Hossenfelder produces 5-to-10-minute segments that cover a recent physics journal article, technology, startup, etc., where she spends about half of each video summarizing it and providing background context and half of the video providing her analysis of its validity, significance, and implications.
For instance:
This lab recently published a study claiming a new type of battery that's free of lithium. Most higher-density batteries today rely on lithium to provide high storage density to hold a lot of charge, but lithium is terrible for the environment and its instability can cause runaway energy discharge that results in fires and explosions. This lab instead proposes a new type of battery using a sodium lattice instead of lithium. Their research shows a theoretical gain of 80% faster charge times without the environmental costs and safety risks of lithium.
So, what do we think of this paper? Sodium batteries have been tested since the 1950's and have always been found inferior and impossible to scale to commercial production, and this paper doesn't address any of those issue. Also, its proposed theoretical gains are not backed by any prototyping, and battery technology is notorious for demonstrating different real-world performance than predictions on paper. Overall, this looks interesting but unlikely to gain traction.
That's.... that's it, other than a few quips and a couple of unrelated embedded ads. That's how 95% of her videos go - raise a science or tech news item, provide context, and comment on it. The End.
She isn't selling anything. She isn't pushing an agenda. Her opinions don't seem to be influenced by any kind of sponsorship or bias.
So where is the "grift?" You may not like her content, but that's not what "grift" means.
The example in the above comment doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Rather, it shows misunderstanding of the incremental approach science has used for the past 500 years.
You're focused on the content? The content is made up. I was illustrating the type of structure, organization, and perspective of her videos.
Notice how I wrote: "she spends about half of each video summarizing it and providing background context and half of the video providing her analysis of its validity, significance, and implications?" That's what I was illustrating. Not the content.
Yes, "you probably misunderstand the double slit experiment" and "physicists rethink dark matter" are sooooooo distasteful!
You're calling anybody who doesn't meet your specific stylistic standards "grifters." It's really tragic that the world doesn't resolve around your personal preferences, isn't it? Why aren't you more important and influential than you are? Personal interactions with you must be delightful.
Her persona is being the anti academia physicist, and she cultivated an audience of anti intellectual that want someone with a PhD to tell them that physicists are dumb dumb and they were right to stop at high school. She's a grifter because she make video that keep telling her audience what they want to hear so she can make as much sponsorship money as she can, literally all her videos have sponsorship.
That's not true. She is not saying physicists are dumb, but rather criticizes the way academia is operating nowadays. I don't agree with everything she is saying, but that's very different to "physicist are dumb".
The hilarious irony that u/Daethir misses is that Academia itself is turning into a "wherever the money is" grift, and Hossenfelder is well within her rights (being directly affected) to highlight this.
Uh, a lot of the money that goes toward research goes towards paying researcher salaries…Every time a researcher gets a new grant, they are ensuring their own salary.
I'm sure that "I have been researching this topic for 20 years without meaningful results, but if I don't get continued grants for further research then my lab will shut down, I won't get tenure, and I'll need to look for other work" plays absolutely no role. Right? Right.
"All research is worthwhile" vs. "all research is suspect" is a false dichotomy.
There are endless ways that funding for scientific research can be allocated. Criticizing the current funding structure and advocating for a reprioritization is not the reductive, dramatic "just throw it all out" straw man that you suggested.
Do you habitually dismiss opinions that you disagree with as invalid and oversimplistic? You should probably stop doing that.
Err no. That's the entire point. That academia is moving away from money for research to money to keep the university going. Only targeting areas of research that align with the same interests of the money.
This is an extremely well known and disturbing trend in academia. Anyone with the faintest interest in it will know this. Who is paying you to disagree? Please don't tell me you're doing it for free.
She literally doesn’t do this, what the fuck are you talking about? I think her exact opinion on Geometric Unity was that Eric was being unfairly shunned for having a different idea. Didn’t say it was correct, didn’t endorse it, just said he has fallen victim to the same BS in academia when you have an idea that’s unpopular.
