I see the article mentions Sabine Hossenfelder -- I had just started watching some of her videos on YouTube. She's a wonderful presenter.
She's also a talented singer and has some music videos on her channel as well.
She's also a talented singer and has some music videos on her channel as well.
See, for example, her blog post and video on LIGO where she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection of gravitational waves. My explanation of why this is dishonest here: [1]
Unfortunately, this is really harmful because she's coming from a place of authority and spreading the lie that big science is bending the truth when it comes to their discoveries. You can see this reflected in her audience and her video comments are full of climate deniers and others that want this to be true thanking her for exposing, in their words, the so called "quack-a-demics".
Also, what is wrong with people who question the politics and alarmism around climate change? Isn't the ability to question something fundamental to scientific reasoning? I don't think your dismisal of people as "deniers" is very reassuring of scientifc reasoning in that context, and this is because I don't see people there who are denying scientific facts, but rather questioning commonly held assumptions.
It's arguably a necessary 'smear' because we've seen the same pattern play out as happened in the case of tobacco: there's a lot of money at stake, and people and organisations with a lot to lose and a lot to spend are not above spreading FUD, laundered through any scientists or 'public intellectuals' who either already hold a conveniently contrary view or are willing to be convinced by $. We'd be naive and foolish to let this happen without pointing out the pattern and calling into question the reputations of the contrarians.
Not commenting on the rest because I don't know much about it, but saying that the quality of youtube comments under a video says something about the quality of the video is, I think, quite unreasonable.
Judge ideas for the ideas themselves, but this is a clear red flag and points to the type of community she is building.
She ended the video saying the opposite [0]. She said she personally does not doubt that the signals are caused by gravitational waves but points out that "in science evidence counts'. They, according to her, haven't conclusively eliminated other terrestrial sources that could cause the signals. [0] https://youtu.be/WWTvNlfkvoI?t=595
What specifically are you accusing Hossenfelder of lying about? I read your linked comment[0] and the Hossenfelder transcript[1], and your characterisation of a lot of the things she said doesn't match my reading of them. But even taking your reading as correct, I don't see where you've identified cases of Hossenfelder giving "information that [she knows] is false".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-mea...
Then months later, she made a much more conspiratorially-toned blog post raising no new issues, but which linked only to her original post as proof that "doubts have been raised", not acknowledging the LIGO response, and generally painted scientists as liars. That is just incredibly disingenuous, and I see no motivation behind it besides wanting to fire up a popular audience.
In her book "Lost in Math" a target of ire has also been supersymmetry, though she dislikes supersymmetry for another reason, namely the fact that it relies too much on justifications of "beauty" to survive all of its empirical short-comings. In her view, the fact that supersymmetry solves the hierarchy problem is more an aesthetic point (and therefore irrelevant), than a mathematical or logical necessity.