Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder
npr.org
npr.org
I like the quote in the article from Patricia Rankin: "[challenging] people's assumptions ... because that's really what science is all about."
I have much more respect for someone who disagrees with me, with whom I can discuss differences reasonably, than with someone who agrees with me, but does so dogmatically. The latter is unfortunately more common than the former, and I think that's why Sabine holds a special place in my heart.
Generally, she is careful to point out when she is voicing views based on her own preferences, speculating about things that have no observational data to back them up or giving personal hot-takes on various topics.
For everything else, aka, the things she accepts provisionally as true, she appears to favor the least speculative among current solutions/theories/approaches in physics. Much of her popular work is focused on critiques of the many speculative musings of physicists who, in her opinion, have moved into a kind of post-science research program.
Her acceptance/popularizing of the standard model and of general relativity as humanity's current best models of the universe indicate that her viewpoints tend to be highly conservative and evidence-based.
Again, most (all?) of her musings about things that might be true or things that might be interesting directions for research are clearly called out as such.
The video I saw at the time is "Why is quantum mechanics weird? The bomb experiment" where she describes entanglement as a photo being torn in half and then sent apart, and then vaguely says that it is a "stronger" correlation than that.
On looking for that video though, I watched "What did Einstein mean by “Spooky Action at a Distance"?", where she describes things a bit more thoroughly with socks, where she explains that the correlations were created locally but when you measure the one particle on one side the other particle's wave function changes. She then goes on to actually explain that the sock explanation does not work as it does not sufficiently create strong correlations, which I think is a much better explanation
Looking back, I think I've learned a lot more about quantum physics since I last watched her videos. Back then, I think I saw her repeated use of explaining entanglement as a "stronger correlation" to be a cop out. Now that I've dove into the actual Bell Inequality experiment and understand how it works, I actually quite like that description as a placeholder for a very strange phenomenon that none of us really understand yet. Still, I do think she should have clarified just a bit better on the first video I mentioned, but I guess when you make lots of videos on one of the most complicated topics of all time it's rather easy to omit a crucial detail here or there.
https://onbeing.org/blog/albert-einsteins-essay-on-racial-bi...
Depending on whether the person being challenged is a scientist, and the specific assumption/"fact".
Has no bearing whatsoever.
Sometimes people start thinking that because they got successful in one area it gives them blanket check to talk about everything. Usually, the end result is they greatly overestimate their capability.
This is how many youtube channels die. The authors think they exhausted the topic and are looking to talk about other stuff and they start alienating their fan base because not only they are much less knowledgeable about those other topics, but also because the fan base just did not expect/appreciate those other topics. They came here because they liked the original videos and now the channel became something else which is unlikely to be what they wanted.
As for Sabine, I watched some of her videos on quantum physics and they were very interesting. Then I stumbled on one or two newer videos on other topics she started adding later and they were jarring, on the verge of misinformation/pseudoscience.
Yeah one was 5G. I did not like she didn’t cut off speculation and stopped watching her videos afterwards. But ultimately she is correct - there just isn’t evidence that microwave heating is safe. I wanna roll my eyes as much as next guy, but need to respect objective reporting.
Just because a 5G antenna can heat up humans around it by 0.00001C (I am guessing at the number of zeroes here), is in no way a valid argument that it is bad for us. A study would have to specifically link this kind of microwave radiation to some ill effects, at the dose of 5G installations in use today. As of now, no such study exists.
Engineerguy 1.4 million Minutephysics 5.6 million PBS Spacetime 2.94 million Periodic Videos 1.59 million Veratasium 14.2 million
Can you cite an example?
For example, a scientist who starts talking about politics is usually well outside his/her area of competence. A scientific method does not seem to lend itself to solving political problems.
If a scientist who is an expert in one field decides to make videos on other fields, they are not applying the scientific method, they are doing the same thing any YouTuber does.
Now what it should do is not speaking about it with authority. If you are speaking in a formal setting on something you either need to disclose you are not an expert or not speak on the matter, if you are not an expert.
Where she really gets into trouble is farther out into the social sciences. I think she should be much more careful there. I don't want her to stop, I just want her to be more careful!
An interesting example is one of her two videos on transgenderism. It had an absolutely appalling both-sidesing intro that literally called people who crazy who are just concerned about suicide rates among trans people. The contents of the video were actually pretty reasonable, although she messed up a few key interpretations so that some parts ended up being misleading. I don't think she's transphobic, but on an issue like this I think a bit more care needs to be taken.
More recently she had a piece on capitalism that was incredibly anemic. I think she tried to bite off more than she could chew (for a 20 minute video) and so she kind of missed the entire "what are the problems" side of the topic, even while laying out some reubttals to common statements. I feel like she'd have done better than that on a more close-to-home topic.