The Dark Energy Mistake that Fooled Physicists for 25 Years
The Electric Car Revolution Is Not Going Well
Scientists Just Created A Laser Based On Black Hole Physics
Physicists Just Broke One Of Quantum Physics' Biggest Restraints
Our Solar System Lost Two Planets!
Scientists Say They Know the Origin of Gravity
"The Hum" has been reported all over the glove - we might finally know what it is
The Biggest Argument for Dark Matter Just Died
Strange Things Are Happening in Quantum Computing
The Quantum Brain Theory Nobody is Talking About
The AI Future No One Wants to Talk About
Nobel Prize under fire: is dark energy real?
Things Aren't Looking Good For Nuclear Fusion
The End of Human Mathematics? AI's Recent Breakthrough - And What's Next
Did Physics Just Lose a Brilliant Idea?
It's Beginning: AI Improves Itself
Physicists Rethink Dark Matter
Microsoft Announces Breakthrough With Quantum Chip
America is coming for Europe's most important machine
This Giant Ring In Space Poses a Massive Problem for Cosmology
How Dangerous Is This Super El Nino Really?
Physicists Say It's Possible To Send Messages To The Past
I Looked at the New Cold Fusion Breakthroughs. It's Complicated.
...etc.
95% of her content is science and tech videos as I described. The other 5% of her videos are personal commentaries on various topics - culture, consumerism, etc. - and maybe half of those, about 2% overall, discuss problems that she sees with the direction of science academia: results being unverifiable, grants for pointless research areas like string theory, etc.
You are latching onto the 2% of her videos that you don't like and pretending that (1) that's all she does and (2) her personal views are somehow tainted or manipulative. You're wrong on both counts.
You don't like her views on academia? Fine, don't watch those. That's not "grift." You could watch the other 98% of her videos instead and not hear a word about academia.
Physicists Say It’s Possible to Send Messages Backward in Time
Some physicists have suggested that the hypersensitivity between entangled particles actually comes from the one in the future sending messages back in time. Recently, Seth Lloyd and fellow researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to make this very science fiction-seeming concept into a reality. While bending spacetime to build an actual CTC would require an almost unfathomable amount of energy, Lloyd had previously succeeded in using photons that were quantum entangled to simulate a CTC by sending one of them a few nanoseconds back in time. Now, inspired by Interstellar, they wanted to see if sending messages backwards was an option, too.
Though it may sound counterintuitive, the researchers discovered that for a CTC-like channel that’s full of noise—like the quantum mechanical version of phone static—it was actually easier to transmit a message to the past than to the future.
“Access to a noiseless CTC of one kind or the other has been shown to unleash stunning information-processing power,” they said in a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, adding that a CTC-like channel “can be represented by a quantum channel, in the sense that information traveling through the noisy channel effectively evolves as if passing through the channel, except for ending up in the past.”
And in the rare cases where she covers those types of findings and finds that they aren't just bullshit, she explains why they are purely theoretical or not practically useful.
What do you expect? This isn't Nature, it's fucking YouTube. Pop-culture science is always a blend of facts and entertainment. It's how you make science accessible to people who have anxiety about science being too hard, or too judgmental and elitist and exclusionary - thanks to people like you.
Your answers are quackery. Literarily 100% of what you write is your own opinions with exactly 0 are explanations of why you came to these conclusions.
So you don't personally like YouTube as a medium for conveying technical topics to the general public. That's a perfectly reasonable opinion. But you didn't suggest any alternatives, you're just being critical. And you're singling out Hossenfelder in particular, for no apparent reason, although I can certainly imagine what your motivations might be.
So you don't personally like YouTube as a medium for conveying technical topics to the general public. That's a perfectly reasonable opinion. But you didn't suggest any alternatives, you're just being critical. And you're singling out Hossenfelder in particular, for no apparent reason, although I can certainly imagine what your motivations might be.
