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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

I post this every time someone links to Hossenfelder, but please take her opinions with a grain of salt.

She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.

My opinion happens to be similar to hers on building the next big collider, but I'm not a high energy physics expert. Given how dishonest she was on the subjects I am familiar with, there's no way that I trust her to give an accurate portrayal of the ones I'm not.

[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo...

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For what it's worth, I usually find Sabine Hossenfelder to be insufferably critical and self-promoting, but I found that LIGO article fairly disturbing. As someone who has worked with complex analyses of large datasets, I know how easy it can be to fool yourself.

Certainly, and the LIGO is one big complicated dataset.

The problem is that Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't just make arguments about the data, but makes the researchers out to be villains. Not only that, but all of the problems she brings up have good community accepted resolutions that she selectively ignores.

I think that once we had multi-messenger confirmation of merger events, any doubt about gravitational wave detection vanished outside of some fringe groups. All of that happened and played out long before Hossenfelder's article, but she doesn't really give a fair representation of it.

Not to defend her, but to defend listening to her...

Often the people in a position to give the most important feedback are _not_ in a position to give feedback gently and tactfully.

So if you want to really know the world, you need to have a check in your mind that lets you take tactless feedback.

One example is when you hurt someone... a person you hurt is almost never going to be in a position to gently, calmly say what happened in a fair, generous way. That kind of feedback almost always comes with barbs, or inflations that accompany a person trying to talk to someone who hurt them.

If you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand the people you hurt.

Another category like this is feedback about norms. People who are well versed in norms and good at operating within them generally won’t be the people who can see outside of those same norms. The people who can see alternatives to norms, who can give feedback on where they work and don’t work, often will not be able to give that feedback in a way that conforms to other norms.

So if you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand broken norms.

If you can separate the content of the message from how it’s delivered you can dramatically increase your access to understanding.

In a scientific sense, NOT finding something should be equally valid as finding something. Just do proper work and write it up and we have increased our understanding of the world. If there was nothing, not even the Higgs, so what? There is nothing to defend or to attack. Where is this discussion coming from?

The actual timeline for this is that when the first critiques of LIGO's analysis came out, there was a good reply from LIGO and a productive scientific discussion, at the end of which Sabine indicated she was satisfied. That was months before. That was good.

Then she came out with the linked post, which pretends LIGO had no reply to the substantive issues even though she already had blogged positively about their reply earlier, and disingenuously throws in a few complete non-issues just to make a gish-gallop. That's not science popularization, that's spreading FUD for the sake of self-promotion. Any field can be "taken down" with enough dishonesty.

I like her videos because she's refreshingly honest about what is known versus not known. Most (tv)physicists are not.

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