(Her physics videos are of course fantastic.)
Now, making videos on topics outside of your expertise? That's a dangerous minefield, but there are ways to approach it.
For example, there's whole youtube channels to taking on challenges and learning new stuff.
This was what she actually said in the introduction to that video:
"Should transgender teens transition? This rather personal question occupies a prominent place in the American culture war. One the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I’m here for. So what’s going on?"
What's objectionable about that? Sounds quite fair to me.
By work, I mean the surgical procedures do not produce body parts that reliably perform the intended function. In one case, the hole closes. In the other, the arm-sausage rots off.
This comment section is full of people afraid of their HR departments, not people considering the actual outcome of the procedures.
I think this fragment speaks for itself. It is not "crazy" to care about suicide rates or suicidal ideation. It is "crazy" to not care about that.
edit: Your response has no actual content in it.
No matter what the topic, those at either end of strongly polarised collections of views do tend to believe that they are correct and everyone else is wrong and informed.
The fact that both sides think they're correct has absolutely no bearing on who is actually correct. For that we must turn to evidence. The evidence in favor of trans healthcare and identities is overwhelming, and the evidence presented by the other side is laced with non-evidenced religious beliefs like "someone being cis and unhappy is a better outcome for society than someone being trans and happy".
Indeed, your comments imply that you are fully immersed in this illusion and are unlikely to accept any suggestion to the contrary.
I don’t see any evidence that mental health in the transgender or general population has actually improved, I’ve seen numbers suggesting societal wide mental health is on the decline, and I have seen a pretty large increase in the absolute numbers of people who say their gender dysphoria makes them suicidal. I can find research that suggests transgender people who receive more medical treatment and societal acceptance are less suicidal than those who do not, but that doesn’t actually demonstrate that trans acceptance will lead to less suicidality and better mental health at the societal level. Or even really at the individual level, since correlation is not causation.
On top of all that, most past research of this sort is potentially non-reproducible at this point because the trans population has expanded so rapidly. Three times as many trans men started visiting clinics in the course of a decade. So the research will have to be done all over again to discount this possibility but this has not been done.
So I don’t know, I’m with Hossenfelder and her radical centrism because I think nobody is actually acting scientifically re: trans people and they’re just playing it by ear. What I detest is the unwarranted certainty and lack of scepticism people have on this topic; People are just guessing and are acting like they are not.
The idea that social acceptance of transness is causing more people to identify as trans is is not entirely without merit, but needs to be thought about critically. It is true that people who have low-key gender dysphoria would treat it with increased salience if they became more aware that trans people exist, but that is very clearly a good thing. Society should generally allow people to be true and happy to their selves.
Moreover, while the general direction of social progress has been encouraging, the magnitude of it has been relatively small. We have a very long way to go before we can even begin to control for social stigma as a factor in trans suicidality rates. This last point is evidenced by comments in this very thread.
I mean, this is literally true, and doesn't sound crazy at all. Why is she saying that normal people think it's crazy? That's not the vibe I get from the general population, who are broadly in support of gender-affirming care. There's a relatively small, very loud contingent on the "mutilating the children" side of things and yeah, some of them sound a little crazy to me (although I suspect most are just uninformed or confused -- or using trans people as a political football, and know exactly what they're doing.) Most people either a) don't give a shit or b) have empathy for people who experience gender dysphoria.
This is classic both-sides-ism, equating two things as "equally wrong" or "equally right" that are pretty obviously on different footings.
Some things seem prima facie to be true, but turn out not to be consistent with the rest of our scientific understanding.
If we're to be thorough then we should not just assume knowledge, we should put it to the test. This is scientific IMO.
Did you assume that challenging an assumption meant opposing it?
I think the phrase 'challenging an assumption' leaves a bad taste in some people's mouth due to negative associations. I have definitely seen people use 'challenging assumptions' as a shield for their argument or actions when it was not justified. Or worse be upset when the phrase does not get people to back their idea or actions.
Questioning, reexamining, challenging what have you is important in scientific progress. 'challenging assumptions', 'challenging the establishment', and probably other similar phrases I am not familiar with have been used conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists and the association has tainted the phrase leaving a bad taste in some people's month.
