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0:00
Hey everyone, as you are aware I spend a lot of time debunking science deniers and charlatans of all varieties. Today I’m going to do something a little bit different. The subject of this video is not really a science denier, nor a charlatan, but rather a fellow science communicator named Sabine Hossenfelder. Therefore, this will not be a debunk so much as commentary on a certain aspect of her work that I view to be problematic. So let’s get started.
0:25
Now, most of you are probably already familiar with Sabine as she is quite popular. She has a million and a half subscribers, and has put out almost 700 videos, largely focusing on physics, as she has a professional background in theoretical physics and astrophysics. She therefore may seem like an unlikely subject for this type of video, particularly if you’ve seen me dunk on frauds like flat earthers and electric universe proponents, as well as propaganda
0:49
peddlers like James Tour and Discovery Institute. But you’ve also seen me expose less transparently problematic people like Eric Weinstein. Sabine is not like Eric Weinstein either, but they have at least one thing in common that merits elucidation. We will get to that in just a moment. First, to demonstrate the good faith nature of my approach to this commentary, I would like to start by highlighting a few examples of Sabine’s work that I consider to be good science communication.
1:15
Physicists call this heat death. The word is somewhat misleading because it doesn’t mean it’ll be hot. To the contrary it’ll be very cold and very dark. Heat refers to the useless energy that I mentioned previously. It had better be called high entropy death. This is a solid video. It’s hard to explain concepts like entropy in a way that laypeople can understand. This one does a good job of it, with a good script, good analogies,
1:41
and good visuals, without avoiding the necessary technical terms like microstates. The mass of the W boson has been measured a few times previously. You can see a summary of those measurements in this figure. On the horizontal axis you have the mass of the W boson. The gray line is the expectation if the standard model is correct. The red dots with the error bars are the results from different experiments. The one at the bottom is the result from the new analysis.
2:11
What did they do to get the error bar so small? Well for one thing they have a lot of data. But they also did a lot of calibration cross checks with other measurements which basically mean they know very precisely how to extract the physical parameters from the raw data. Or at least they think they do. Is this reasonable? Yes. Is it correct? I don’t know. It could be. This is another solid video. Summarizing results from the primary literature in physics for
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laypeople is also extremely difficult, and Sabine does about as well as anyone possibly can right here, without overstating or understating the relevance of the research in question. There are plenty of other videos like this on her channel. So as you can see, I would describe Sabine as a solid science communicator overall, and her perspective is welcome in the scicomm landscape. However, the more you familiarize yourself with her content, the more you notice
3:04
a particular undercurrent that sours her output to a noticeable extent. I personally began to notice this when I observed that a fair amount of science deniers would commonly reference her. That’s a red flag. Without even verifying whether the videos they reference support the stance of the science denier or not, when enough people are doing this, it is indicative of a tone that encourages science
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denial. What could this tone be, in her case? As it turns out, it is a firm anti-establishment sentiment, and in particular anti-academia sentiment, which as any viewer of my debunks will recall, I consistently describe as the single characteristic that unites all science denial. This is the way in which Sabine is similar to a figure like Eric Weinstein. Now to be clear, Sabine is not Eric Weinstein. She does not proclaim to have a brilliant theory of everything,
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whine about how nobody will take it seriously, and then devolve into a toxic toddler while evading any and all legitimate criticism of her completely unsubstantive work. Sabine also is not paid by Peter Thiel to undermine public perception of academic institutions. Sabine is not a charlatan. She has at times associated with Eric in the way of appearing alongside him in podcasts, but this does not make her his crony. In fact, she has outright stated to Eric’s face that she
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doesn’t understand or care much about Geometric Unity, and she even published Tim Nguyen’s rebuttal to it on her blog. So they certainly are not the same. But once again, they share this common thread of promoting anti-establishment narratives to a degree that is unreasonable, which is particularly damaging coming from a respectable figure formerly within academia, and examining examples of this rhetoric in her work will be the focus of this commentary.
