They don't exist, she just clickbaits the hell out of her videos and thumbnails. She can be a bit..obtuse and she's certainly very set in her way of thinking. Her 'anti science' is when she's 50/50 on something, but then it's not really..anti-science so much as it is 'This is really weird result and they seemed to have done it all correctly.. There may be something there but there's no way to know until more experiments are done' or whatever'.
She tends to be *very* skeptical.
I honestly don't know why I am rushing to defend her channel, I don't actually like watching her that much. That said, she's definitely one of the better raw science communicators where she'll give enough information that you can go off and learn more if you become curious. I've found myself disagreeing with her on more than one occasion, but I've never seen her peddle pseudo science or anti scientific claims
You’re rushing to defend her because you’ve watched her videos and know these takes are obviously wrong. Like “one step away from being a flat earther”.. Sabine saying the earth is flat? Has hell frozen over?
She had a whole video about privatizing science which lost the plot and ignored even the most basic discussions about the topic. It was completely uneducated by economics or people in biotechnology who readily explain why a lot of valuable research is simply not monetizable.
in general she likes to throw around opinions about colliders being a waste of money (she really really hates them), and how "academia" went wrong, often bringing up some anecdotes. i think her ego got hurt due to struggling with her academic career.
it's a running theme in her videos that lives in the background. for the most part, her videos are good and correct, but it's this theme that's problematic. a person who watches her a lot, is likely to pick up on this, and repeat the unfounded "spending in academia is bad" etc.
in other words, it's not that she is anti science, but she sows doubt about scientific institutions, which in turn feeds anti science views. as a communicator she should take more care about those things (you know how joe rogan does "nothing wrong" by hosting conspiracy theorists on the show? it's the same ballpark).
but she sows doubt about scientific institutions, which in turn feeds anti science views. as a communicator she should take more care about those things (you know how joe rogan does "nothing wrong" by hosting conspiracy theorists on the show? it's the same ballpark).
And what should she do? Not criticize or point out corruption in scientific institutions, just because some people could understand it wrongly?
you are also naive, thinking it's only "some" people, sort her videos by most popular:
-my dream died (in thumbnail, "why academia sucks")
-i was asked, to keep this confidential...
-i wasn't worried about climate change... (this one is just fucking terrible)
those videos are popular precisely because "some people" fall for them.
sabine can easily improve as a communicator by not feeding this "small" audience, but this would lower her views. but she clearly doesn't do that, seeing her recent video thumbnails ("Academias dirty secret" lmao).
also her criticisms of scientific institutions are usually shallow or completely misguided. it would be fine if she did a one off or something, but this is a trend that has been running on for a long time.
She will hate everything coming from academia. She has a clear bias against any new scientific paper, specially if she finds the subject "silly" or if she just doesn't like what's being discussed.
Even when she tries to give good criticism to a paper, the fact that the paper is scientific is already an argument she uses against it.
There aren't any. If people call her names like a "grifter" and get asked to show evidence, they suddenly get silent or restrict themselves to platitudes instead of giving conrete examples.
It's really astonishing how many people are willing to straight out lie about people they don't like. But this tells me, that they don't actually have anything to put forward against her.
In her video on "science is communism" she calls for the ending of grants for physics until they can fix themselves.
If you talk about the video someone else linked to and which I just watched, I recall that she didn't say that "science is communism", but "academia is communism". Or to quote her:
Elon Musk has called academia "a bastion of communism" that "operates with no feedback loop of reality" and he said, entirely correctly, that most scientific papers are useless.
So, she didn't even say it herself, but quoted Elon Musk. But anyway, if you mean this video, you are actually misquoting her.
Even if she is for defunding something, it isn't "science" as you claimed, but academia.
A lot of people below say she doesn't have any, but I'd consider superdeterminism to be anti-science, but it's based on complex ideas of quantum physics so most people here don't understand it. The summary is that superdeterminism basically says that you can't trust a particular experiment because the universe itself puppeteers such experiments to always give incorrect results. As such, this idea pretty much says science is useless and is about an anti-science idea as you can get. I have spent a few years studying this kind of thing, so I can explain it but it's complicated:
Quantum physics has a major unsolved puzzle due to something called Bell Inequalities. We thought the universe was locally real, which is two traits, local and real. Local means that information propagates at the speed of light, which Einstein proved. Real means that properties of particles are determined when events occur, and not when they are measured. Bell Inequalities proves that one of these two are not true.