Do they? That's not what I've seen. The criticism of her most recent video "Capitalism is good, let me explain" [1] is surprisingly concrete and substantive for a subject that usually degrades into a vitriolic dunk-fest within seconds. In particular, the popular reply videos [2] and [3] raise the criticism that:
* She opens with the "money emerged to fix barter" origin story, which fell out of favor a while ago [2]
* The focus on money as opposed to credit and ownership isn't just ahistorical, it avoids the core of what is usually meant by "capitalism" [2]
* She handwaives the problems of the industrial revolutions and the capitalism critic by saying "that's another story." Is it? [2]
* She botched the Penicillin example [3]
* Her discussion on externalities absentmindedly missed the problems with positive externalities [2]
* She attributes successes to markets and failures to regulation without justifying why [2]
... and more. Regardless of what you think about the underlying debate or whether you agree with these points, it seems pretty clear to me that they are substantive. Not only that, a few of them pretty clearly seem to be the result of an expert leaving their lane and speaking authoritatively on a subject they don't have deep knowledge of. Do you disagree?
[1] SH Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRPHp2EjNR8
[2] Reply 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGgBfpD-Ao
[3] Reply 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7XAxiJGJdg
Instead of questioning her as a scientist, rather ask your self, why she applies this non-scrutinizing philosophy to the field of economics and sociology (as well as health care; see video about gender affirming care), while she so well known and successful for her extreme skeptical takes on the field of her expertise. Like she must have a personal reason—not a scientific one—for this dissonance.
It's possible that she's a great scientist, I don't know enough physics to tell whether there is a dissonance or whether it's all snake oil. My skepticism comes from seeing such (conscious or not) intellectual dishonesty on her part
This is a misrepresentation of Sabine's video. It should be obvious from the generic contemporary products that she chose that she wasn't talking about the history of money, but of course anti-capitalists can't help but smugly inject the ideas of their favorite pop-anthropologist everywhere they can.
A gift economy may work in a tribe 100,000 years ago, but most of the goods and services that we rely on today comes from strangers who won't give you anything unless if you give them something that they consider at least equivalent in return. Sabine's point is that money is the most efficient medium of exchange for this sort of equivalent exchange.
I didn't bother to investigate most of the other criticisms, but I feel like they're going to be just as bad faith. For example, the penicillin video criticizes Sabine because her 1 minute history of penicillin wasn't as nuanced as a 20 minute explanation of the history of penicillin. Fair enough, and I did find the video interesting. However, judging that the title of the video is "Capitalism would've killed penicillin", I doubt author has the same standards of nuance towards people she agrees with.
What people are criticizing that the video isn’t well argued, and that even the only evidence she gives which favors her main thesis isn’t—and doesn’t even directly support it might I add—isn’t even true.
Either way it was a bad video, and not at all to par with the scientific standard she sets in her previous work, in the field she is an expert at.
But there is another—much worse—assumption you made. Even if we conclude that industrialization only happened because of capitalism, and even if we conclude that industrialization and capitalism is what made penicillin useful, we still cannot conclude that capitalism is a good system. You run into the black swan problem here. Just because you can point to a single white swan, and even if you can point to a million white swans, this is no basis to conclude that all swans are white. Similarly, even if all your other assumptions are correct, your anecdote about penicillin is not a conclusive about the quality of the system.
This is why scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder usually only take anecdotes at face value, and use them only as hints to justify further research. For some reason Sabine Hossenfelder doesn’t do that when she concludes that capitalism is a good system. I wonder why.
I'm not talking about countries. I'm talking about industrialization in general. It is less of an accomplishment to replicate an innovation that you already know works. Obviously, Marx who never lived to see any communist revolutions, wasn't talking about countries either.
> You run into the black swan problem here.
Saying "capitalism is the best system ever" is like saying there are no black swans. Saying capitalism is "good" merely requires the existence of a large number of white swans, or at best more white swans than black swans.
I don’t follow the logic here.
You should come into this knowing that you have a bias towards favoring capitalism, as you are not only living within that system but very likely benefiting heavily from it. You should also come into this knowing that you have a very limited scope to weigh alternatives, as you don’t have much real world data, and all historical data is heavily tainted with both your biases, as well as the filtered through lenses of your current system.
Imagine your self to be an astrophysicist, this is akin trying to compare our sun to a star that is on the other side of the galaxy directly behind the sun, without having many instruments or even a telescope to observe the latter. Whenever you try to look at that star, 99.9999% of all the light you see is coming from our sun, not that star, and you have to account for that when comparing them.
Saying that capitalism is good and backing it up with a few stories, also ignores all the stories which demonstrates that capitalism is bad. For every story of your penicillin—which isn’t even that clear cut, but let’s ignore that—there are stories like the Bhopal disaster, the climate disaster, of wage theft, of poverty and exploitation, of people dying of preventable and curable diseases, etc. Those are the black swans in the system, and they are all over the place. People arguing that capitalism is good are choosing to ignore these stories, and focus on the penicillin.
Saying that “capitalism is good” based on observing white swans, should follow with “capitalism is bad” based on observing the black swans. A scientist like Sabine Hossenfelder should know better.
