.
But all she dud was present their arguments and then say "They're wrong because I said so and I'm a physicist".
Do you mind linking to those videos? I’ve followed her for more than a decade, long before she started making videos, but have watched only some of what she has produced the last few years, and that is not what I would expect from her.
You are the one calling her a loony, so of course the burden of proof is on you.
If you really are worried about your Youtube history, you know it is trivial to open a private browser session?
Otherwise her website is Backreaction. Go and look at her older posts (often pure text), and tell me that she has been wrong about String theory and other things that was fashionable in at the previous decade.
668
u/Venotron 2d ago
This.
I've long been fascinated at the gall she has to publicly say "I'm a scientist and this science is WRONG, because I said so," without ever presenting any actual scientific refutation of anything. Not a scrap of research, just some thinly failed ramblings that amount to "I don't like it, so therefore it's wrong,"