Sabine Hossenfelder Has Started Openly Defending Proven Grifters
Sabine Hossenfelder Has Started Openly Defending Proven Grifters
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.
Absolutely surprised. Yep. So surprised.
She always gave me off vibes. I didn't really understand why she got the recognition she did
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.
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.