She states that she doesn't have the proper knowledge of economics to comment on other parts, but then comments on the errors in the subject matter she does know enough to comment on.
In the process she has diverted from topics she knows to scientific areas where she has at best a undergraduate level understanding but still talks like she is a subject expert and always taking a contrarian stance. After seeing videos where I have significant expertise where she was clearly wrong (and again peddling the "anti-establishment" angle) I stopped watching. That she is now making videos about capitalism and other social science topics just illustrates the point.
A good example of this was on her video on free will, she made the argument that free will does not exist because human brains operate on principles that are deterministic. She followed that conclusion with a tirade on climate change and how people should stop trying to build the “political will” to do something on climate change, because free will does not exist. I have to wonder what the reasoning behind including that in a video was. It absolutely alienates anyone working on building coalitions for climate solutions, and she didn’t even need to bring up the topic to make her point.
You could say that she could be making that point to curry some favor with people who do not believe in climate change and would like to see content by a scientist, with credentials, indicating skepticism. However, she has videos that talk about the drivers behind climate change in detail that are in line with the scientific consensus on the issue. It makes zero sense to me from a messaging stand point why she takes contrarian views on social issues.
I can appreciate the scientists who stay out of the limelight because, while many are smart, not all are “media trained” and are wise enough to know it. Scientists who drift into fame, but are not equipped to navigate it, are controlled by the whims of the public they serve.
My perception was that she thought she was getting pushback from climate groups when she said that free will didn’t exist, and that this groups were effectively accusing her of being opposed to climate action, on the basis of of them thinking their free will was the only way to fix climate change.
These are however very different things, and "science reporter" is something where my expectations in general — not just her, everyone doing this — is that at best and when trying sincerely and with skill, they will still misunderstand and misrepresent as per a game of telephone.
This means I do still listen to what she has to say "out of her lane", but I don't rank it as highly as her videos in her own domain of expertise, instead treating them more like a Tom Scott video. (Tom, if you're reading this, that's still a decent standard).
I do appreciate that she explained how she does the research for these: https://youtu.be/nD6hS8WV3ic?si=raJ3UySkXZOgZfIn
She's no better than any YouTuber looking for clicks and monetization.
One example is she calculated the power output of fusion reactions as energy created by fusion * heat to electricity conversion efficiency. However, energy that’s heating the plasma should also recoverable at the same conversion efficiency. Largely irrelevant a Q=1,000 but it plays a major role in what Q is breakeven and what Q is economically useful.
Not on the surface such a big deal, but a sign she should reach out more to actual experts in these fields.
It also explains why Q is formulated in terms of energy added to the plasma vs energy gained from fusion which she didn’t understand. This formula for Q ends up being a term in the equation for economic viability, but she attacked it as if such a formulation was misleading.
Basically the total energy spent on the facility including cryogenic cooling, pumps, etc matters + Q as defined by fusion experts + fusion output energy + conversion energy lets you find the total net energy gain which you then compare with the cost of the facility to find economic viability. Roughly, [ (Fusion energy) * (1 + 1/Q) * (conversion efficiency) - (Total energy use by facility) ] / (cost per hour of operation) = energy per dollar.
There are other ways you can calculate that same number, but they require a lot more details.
Because she still gives good statistical overviews/analysis.
But I could be wrong this particular video I haven't seen yet.
The many "that's another story" caveats are important because there are many ways in which the interaction between markets and governments can cause bad outcomes; far too many to be covered in a 20 minute video.
I'd like to hear just one example of a society which does not have capitalism (as defined by the ability to risk capital in hopes of future profits) which is a nice place to live.
In short, your definition of capitalism seems extraordinarily deficient.
To attempt to get a little closer:
Capitalism is the funding of an activity by people who are otherwise uninvolved in order to take some of the gains without direct application of work/effort.
Society could collaboratively endorse actions, eg through democratic choices, but instead those who have inherited power, acquired through past violence, get to decide on the application of resources and cream off the benefits of the workers whom they have used to action their (the Capitalists) chosen activities.
Many actions (in a just society) would have been chosen in any case, things like delivery of water to each person; now the Capitalist gets to make delivery of water something for which they claim the right to profit from, ultimately extracting worth from the inherent nature of people's needs.
> Society could collaboratively endorse actions, eg through democratic choices...
There is nothing about capitalism which prevents this from occuring. People can be allowed to invest while simultaneously participating in a democracy which elects to provide all sorts of publicly funded goods and services.
What has never existed (to the best of my knowledge) is a society which prevents "the funding of an activity by people who are otherwise uninvolved in order to take some of the gains without direct application of work/effort," which is not also a terrible place to live.