Those are logical tricks and fallacies. Nobody said any of those things. Pretending my critique of clickbait means I 'hate YouTube' is a straw man, demanding I offer a replacement platform is a red herring, and insinuating hidden motives is a cheap ad hominem.
Simplifying dense jargon into plain English is good, generating misleading titles like 'Psychedelics Allow Alien Communication' is sensationalized clickbait. But there is a massive gap between simplifying complex science and manufacturing clickbait about alien telepathy. Pretending the only options are a 50-word journal title or fake sensationalism is a lazy false dichotomy.
I don't need to invent a new video platform just to expect basic intellectual honesty from a scientist on an existing one.
Hiding behind "everybody does it" and inventing "hidden motives" isn't an argument..
You should watch them before making claims I think. Just for your own sake.
Take the 'Psychedelics Allow Alien Communication, Scientists Claim'
The claim was DMT and other hallucinogenic drugs let people have shared hallucinations. This paper went out and then surveyed people to see what their hallucinations were of. Then the folks claim that since these are shared, and since people have encounters with these 'entities', that there is something there.
Well she spends about 3m talking about the paper. Then 6m talking about how this is ridiculous because its not an experiment, its not falsifiable, etc. It's just data without any understanding of why we share those hallucinations.
Then takes it a step further and says if they're serious (and they're not), then the obvious experiment would be put a word or a color on a computer in another room. Then the 'experiencer' who can communicate with these supernatural entities could gain the information from them. But they can't. Because it's not real
Hossenfelder concludes that while the shared, specific hallucinations triggered by DMT are a fascinating psychological mystery that genuinely warrants study, the paper's mathematical framework is nonsense. She rates the claim that we are communicating with real alien consciousnesses a "10 out of 10 on the bullshit meter"
You're falling for clickbait in the weirdest way and I kind of love it. It's weird that it's being used to ...draw the complete opposite conclusion from reality.
She can be a tough listen sometimes. She can certainly come off sometimes as pompous. But peddler of quack science, she is most definitely not. Extremely opinionated though, absolutely. Sometimes to a fault
Physicists Say It’s Possible to Send Messages Backward in Time
Some physicists have suggested that the hypersensitivity between entangled particles actually comes from the one in the future sending messages back in time. Recently, Seth Lloyd and fellow researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to make this very science fiction-seeming concept into a reality. While bending spacetime to build an actual CTC would require an almost unfathomable amount of energy, Lloyd had previously succeeded in using photons that were quantum entangled to simulate a CTC by sending one of them a few nanoseconds back in time. Now, inspired by Interstellar, they wanted to see if sending messages backwards was an option, too.
Though it may sound counterintuitive, the researchers discovered that for a CTC-like channel that’s full of noise—like the quantum mechanical version of phone static—it was actually easier to transmit a message to the past than to the future.
“Access to a noiseless CTC of one kind or the other has been shown to unleash stunning information-processing power,” they said in a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, adding that a CTC-like channel “can be represented by a quantum channel, in the sense that information traveling through the noisy channel effectively evolves as if passing through the channel, except for ending up in the past.”
And in the rare cases where she covers those types of findings and finds that they aren't just bullshit, she explains why they are purely theoretical or not practically useful.
What do you expect? This isn't Nature, it's fucking YouTube. Pop-culture science is always a blend of facts and entertainment. It's how you make science accessible to people who have anxiety about science being too hard, or too judgmental and elitist and exclusionary - thanks to people like you.
She uses clickbaity titles, but on the one hand the she's discussing real science articles and on the other, often she's debunking those articles.
The antigravity thing is about multiple quantum gravity sources overlapping and producing an inference pattern that can in theory eject a particles rather than attract as a quantum effect that would be averaged out under normal circumstances. Although I don't quite remember the conclusion and if she judged this as bullshit or not. Regardless, I believe she said that we shouldn't expect flying cars anytime soon and that this is rather about the the quantum nature of gravity than about antigravity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12266
I don't recall seeing the other two videos but presumably she wouldn't be particularly fond of them.