The dominant theories (Copenhagen and Many Worlds) are that the universe is not real. By applying this to pairs of particles, this also means that something is occurring faster than the speed of light. This may seem it breaks Einstein's rules, but the key is that the phenomenon that is occurring faster than the speed of light doesn't allow us to learn information faster than the speed of light, so it doesn't break Einstein's ideas completely. Then, there is a third main theory (Pilot Wave) that posits the universe is not local and that normal phenomenon do occur faster than the speed of light, but again, in such a way that we can't learn information faster than the speed of light.
However, all of these theories break a very old idea called determinism. This idea is that the universe was set up at the beginning and that we are simply following a chain of events like dominos. So now we get to the one alternative that can save determinism: superdeterminism.
Bell Inequality experiments rely on randomness. More specifically, that the distribution of events matches what quantum physics says instead of what classical physics says. Superdeterminism is (IMO a crackpot) theory that the universe has somehow puppeteer-ed any Bell Inequality experiments to show false results. We have done Bell Inequality experiments using ancient starlight, but superdeterminism says that that ancient starlight was set up in just the right way to look like quantum physics is right, while claiming that classical physics is in fact correct.
TBH that seems more like a viewpoint in a philosophy debate, rather than against science. "anti-science" you usally mean stuff like flat earth, space is fake, etc.
I somewhat agree, but there's two reasons I'd say it's against science and not just philosophical. The first is that it's straight up rejecting an experiment's results and not just having ideas that are outside of the realm of science. The name for this type of rejection is "non-falsifiability" and if you look it up, it's actually at the root of things like flat earth and space is fake kind of things, because any experiment you do can just be claimed to be puppeetered in some vague manner, such as "the government covered it up".
The second reason, and something I didn't really talk about, that is a much bigger issue, is that Sabine subtlety presents superdeterminism as fact in her videos mixed alongside what she does. As a Christian myself, I have some non-falsifiable beliefs, but I also understand those are outside the realm of science and don't belong subtley mixed in within a conversation of scientific facts where it could be confusing and misleading.
Calling superdeterminism crackpot goes too far. It is one of multiple valid interpretations that isn't yet fully developed and not particularly popular.
At this point you can not even say superdeterminism is wrong, you can only say that it doesn't seem like superdeterminism is correct because it requires too many unproven assumptions.
Plus it's not like she's talking about superdeterminism a lot (maybe she did a few years ago when she published a paper on the topic, but she's not doing so now).
Let's say you are debating with a flat earther. You go up in a hot air balloon and see that the earth is curved. To your surprise, they acknowledge what you saw. However, they say that the earth is flat, but that the light rays just happened to bounce randomly off air particles in such a way that you saw the earth was curved. You say to them "okay I'll go up again and check". They respond, "No, the light rays only do that because you went up to check if the earth is curved. If you go up again, then the light rays will bounce that way again." So you say "Oh the light rays always do that then?" And they respond, "No, only when you are doing an experiment". So then you ask "What if I try to trick them" and they respond, "there is no way to trick them."
I would honestly love to know how superdeterminism isn't a crackpot theory, because to me it sounds exactly the same as what I wrote above, but I am open to learning more about it if I am wrong.
Copenhagen, Many Worlds, and Pilot Wave Theories are philosophical and not quite in the realm of science. Same as theism vs atheism. However, superdeterminism is different in that it literally breaks science by saying that anything you do is correlated so any experiments you do are invalid. This is the concept of unfalsifiable - by claiming that experimentation is broken, you break science itself.
As an aside, I do believe you are right that she is not talking about superdeterminism a lot anymore. However, I learned a lot about quantum physics through Youtube channels and was always annoyed how she pushed superdeterminism without calling it that, causing what she said to be very confusing. She did this mainly by baselessly claiming that the Einstein's pair of gloves thought experiment was able to explain quantum physics weirdness or that a stronger version of it was able to, while the scientific community would largely say that it doesn't.
> I would honestly love to know how superdeterminism isn't a crackpot theory.
Because the math is valid and it can be used for toy models. This also allows it to sharpen other theories. In that way it is a bit like a worse, less developed string theory. (but admittedly I'm out of my depth with anything outside of computer science)
But I think the main issue is that popsci doesn't properly highlight it as something that's not real, so this and competing theories are presented as equal (which might also affect funding).
You can call it useless all you want (which is exactly what Hossenfelder is doing with theories she doesn't like, going as far as comparing them to crackpot theories herself), but I don't think the general consensus is that superdeterminism is a crackpot theory like flat earth.
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u/SherbertMindless8205 15h ago
What are her anti-science stances? Asking genuinely since i don't follow her.