That said capitalism is a state enforced system, which is protected with violence. Every attempt to topple the system and provide an alternative has been met with violence by the state, and every successful revolutions have been through violence. It is hardly a scientifically pristine environment to provide a fair comparison of alternatives, is it?
There will come a time in human history where capitalism is a thing of the past, and only then will we have the tools to judge alternatives. As of now, we can clearly see that early attempts at capitalism were horrible, and resulted in travesties for the common working population. This is the same story of any system that preceded it. I have a feeling future peoples will largely blame the current system for the climate crisis, and deem it equally bad—if not worse—than our historic alternatives.
> That said capitalism is a state enforced system, which is protected with violence.
As opposed to the hands-off, peaceful Soviet state which flourished without horrible capitalism.
My observation about the future is merely historical, not a prediction. Forever is a long time, and there is 0 chance that capitalism will be the dominant system for the remainder of human history. There are many systems of governments which exist in the past which we today look on favorably. However there has been no world—or even regional—dominating economic system enforced with violence which has survived the scrutiny of history. They all suck, though some more then other.
It is arrogant to think that capitalism will be any different, especially as we are now facing a potentially societal collapsing climate crisis which our economic system is not handling well, and the political class is reluctant to act on fearing damage to this very system.
Even in the short history of capitalism, history still does not look kindly on earlier attempts at the same system. The Laissez Faire capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th century yielded a series of depressions, and treated workers horribly. Attempts to reform the system yielded the great depression. It was only through severe regulations of Keynesian economics where this system had some lasting success, but this success was not to last as deregulation of neoliberalism took over. History doesn’t even look kindly on Reaganomics which isn’t even a 50 year old system.
My prediction about the future is just about as plausible as someone looking at the Sun in the post Galilean heleocentric universe, and predicting that perhaps one day humanity will discover that the Sun isn’t at the center of the universe either.
The point of the video was to give a basic explanation of completely uncontroversial concepts covered in an economics 101 class.
Econ 101 is taught to people, and not "non capitalist systems that doesn't have money 101" because the experts have studied the topic extensively and the conclusions in her video are uncontroversial.
Of course she is going to listen to the experts on how economics works.
No it did not. Market economy combined with the positive feedback loop between science and productivity were the key components. They helped bring about prosperity for at least several thousand years. Recent fad of factory owner(s) hiring other people, paying them wages and skimming the difference is actually a net drag.
> I'd like to hear just one example of a society which does not have capitalism (as defined by the ability to risk capital in hopes of future profits) which is a nice place to live.
And if there is none because our societies co-evolved and at the present moment in history it is the universally dominant economical and political model? You sound like a person who would ask for an example of a non-feudal state in medieval Europe to prove the point that having a king is the best arrangement ever.
You can risk something else than capital ("time of people who do what I tell them to"), for example your own time. With that, everyone can risk something important to them to try to build something better and we don't even need a special social class to bravely take on the risk ("of wasting time of people who have to listen to them or starve"). Wooooot?!
Maybe we would have some such societies, if fascists in Europe and then fascists in US did not take great care to crush them.
Or maybe, instead of that that, those other societies just sucked.
Given that lots of societies have attempted and failed at non capitalist systems, how about instead of inventing excuses we can just use that as evidence that those other non capitalist systems are bad.
This kind of misunderstanding of the science is suspect when coming from a scientist famous for her skeptical take in her own field. Her sorta dismissal of ROGD is also suspect, because she seems to sorta believe the anecdotal “evidence” for it why also noting the lacking of actual evidence. This is the opposite of the kind of skeptical take she is known for. I call it suspect because here we have a social issue surrounding a minority where she flips her philosophy. I wonder why she did that.
The only concern she mentioned was a statistical point of a few more girls potentially being / having a little bit too much rogd.
There are no evidence for ROGD other than very bad and highly suspicious anecdotal evidence. There isn’t even a statistical evidence for it. A scientist would know that, and would quickly dismiss this theory and all the talking points of those advocating for it.
btw. she raised more “concerns” than just the population skew in favor of trans people assigned female at birth—which btw. is not a concern, but at most a curiosity. She also had concerns about the efficacy and the long term health affects of gender affirming care. The concerns were without merit, and a true scientist with a neutral take would not find the long term health impacts “concerning” given the evidence we have, and as for the efficacy... well... see my parent post.
What is reasonable is to assume that people are pushing these theories (or hypotheses) because they have an agenda. What ROGD is stating is basically that transgender people are contagious. This is a very disgusting thing to believe so they decorate it with science sounding terms and provide compelling—and suspicious—anecdotes to support it. This isn’t science and it is definitely not reasonable. I’m gonna call it what it is, this is hate speech, and it is not reasonable by any definition of that word (not even political convenience).