4:47
Take a look at this video. The text on the thumbnail reads “I failed: why academia sucks”. From the title we can surmise that she is going to be talking about her own personal experience, but think about how this thumbnail would resonate with your average science denying ignoramus who looks at scientific credentials as cause for distrust, warning everyone about evil universities and their Rockefeller narratives full of lies. Do you see how instantly
5:15
compatible they are? Let’s have a listen. Because I finished my exams with excellent grades. I don’t mean to brag but I think you need this context. But I wasn’t offered a job because I’m a woman. I’m not guessing that that’s what happened, I know. Because they told me. I told him that I was under no obligation to work for him, and didn’t care what the rest of the students were thinking. He got angry, I laughed at him, he started shouting that I was fired, and physically
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shoved me out of his office. This institute wasn’t about knowledge discovery. It was about money making. And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn’t just this particular institute and this particular professor. It was generally the case. This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money. And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves. The
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result is a paper production machine in which students and post docs are burned through to bring in money for the institution. It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery. And since most grants are three years or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly. So it’s absolutely fine for Sabine to tell her story, point out sexism she experienced, complain about someone who had authority over her,
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and even lament the degree to which capitalism influences scientific research. But it is a very exaggerated and one-sided description of academia. Yes, researchers need grant money, but this is acquired by pursuing research that is innovative, probes unanswered questions, and potentially has some kind of industrial application. Good research tends to get funded. The description Sabine offers
7:11
allows those with anti-science leanings to imagine a soul-crushing factory devoid of imagination that exclusively manufactures technology for resource extraction and military campaigns. It’s just not real. My only personal experience with research is in synthetic organic chemistry, but every single other graduate student I knew was just doing chemistry. Coming up with new reactions, trying to synthesize specific molecules, there was nobody there from the pentagon asking about
7:39
how their research strengthens national security. There are certain examples in certain sectors that align with the narrative Sabine is describing, no doubt, but to paint with such a broad brush and brand the entirety of academia this way is just dishonest, tasteless, and quite frankly amounts to nothing but sour grapes. The way the video continues is also disheartening. The other thing that happened was that the more I saw of the foundations of physics,
8:06
the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn’t based on sound scientific principles. I know this sounds wild, like I’m the crank next door on YouTube. It is indeed a crazy thing to propose. The idea that most physics research is not based on scientific principles is just patently false at face value. This is a shameful thing for her to have said. I never intended it to be offensive. I just
8:35
explained why thinking up new particles isn’t a good strategy for progress in physics. And why that had gotten an entire discipline stuck. And naïve as I was, I expected physicists to think about it. I expected rational debate. But that never came. No one was interested. No one is interested. But the discipline absolutely isn’t stuck. This is where Sabine is sounding like Eric Weinstein. This narrative that particle physics or physics
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in general is at some kind of impasse is a popular narrative among science deniers and pseudoscience peddling charlatans. Sabine is different in that she is not peddling anything. She has no alternate pseudo-theory that she pushes. But the core message is similar, and it reminds me of electric universe grifters like Wal Thornhill. Physics is lost! They don’t do science anymore, only math! Heads stuck in the clouds! Wal used to spew this script all the time, and Sabine
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mirrors this script too closely for comfort. By my mid-30s, I had somehow miraculously managed to get married and have two children. But I couldn’t find a job anywhere near my husband. So for several years I commuted from Frankfurt to Stockholm. And yes, those cities are actually in different countries. After five years of my murder commute I just couldn’t do it anymore. My mental health was worse than ever, I was permanently stressed out, I was feeling guilty for not working
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more and not spending more time with my kids. I had several nervous breakdowns, I was constantly ill. I decided I’d go back to Germany and not move out of the country again until the kids were out of school. Instead I applied for research grants on projects that lasted one, two, or three years and that could be located in Germany. Again, all of this is fine. This is her story, and she’s entitled to tell it. But that she wasn’t able to find a job nearby at that particular time
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is not indicative of some massive problem with academia. That’s just life. There are lawyers who finish law school and then can’t find a job because no law firms are hiring. This is a broad societal problem that is tied to the status of an economy, which is a political issue that transcends the confines of academic institutions. Even Einstein, with a college degree in math and physics from the top institution in Switzerland, couldn’t find an academic job at first,
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so in order to make a living he had to look for any job that would hire him. He settled on a position as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office, and the rest is history. The boring and easy job gave his mind plenty of time to think about his doctoral thesis and other revolutionary ideas, and in 1905 he changed the world with his three big papers of that year. Even top minds sometimes struggle. That’s life. Blaming the scientific community for this is disingenuous.