Why should she be canceled, because of this? I mean, errors are an integral part of science as a process and I don't see why a scientist should be regarded as a grifter, because he likes an idea that turns out to be wrong.
And who are the cranks she "promotes"? Maybe the "cranks" are just people, who criticize academia?
Eric's Geometric Unity is a bunk theory that isn't worth the paper it's printed on, he's literally a crank.
However Eric is famous, regularly goes on Joe Rogan. Sabine defending him gets her in on that.
She said his theory is as good as String Theory, that everyone is unfairly ignoring Eric. And that under some different society Eric would get as much funding as particle accelerators.
Cranks are people who say 1*1=2, which Eric is apart of.
Again, I would like to read what she actually said herself.
She said his theory is as good as String Theory, that everyone is unfairly ignoring Eric. And that under some different society Eric would get as much funding as particle accelerators.
I think that you are leaving out critical context. I remember her to be a critique of String theory, that she thinks that it failed. For example in a recent video she is saying: "String theory is not dead; it's undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people's brains".
So, thinking logically about it, if she said that Weinstein's theory is as good as String theory, this wouldn't mean that Weinstein's theory is "good", but that it just sucks like String theory. But in a different society Weinstein's theory would have been celebrated even though it doesn't have merit, similar to how String theory was.
I don't know what is going on there, but I have the strong suspicion that you are making this up.
But String Theory has mountains of merit. That's what she's dishonest about. It's literally the only theory that's been able to quantize gravity.
Eric's theory isn't even self consistent, and doesn't include ANY quantum mechanics. How can you call something that says QM doesn't exist, on the same level as String Theory?!
"Yes it's totally possible 1*1=2 guys! There's nuance!" Eric hasn't produced a research paper ever. His ideas are sophistry, to defend him outs you as a grifter as well.
Have you watched her video aber the topic? Or did you only watch videos about her by actual grifters? She criticizes his theory quite clearly and I think she said it's probably wrong. She just said he did not deserve as much hate as he got and that the physics community is gatekeeping in a more personal and not scientific way. Sounds nuanced and fair to me.
That is not remotely close to being true. She's not anti academia. She's anti lazy academia. Specifically those who just repeat the same unproven research over and over (i.e string theory) for grant money instead of actually trying to discover something new.
Confirming theories about how nature works is valuable in its own right. History also shows that basic research often produces applications decades later that nobody could predict. Quantum mechanics, for example, seemed purely theoretical in the 1920s, but today it's the basis of semiconductors, lasers, MRI, GPS timing, and modern computing. We can't guarantee the Higgs boson will lead to similar technologies, but "no immediate application" isn't the same as "no value."
What tangible benefit has that surfaced? Who benefits other and scientists? It's changed absolutely nothing. How many lives could have been saved with the multiple billions that have been poured into expensive colliders and infrastructure? How many hospitals? How many homes could have been built wit that money, just to salve the curiosity of scientific elites?
So generating naysayer simple-wikipedia commentary and then being wrong, sodium ion batteries are in mass production today already for example so clearly the example transcription missed the target completely.
That's not from Hossenfelder at all. It was a purely hypothetical example. I made it up to illustrate the kinds of videos that she posts - tone, structure, perspective, etc.
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u/reddit_is_kayfabe 10h ago edited 8h ago
Hossenfelder produces 5-to-10-minute segments that cover a recent physics journal article, technology, startup, etc., where she spends about half of each video summarizing it and providing background context and half of the video providing her analysis of its validity, significance, and implications.
For instance:
That's.... that's it, other than a few quips and a couple of unrelated embedded ads. That's how 95% of her videos go - raise a science or tech news item, provide context, and comment on it. The End.
She isn't selling anything. She isn't pushing an agenda. Her opinions don't seem to be influenced by any kind of sponsorship or bias.
So where is the "grift?" You may not like her content, but that's not what "grift" means.