There is significant literature on functioning perpetual motion machines in physics as well. If you were to read it and report on it, that would make your reporting shit.
Well, no, you absolutely need some data, axioms, or facts to support your thoughts, too. Pure thought only works for mathematics and some areas of philosophy.
So, please - what are some of the facts from which that few minutes thought would proceed? Is it the case that there is a hard upper-limit on the range (imposed by constraints in battery technology), or that some road surfaces are unsuitable for EVs, or that electric engines are unsuitable for some chassis types (e.g. heavy haulage), or...?
Distance -- electric cars promote building places inefficiently. The car and the commute are synonymous
Drop the constraint of needing cars, and you can make much better solutions
Adoption of each isn't exclusive of the other, so that's irrelevant.
> Distance -- electric cars promote building places inefficiently
No, they don't, as a replacement for ICE vehicles. If anything, they promote building things more efficiently.
> Drop the constraint of needing cars, and you can make much better solutions
Replacing some share of ICE cars with electric cars does not require active maintenance of a constraint of needing cars. Reconfiguring cities to not need cars is a slower process than replacing what cars are used, so there is a role for the latter even if the former is the main long-term solution (and even if it is and reduces the scope of pervasiveness of the need for cars, it is unlikely to replace all need.)
> “EVs,” notes King, “pull an invisible trailer filled with required major lifestyle changes that the public is not yet aware of.” > > When it does, do not expect the public to acquiesce quietly.
To electrify any significant proportion of ICEs you will need to massively ramp up mining in developing countries. This is going to crush their populations like a meat grinder at the same time that it blights their ecologies with the after-effects of mining. It's a new colonialism with a race to acquire resources for EVs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-cob...
You only need a little thought to see that each increment of electric vehicle adoption shifts the market context and incentives away from “as things stand today” in a way which makes your claim, to the extent its true as written, irrelevant in practice.
That... sure is an interesting position to take.
I've been learning a lot of quantum physics and she's a mixed bag. On the one hand, most people's (and even textbooks') understanding of quantum observation and the quantum eraser experiment are incorrect, and Sabine is one of the few voices on Youtube that calls them out instead of joins them, which is why I suspect why she is so popular.
On the other hand, she embraces the very niche superdeterminism hypothesis. This hypothesis basically says that cause and effect and reversed for any Bell's Inequality related experiment in that using uncorrelated data as inputs into the experiment causes them to become correlated because you used them for the experiment. In other words, she believes that the universe is puppeteering Bell's Inequality experiments so that we can't trust results from those experiments. This has serious issues related to non-falsifiability, where we could technically do this with any experiment we don't like the results of.
However, that's not even the worst part of it. The worst part is that she does not explain her niche viewpoints in her videos. If any of the more popular hypotheses about entanglement are correct, then Einstein's hidden variables hypothesis where entanglement acts like a pair of gloves will be disproven. However, in her videos about entanglement, she constantly refers to entanglement acting like a pair of gloves like it is a fact, because her niche viewpoint is the single viewpoint where it is not disproven.
Why the double standard?
It's a bigger shame most students aren't taught that Copenhagen is not the only interpretation consistent with experiment and are often thought it as absolute truth.
Let's not get into the compatibility with free will philosophical issues, because that'd need physics to recognize metaphysics once more.
That freedom is what needs to be emphasized because a lot of paradoxes in one interpretation are not in another because they basically boil down to your choice of metaphysical assumptions about the universe.
None of them alter the calculations or observables (so far) which is why saying one is more practical than the other is missing the point.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-fantasy-behind-sabine...
I believe this criticism implicitly assumes realism, which is another metaphysical assumption that is not trivial in the light of Bell-style results. It's circular in that way, like a lot of surface critique of superdeterminism (which I don't particularly like and don't subscribe to).
Confusing metaphysics and physics is a real issue here.
(This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The original submitted title (from NPR) was "She got famous on YouTube. Now it helps fund her research in quantum gravity".
I'd pinged HN mods about this, though dang ended up dong a wholesale replacement rather than s/She/Sabine Hossenfelder/.
"Click here to know who this _woman_ is who did something so great"... As if being a woman, to the author and their target readers, supersedes in importance what the person actually achieved or had to say.
One of her recurring points is that physicists get to sort of make stuff up for their own gain now, because the public (and grant institutions, politicians etc) have become very interested in the field while being mostly illiterate in it. But she does this as well. Lay people aren't fit to judge whether eg the sampling algorithms used at the LHC detector are laughably stupid, nor compact dimensions of space, inflation, etc.