11:27
But I knew it was bullshit. Just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit, and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. This is the problematic language. No, it is not the case that the majority of scientific research is bullshit. This is something science deniers say. Most of it is not revolutionary, most of it is irrelevant to the general public, or in Thomas Kuhn’s language,
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“normal science”. But it is not “bullshit”. It’s just science, which fills in gaps in our knowledge a little bit at a time. It’s researchers expanding the scope of their field in tiny increments. Applying a particular chemical reaction to a slightly different starting material. Collecting and indexing thousands of archeological artifacts. Performing taxonomic identification of new species
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of butterflies. Most scientific output is kind of boring, even for people who are familiar with the field. That doesn’t make it bullshit. It’s true that sometimes papers reach incorrect conclusions, and sometimes these aren’t corrected for years. It depends on the attention that it attracts. The more groundbreaking the work, the more likely it is to be scrutinized and therefore either refuted or confirmed. Science does not always advance in a perfectly straight
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line. Scientists are people just like everyone else, subject to wishful thinking, bias, error, and once in a while even dishonesty. That’s not a science problem. It’s a people problem. The system always eventually corrects itself and science advances. Let’s see what else we can find. Scientific progress is slowing down. But why? And the thumbnail reads “Is Science Dying”. I’m sorry, this is preposterous. Again, look at this from the perspective of the science denier
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who desperately wants all of science to be wrong. If only empirical knowledge didn’t exist, then my ridiculous conspiratorial fantasies could spread their wings and fly without any challenge from reality. If science dies, I can replace it with my pseudoscience! And this scientist lady says it’s true, so I’m going to click and pretend to listen, even though the conclusion I want to take away from it is already set in stone. Is a foldable phone a breakthrough invention? Is
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gradually cramming more and more pixels and transistors into headsets a sign of progress? Aren’t machines on the moon more often an engineering feat than a scientific revelation? Is this the end of science? I’ve talked about this a few times recently, and I do think science is in big trouble indeed. Again, this is just ridiculous. She listed two random products and then concluded that science isn’t doing anything. This would be unfair to
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express even about her own field, but extending that to every other field, with their respective frontiers that she knows nothing about, is extremely arrogant and unreasonable. With this measure they find that the research productivity has steeply decreased since the 1960s and 70s. From the way that they’ve defined it, this means that of all the scientists alive, fewer and fewer are contributing to key discoveries. They looked at 45 million papers stretching back
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to 1945 as well as 3.9 million patents and at how often those papers and patents were cited. Then they measured whether a new paper or patent made citations to earlier work redundant, which they say is a sign of a disruptive breakthrough. Using this metric, they found clear evidence that both papers and patents have become less disruptive over time in all areas that they looked at. This all may seem reasonable at face value, but there’s a lot of nuance missing. First of all,
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it is far easier to attain breakthroughs in a nascent field. The more a field has developed, the harder it is to do something revolutionary. The harder it is to innovate. When it comes to physics, chemistry, biology, and other well-established fields that have enjoyed several centuries of development, it’s just not as easy to break new ground as it once was. That’s the nature of the scientific process. And this graph goes all the way back to 1750, a time when we didn’t even
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know that atoms and molecules exist. So it’s not a fair comparison. Fast forwarding to modern day, not everything has to be a breakthrough in order to advance the field. Sometimes a singular breakthrough occurs, and this will shine a spotlight on a particular new area that needs to be explored, such that hundreds or even thousands of researchers can work on that new area for several decades to catch up to new theories. The better we understand nature, the harder it is
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to come up with results that revolutionize our conception of nature. It’s as simple as that. It gets a lot worse. Here’s a video called “this is why physics is dying”, and a frustrated Sabine is on the thumbnail exclaiming “still the same crap”. It’s exactly the same crap as with string theory and supersymmetry and inflation and dark sectors, and many other research bubbles in the foundations of physics. It’s mathematical fiction. It’s
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nothing to do with reality anymore. I don’t understand why people get paid for doing this. Sabine is sounding like Wal Thornhill again, complaining about how physicists get paid to do math. I recently heard Eric Weinstein say in a video that we’re seeing the beginning of a collapse in the foundations of physics because it’s so obvious now that string theory was a huge mistake. I think you’re wrong, Eric. This will keep
