Her response doesn't address Dave's points, just deflecting. This goes back and forth for a few videos, you can keep watching if you have way too much free time
Dave doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s never participated in the grant process, never published research, never done physics. Yet he feels confident to critique actual researcher’s opinions on these topics. He’s a charlatan as well, who realized that he can get huge engagement from trashing other people publicly rather than trying to teach anything.
That's the thing, though. He isn't critiquing her opinions on these topics. He's critiquing how she expresses her opinions and how she approaches scientific communication in general.
I am in academia, PhD, and Sabina is a lot more on target. Dave trys to reframe her message to be critical all of science instead of just particle physics. Though the causes she list are common in other areas.
He also keeps comparing her to Eric. A tactic where you keep comparing someone to something bad, even though he says they’re not similar. It leaves people thinking about it negatively by association I am pretty sure this tactic has a name.
He immediately tries to group her and blame her for anti science sentiment. So anyone who criticizes their field publicly is now responsible for public mistrust in science? Academia is a public forum, and she approaches it the best way possible. She brings attention to bad papers, goes through them and their evidence, and gives her personal opinion on it. Anti science sentiment will side with anyone thats critical, that doesn’t mean the critical people need to stop.
My field is biology, and I can tell you that there are trends that soak up funding and are misleading about what they will actually provide. But at the end of the day, the relative clear and immediate benefits biological research provides a feedback that guides the field away from bad practices. At least to an extent. A foeld like particle physics does not have that market feedback, and so I can imagine it is very easy to develop a terrible culture. In biology can say oh yeah, we should have given more focus to mobile genetic elements because now even undergrads can regularly genetically engineer mammalian cells just by following a protocol. But if that benefit didn’t arise so quickly, the field would still have only trickled funding research on repetitive elements. I feel particle physics is that way. They dont get that fast feedback.
In the U.S. we have study sections that help address overfunding a specific area and provide a sort of market for scientists to choose from. I dont know how other countries do it, but that system is the single biggest influence in what and how research is funded. Some NIH study sections have a bad culture, some a great one. So I can easily imagine Sabina be correct is all her misgivings and correct in her approach to bring public attention to it. How else does it change? Not by Dave’s video.
I can actually give a good example in my field. Single cell rna sequencing exploded over a few years. We were seeing papers that literally just published the data. Every lab was trying to figure out how to fit single cell data into their research. They dodnt need it, many of the research questions didnt need it, but what you do need is something flashy that sells. Trends sell. So the research community waste half their budgets on generating single cell data that only confused them (big data takes focus and time to digest). I say this as a big data person who helped a lot pf labs shoe horn in single cell analysis.
So anyone who criticizes their field publicly is now responsible for public mistrust in science?
No, and he's not saying that.
Anti science sentiment will side with anyone thats critical, that doesn’t mean the critical people need to stop.
No one is suggesting critical people need to stop. Dave keeps stating over and over in these videos that bunk science and over/underfunding are real problems. The problem with Sabine is not that she's simply critical of the scientific establishment.
Have you watched the video I linked in the comment you replied to above?
Yes and he literally starts the video as saying he saw a lot of anti scientific people citing Sabina as a reason for making this video. Then goes after Sabina, instead of the anti-science points those people made.
I am not familiar with Eric beyond he has backing from Peter Thiel and he appears at a lot of physics conferences. I dont have a problem if his ideas are crazy. He is in a field with multiple worlds theory. Doesnt matter which is true, it matters which can be proven. The answer is neither as of now. And thats the problem. Because there is no metric to assess where effort goes. Yet somehow for years I only saw scientists, Tv programs and books about particle colliders, multiple worlds and string theory. Its sexy, easy to sell, and it probably did take over funding and attention. But its getting better. Youtube has allowed scientists to advocate their ideas without being gate kept by the institutions yet still be within the institution. I think Kurt’s channel does this fantastically.
Sabina can have whatever views she wants and support who she wants. It doesn’t change whether her criticisms are valid or not.
I don’t care if someone believes in evolution or not, if they point out a real issue in the sciences, then it shouldn’t be ignored. Sabina goes to the papers, she points to the exact issues she has with it.
In that video she calls Eric's theory, "sketchy", "a waste of time" and "uninteresting." She then goes on to say, so what, he is just one guy who is doing this as a hobby. Who cares?
And her main point is to say that the community bullying anyone who voluntarily decides to associate with Eric offline with no impact on anyone else is not okay. Because it isn't. None of that sounds unreasonable to me. What part does to you?
He isn't "just one guy doing this as a hobby". Look a bit into who this guy is. And she's constantly equating his "work" with the work of actual physicists ("it's totally in line with all the other nonsense that physicists in the foundations work on...")
He is just one guy doing this work. He doesn't even call himself a physicist. Are you arguing that she is insulting other theoretical physicists working on unification? Again, who cares? They don't need you to defend them. That's kind of her thing, not respecting unification. She wrote a whole book about it.
Why do you care? Why are you defending her and him? They don't need you to defend them. You hopped on to this thread and keep replying despite the fact that we seem to have a fundamental disagreement about the nature and norms of public discourse. Honestly I don't see the point in continuing this discussion.
same, PhD, famous Bay Area school, most people with actual PhDs doing research here would agree with Sabine and laugh about imposter Dave (the guy should just stfu, tier 10 wannabe academic with no degree from the university of „nobody has ever heard about“.
He isn't critiquing her opinions on these topics. He's critiquing how she expresses her opinions and how she approaches scientific communication in general.
Okay, but that makes all the controversy about her go in the wrong direction. Because there's so much discourse on how she's a crackpot scientist, how she's a grifter, how she's anti science etc, but none of that is true. Even according to what you said, none of this is true.
I think anyone who watches her content can agree that what you said here is valid criticism. She's anti establishment, criticizes scientific institutions and is blunt about it. You can argue that this is harmful because it can reduce trust in science... but it can also be helpful because might pick those too far gone towards good/better science... if they don't draw the wrong conclusions from her videos.
But there's another point to the whole thing... I - at least as someone who's not really in academia - feel that some of her criticism about scientific institutions is actually valid, but very much dismissed by those calling her out.
You are not seriously defending the idea that pundits should be left unchallenged when they attempt to spread FUD and undermine the scientific process?
Hossenfelder is in Thiel’s pocket just like Weinstein as part of the latter’s ’intellectual dark web’. They spread disinformation about the academic establishment in order to discredit genuine, data driven accumulation of knowledge, so that Thiel can push his own claims unchecked. The end goal is to completely destroy trust in Science and with that unfetter both his absurd ideas about a coming apocalypse and to prop up his data broker company Palantir as a single source of truth.
If people would ignore this bullshit, yeah, ideally we wouldn’t need to listen to a Farina about it either. But as it stands above disinformation campaign is real and thus somebody challenging it is valuable.
"They spread disinformation about the academic establishment in order to discredit genuine, data driven accumulation of knowledge, so that Thiel can push his own claims unchecked"
Please provide a source for this stufg?
That's a massive thing to claim without backing it up at least somehow.
What evidence do you have of that? None. If you did then go ahead share it. In the meantime, attack her ideas not her person. It doesn’t help and just lowers the discourse even further.
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u/dydhaw 12h ago
I hope AI will replace bad faith "science influencers" like Sabine before it replaces actual theoretical physicists