It's sad and disappointing thatnshe has started using her credibility in one field to make propogandaish videos on other subject she either ignores or is lying to profit off the terf grift.
It takes away from her well earned credibility in her field of expertise.
You have to get specific if you want to convince anyone.
Perhaps not as many people self-identify as "TERFs" now that the term is widely viewed negatively, but as of a few years ago there were several subreddits on reddit where people identified themselves as TERFs (I'm not sure whether these subreddits still exist).
However, the prevailing view on these subreddits was that all men are inherently poisoned by testosterone and dangerous.
For this reason, I'm not sure it's actually a "thoughtful middle ground" as much as you might think.
One person who I feel exemplifies the sensible middle ground here is JK Rowling. She wrote a very thoughtful essay on this topic which I think is well worth reading, if you haven't already: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-....
She also often refers back to where she was "wrong" about things in the past, mostly where she said one thing, further research came out and she updated her takes based on it.
Not because I think they're accurate, or fully informed, or anything like that.
But because usually they're a decent attempt at grokking important information from another field, which is a challenge we face nowadays in this sea of conflicting information about everything.
When she gets something wrong, it's another indicator of how even a trained scientist can still make mistakes in these interpretations, and so brings me to a more realistic expectation of what myself, or any other person, could do on their own.
Her latest video on how to do your own research puts this challenge in perspective.
More generally, I don't like the "stay in your lane" opinion. To more forward as a society, we need _more_ interdisciplinary work, not less. Mathematicians need to work with engineers and architects, psychologists with economicists, etc.
Of course, let's call out bad science or bias, but let's not ignore valuable insights because they came from the wrong lane.
I like her videos because I'm generally curious what a fairly unbiased intelligent person thinks about trans issues, economics, etc. Even if I don't agree with them on everything, not should you.
She also doesn't seem particularly unbiased to me. Like, I don't think one can ever be unbiased, but someone with a lot of knowledge about a subject can do a good job of identifying the biases they have in that area and try and approach things more objectively, or at least indicate where they're speaking for themselves and where they're describing beliefs in the field. For example, I'm a frontend developer with a bunch of biases for certain technologies and styles of development, because those are the ones I'm used to and invested in. But I know the field well enough to - I hope - be able to recognise those biases and tell you that you don't need SolidJS for your next project, even though I think it's really cool and want more people to get involved there.
Rather, Hossenfelder feels like she just doesn't know what her biases are in the first place, at least when discussing something like economics. Based on your comment, I'm sure that's not true for the subjects that she is knowledgeable in - you bring up particle physics as an example of an area where she knows her opinions aren't necessarily standard. But in the video I watched, she presented herself as this neutral figure telling you only the facts, and then said things that ranged from being out-of-date or untrue, to things that didn't even really make much sense.
I agree with you that "stay in your lane" is a bad counter to these sorts of videos, because collaboration between fields is good. But good collaboration takes a lot of humility - you need to come to the table knowing that you know almost nothing about the other field, and accepting that you're going to have to learn a lot of stuff. At least from the stuff I've watched, I don't get the impression that Hossenfelder has put the work in to understand what she doesn't understand. And that, to me, is pretty much the definition of wilful ignorance - she knows she is not an expert in this field, but she doesn't seem to want to put the effort in to get the opinions and feedback from real experts. Instead, she's assumed her own knowledge is enough.
She is biased in favor of what the experts say on a topic.
Her video was a bog standard explanation of topics that are covered in econ 101. They were completely uncontroversial.
Yes, the profession of economics, which are the experts on the topic, are all strongly biased in favor of the scientific opinion which is that economics is real and that capitalism is good.
Can someone expand?
Transcript :
Russ Roberts: I think that moment in science, and other related moments in physics, were things that were predicted--the Higgs boson being one example where things did show up. They just think, 'Well, it's just a matter of time; we don't have powerful enough colliders. We'll eventually develop them. And all these things have to be true.' They're holding onto that. And I get that. Because the history seems to encourage that viewpoint.
Sabine Hossenfelder: No, it doesn't.
Russ Roberts: Okay. Why not?
Sabine Hossenfelder: That's a very sloppy look at the history (it continues)
https://www.econtalk.org/sabine-hossenfelder-on-physics-real...