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on going and going until physics is entirely dead. What we are seeing now is just that the senior people are handing over to their students. If you didn’t believe me earlier that Sabine and Eric have something in common, there’s your proof. Nobody should be agreeing with Eric on anything, least of all this script about physics being hopelessly stuck because of string theory. She then goes on a very Weinstein-like rant where she rattles off some physics terminology rapid fire in
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a way that very clearly is not meant to convey any information to laypeople but rather serves to proclaim “I know what I’m talking about”. In which they claim that loop quantum gravity doesn’t have an issue with Lorentz invariance. There’s the smallest possible area that you can have which is proportional to the square of the Planck length. A minimal area isn’t compatible with Lorentz invariance. It just isn’t. If you quantize the angular momentum operator,
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then the spectrum of eigenvalues is discrete. And that doesn’t violate rotational invariance, and it works similarly in loop quantum gravity with Lorentz invariance. But it’s so frustrating to see this is still going on. They’re still discussing the same nonsense as 20 years ago. I’m not a physicist. I don’t know if she’s right or wrong. This could even be a completely valid criticism of a particular subset of physicists. That’s not the point here. The point is that this
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is bad science communication. There is nothing of substance here for the viewer to latch onto. All they can do is walk away having absorbed some kind of vague vicarious frustration and the general sense that physics is hopelessly stuck. Which it isn’t. This whole “physics hasn’t done anything new in 50 years” song and dance is totally meritless. Within this century, we observed gravitational waves. We found the Higgs boson. We directly imaged a black hole. We experimentally
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determined the mass of the neutrino. We generated Bose-Einstein condensate. We’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets. Physics, in all of its subdisciplines, is doing just fine. Is string theory super awesome and totally valid? Who knows. I certainly don’t. Maybe it will never, ever pan out. But it’s not the only thing happening in physics, nor is it the only thing that gets funded. Not by a longshot. When figures like Sabine or Eric rail against string theory, it’s
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just a scapegoat for their anti-academia rhetoric. What happened instead is that everyone who works on this just repeats arguments that they all know to be wrong to keep the money coming. Because, let’s be real, these people sit on cozy tax-paid positions, with no other task than producing useless papers that no one understands and therefore no one dares criticize. This video is genuinely just one long rant. It has no educational value to the general public.
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It exists purely for entertainment. It exists so that a certain demographic of people who are eager to look down upon academia have a reason to throw their hands up and say “See, I was right!”. That’s why this video exists. We can say that Sabine has two audiences. She attracts science enthusiasts who want to learn about science. She also attracts science deniers who look for reasons to disparage
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and deny science. It’s rather remarkable, but Sabine has managed to tap into both audiences. The problem is that the latter audience is much, much larger. Therefore, she gets a tremendous amount of positive feedback from that audience, and I feel it has polarized her content in that direction. Look at the view count on this very recent video we were just looking at. Observe that it is much higher than the other videos released around the same time. Now look at the one with “why
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academia sucks” in the title. This one is from six months ago, and look at the disparity in view count with the other content released at that time. Between 100 and 200 thousand views in six months when Sabine talks about energy storage or quantum cognition. Academia sucks gets over three million. That’s a pretty stark difference. Can you see now why Sabine has moved further and further in this direction as of late? It’s not Sabine’s fault that this is how the
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internet reacts to her content. But she does have a choice as to how she reacts to them, and whether or not to continue enticing this kind of audience. Once again, these are two separate audiences. One audience loves science, the other hates it. They have an axe to grind. They’re the exact same people who follow the Weinsteins. They want to hear academics, or in the case of the Weinsteins fake academics, tell them that academia is bad. They want the patrons of the
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ivory tower themselves to tell them that the tower is really full of filth and corruption. They want a reason to hate knowledge and turn their backs on expertise. Sabine is rewarded when she caters to this audience, and it’s hard to ignore all those clicks and all that money, especially when you’re self-employed. I should know, I’m self-employed too, and do you remember when I said this?
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I’m definitely not going to be making any more of these because I have much better things to do, and I’m going to get back to doing those things now. Well I sure did do more of those, now didn’t I? Why did I do them? Money, mainly. I admit it. I like getting views and making money. But these flat earth videos do not damage public perception of science. In fact they strengthen it, which is the singular goal that unites all of my content as a science communicator.
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Sabine’s antics in this regard are not limited to YouTube. She has written several articles for the Guardian, and they reek of the same attitude we’ve highlighted so far, yet in this case we see her slipping into legitimate dishonesty and abject falsehood. Here she is complaining about the status of particle physics. A delightful analogy is offered about zoologists inventing new animals out of thin air, and isn’t that exactly what particle physicists do? They invent exotic new
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particles with zero basis and then demand that we look for them. Except this isn’t what they do at all. They work within models to predict with firm empirical basis what particles ought to exist should the Standard Model be accurate. They are not random flights of fancy like worms with wings. The suggested particles always attempt to solve some problem in particle physics. Then they do
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particle accelerator experiments to confirm their existence. And they have confirmed the existence of numerous previously hypothetical particles this way, most famously the Higgs boson. How can this be a waste of money when the approach has been successful multiple times? Furthermore, in describing this so-called particle zoo, she lists several particles that aren’t a serious subject of
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research. They aren’t even all separate individual particles but rather broad classifications that are more or less well-defined. The phrase particle zoo isn’t even used correctly. It was coined in the 1960s due to the large number of new particles that were discovered, which at first seemed like a disordered mess, until particle physicists found the solution: the quark model of hadrons. Then everything fell into place, and we were left with a highly coherent model,
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which has since made many predictions that were vindicated by experiment. Sabine is abusing this term to baselessly mock particle physicists, which is particularly frustrating as she used to be a particle physicist. She goes on to mock the entire field, saying they don’t believe in what they do, and likening them to an army of typewriting monkeys, essentially just lying to get grant money. Not only is this ridiculous and offensive slander, it also reeks of the
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same vibe as all the pseudoscience associated with this field. Wal Thornhill and the Electric Universe bunch would never shut up about how physicists don’t do physics, they just do math, and it’s all a bunch of hocus pocus to keep the grant money coming in. This is of course just to trick their incompetent audience into thinking that their easy-to-understand bullshit is more relevant than actual math-based physics they can’t comprehend. It even sounds a bit like James Tour,
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whining about all the funding that goes to origin of life research even though it’s a bunch of stupid fairy tale magic nonsense. 40 million euros was just designated to, in ten years, figure out where life came from. And there’s about 40 researchers that in Europe that are gonna try to do this. It’s really nonsense. We don’t even know where to begin. It also reeks of the same vibe as Eric Weinstein, with Sabine painting herself
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as a martyr and whistleblower on a corrupt system that she can only now comment on as she is firmly outside of academia, having escaped its tentacles. Again, Sabine is not like those people I listed, but when her arguments resemble arguments from those people, isn’t that problematic? Science communicators should not be sounding like the science deniers they are ideally there to neutralize. They should not be writing entire books like “Lost in Math” that practically could
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have been written by Wal Thornhill if he had a better understanding of physics. I won’t dive into the details of this book, but any particle physicist I’ve come across that is aware of it speaks emphatically and with specificity to the dishonesty within. A modest knowledge of the history of science is all it takes to dispel this bogus attitude. Quantum mechanics was at first pure math. Now it is used in the production of every electronic device in the world. The same
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can be the case for any other area of physics, and we must remember that some developments elude experimental verification for decades because new technologies must first be developed in order for such experiments to occur. To find gravitational waves physicists had to invent and build LIGO, and they eventually succeeded. Sometimes it’s not even about technology. When Mendel established
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the field of genetics, for almost 100 years nobody could figure out the mechanism of heredity. It was just a bunch of numbers and statistical analysis. We needed advancements in chemistry and biology to figure out that DNA is the molecule of heredity, and learn about what it does, and now our understanding of heredity is profound. Relativity was only math for a while. Lasers were developed after math predicted them. There are countless examples of this in the history of science.
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This is a bad article. Sabine is asserting herself as the premiere authority of this field in order to negate its legitimacy, which is dishonest and crude. Whether or not it can be said that fewer predictions within particle physics are materializing per year than a few decades ago is irrelevant. Sabine does not word it that way. She instead haphazardly paints a picture of bumbling incompetence for the entire field, which is highly damaging.
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Now that we have examined a few examples of her rhetoric, I want to be perfectly clear about the nature of my criticism. It is singularly aimed at this one aspect of her output. Others have expressed other criticism, and I don’t necessarily share it. There are those who take issue with her blunt tone. I do not. I also am blunt. I appreciate people who are blunt, and tell it like it is. There are those who take issue with her speaking outside her area of expertise.
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I do not. I am a generalist, and I encourage other science communicators to dabble in generalism, offering their perspective on any scientific topic they please, so long as they do not misrepresent their level of expertise or confidently assert blatant falsehoods. I have seen Sabine comment on things like gender identity and climate change, and I too have commented on these issues, despite the fact that neither of us are experts on them. Although I did not watch those videos
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in depth but rather only skimmed them, I did not immediately detect anything firmly unscientific or misleading in them. Others who work in those areas can absolutely disagree. Perhaps she got some nuance incorrect, or even made significant errors. I myself got some nuance incorrect when commenting on gender identity, and others who are more knowledgeable on the topic informed me of this,
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like Vaush, who did a reaction to my first video, which I watched and used to slightly adjust some of my language, which is why my response to the idiot Matt Walsh was much more on point. Perhaps Sabine has experienced something similar. So I am not criticizing the topics she chooses to communicate. Some take issue with the fact that she makes clickbait content. I am not even taking too much of an issue with that either. My flat earth content could arguably be described
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as clickbait. Do I really need to debunk flat earthers for the fifteenth time? Is that really imperative in the scicomm landscape? No, it isn’t. I do it because people really enjoy those videos and I know I’ll get a lot of views and make some money. It’s ok to make content that your audience enjoys watching, and it’s ok to make content as a science communicator that isn’t as urgently needed as other content. But once again, there is one huge difference. My flat
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earth content is not damaging to society. The way that Sabine uses clickbait is damaging to society. If you trace this anti-establishment sentiment through Sabine’s content, it has gotten worse over time, and it appears to me that it is a reaction to the engagement she receives. As we showed earlier, every single video that blatantly disparages academia in either the title or the thumbnail gets many, many more views than her other content. Sometimes by an order of magnitude
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or more. This has caused Sabine to become more blatant and more frequent in the expression of these views, to continue maximizing views and engagement. Let me reiterate for a second time: wanting more views and to make money is not the problem. I also like views and I also like money. I like money though. But if you are sacrificing your integrity and poisoning society to achieve those views, is it really worth it? Are you any longer
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a trusted voice in science communication? And make no mistake, I am not being overly dramatic. This attitude is very damaging. As I have stated many times before, the public has no ability to compartmentalize science. When laypeople hear rhetoric about shifty string theorists and cosmologists, it does not damage their view of those researchers alone. It damages their view of scientists and the scientific process in general. They conclude
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that scientists are lying about physics, which means they’re lying about vaccines, and they’re lying about the climate, and absolutely everything else. Because science is all one thing to them. When you plant a seed of anti-establishment bias in a person, it will inevitably rear its ugly head in the form of rejecting scientific consensus on any other matter imaginable, and in ways that produce quantifiable harm or even elevated death tolls,
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given situations like a pandemic or other events that pose an existential threat to humanity. I mean for the love of Christ, “I don’t trust scientists”. Are you serious with this shit? This is an insane title for a video made by a science communicator. It sounds like something Alex Jones would say. Make no mistake, the majority of people do not engage with this content in any meaningful way, so even if the video itself is more nuanced, they are slammed by the blunt force
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trauma of that title, and come away with the impression that even a scientist is admitting that scientists can’t be trusted, so they are justified in denying literally any science they please. This is incredibly damaging. This is not whistleblowing. This is bad, unethical clickbait.
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I don’t really think that Sabine set out to do this. I think that she set out to be a trustworthy, straight-shooting science communicator. And she still can be. But this mixture of constantly venting her own frustrations regarding her professional history, along with the apparent audience capture, driving her to further and further reinforce this bizarre attitude, is an enormous stain on her reputation. As she stands currently, she cannot be considered a leading
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voice in science communication strictly because of this behavior. There are no explanations on her channel, no riveting demonstrations, no tantalizing science popularization that can possibly outweigh the damage that she does with these kinds of videos. In this specific regard, and this regard only, she is similar to a figure like Eric Weinstein. The difference is that Eric is a grifter to his core. He will never change. I think Sabine is an intelligent
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person with good intentions, whose efficacy as a science communicator is in no way determined by her history as an academic, she simply fell prey to the wrong kind of influence from a portion of her audience. I think she can turn things around, drop this unprofessional behavior that represents only a fraction of her output, and redirect back to a course of exclusively respectable science communication. Will she do it? I have no idea. Will she see this video? I have to imagine
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probably. Will she care or respond? Again, no idea. But if she does see it, I hope that she will not take offense, as none is intended, and I hope that she will take to heart what I have said. We need effective science communicators now more than ever, and it would be a shame to lose one as solid as Sabine down the anti-establishment rabbit hole into demagoguery for clicks and cash. So that’s it for my thoughts on Sabine Hossenfelder. A bit of a departure from my other
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content in this format, but I hope you can now see my perspective, and why I felt all of this needed to be said. Feel free to let me know what you thought in the comments, I’ll see you next time.
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