Grand unification is a hypothetical scenario in which the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces are unified into a single force at very high energies. This would imply that the elementary particles of the Standard Model are composed of more fundamental particles, such as quarks and leptons, that interact through a single gauge group. Grand unification is motivated by the observation that the strengths of the three forces converge at high energies, suggesting a common origin. Grand unification also predicts the existence of new particles, such as magnetic monopoles and proton decay.[2]
Supersymmetry is a theoretical framework that proposes a symmetry between fermions and bosons, two classes of particles with different spin properties. It implies that for every known particle, there exists a superpartner with the same mass and quantum numbers, but with a different spin. Supersymmetry is not based on any empirical evidence, but on mathematical aesthetics and theoretical convenience. Supersymmetry can solve some problems in the Standard Model, such as the hierarchy problem and the dark matter problem, but it also introduces many new parameters and complications. Supersymmetry has not been observed in nature, despite extensive searches at the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments.[3]
The main difference between supersymmetry and the periodic table or grand unification is that supersymmetry is not a natural consequence of any observed phenomenon, but an ad hoc assumption that has no experimental support. The periodic table and grand unification are based on empirical data and physical principles, while supersymmetry is based on mathematical beauty and speculation. Therefore, supersymmetry does not make any expected predictions, unlike the periodic table or grand unification, because it is not constrained by any reality check. Supersymmetry can be adjusted to fit any observation or avoid any contradiction, making it unfalsifiable and arbitrary.[4]
[1]Supersymmetry - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry.
[2] Supersymmetry and what it means for particle https://www.space.com/supersymmetry-particle-physics-string-....
[3] The status of supersymmetry | symmetry magazine. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-status-of-super...
[4] Supersymmetry: what? why? when? - Ohio University https://inpp.ohio.edu/~inpp/nuclear_lunch/archive/2005/kane_....
I'm not familiar with high energy physics, but from your description of supersymmetry: "It implies that for every known particle, there exists a superpartner with the same mass and quantum numbers, but with a different spin. Supersymmetry is not based on any empirical evidence, but on mathematical aesthetics and theoretical convenience.", it is on the same basis as the periodic table was when Mendeleev first published in 1869. It was only later that additional elements were found to validate the arrangement.
>The main difference between supersymmetry and the periodic table or grand unification is that supersymmetry is not a natural consequence of any observed phenomenon, but an ad hoc assumption that has no experimental support.
Can you clarify this? I would argue the periodic table to be "natural consequence of any observed phenomenon", insofar as there was no evidence or only circumstantial evidence to support that grouping. Indeed, that grouping was chosen because of aesthetic reasons and speculation: "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."
>Therefore, supersymmetry does not make any expected predictions, unlike the periodic table or grand unification, because it is not constrained by any reality check. Supersymmetry can be adjusted to fit any observation or avoid any contradiction, making it unfalsifiable and arbitrary.[4]
Your reference doesn't seem to agree with you here. It claims several predictions that supersymmetry has gotten correctly, and doesn't claim that supersymmetry can be adjusted to fit any observation.
> So, this is one of the points that I try to get across in the book, but I know that for someone who doesn't really know the math of the theories, it's hard to understand. So, let's take this example of the Higgs boson. If you have the standard model of particle physics without the Higgs boson, this theory just does not work at LHC [Large Hadron Collider] energies. You cannot make predictions with it. You get probabilities that are larger than 1; so this is obviously mathematical nonsense.
This seems to me like one of those cases where a woman can’t be confident or assertive without looking like an asshole. He was wrong, and wrong in a way she literally dedicated part of a book about, at that.
Although without knowing the tone of the interviewer before the excerpts above, I don’t know if it’s warranted
I don’t think this has anything to do with being a woman
AS far as i know, both the standard model and the higgs boson are proven. Why would you caveat that predictions cannot be made, by taking out the Higgs Boson ?
The analogy to what Russ Robers is making, is equivalent to her saying: "take radioactivity out of chemistry" "AHA! Now since atoms can't decay, then you cannot get certain elements, so now i can conclude that the periodic table is crap! it can't make predictions about atom size!"
Why ?
Terry Gross manages to do it right. So does Joe Rogan (sorry, you haters).
I think Gross handled both appropriately.
Simmons: <https://freshairarchive.org/guests/gene-simmons> (2004-2-4)
O'Reilly: <https://freshairarchive.org/segments/bill-oreilly> (2003-10-8)
Though I'd argue there are many much-better interviews. Those two are instances of combative subjects, well-handled IMO. Total archive has > 20k segments.
somehow I'd avoided ever listening to this. But now, my take is a little different from this:
https://www.insidehook.com/article/music/gene-simmons-terry-...
which I gather is the establishment take. After 20 years, no one cares anymore. However...
Leaving aside the fact that he IS a jerk and didn't do himself any favors: I don't think she handled it well at all. Her fixation on his makeup is weird. He gave her lots of openings at the beginning to make it an interesting interview, and she blew them off.
He started with some philosophy on why KISS is successful, and there was plenty of dumb things to argue with there, if she wanted to pick them up.
Instead she went on about his makeup, and how much money he had. Who, really, is going to answer that question?
You can't really be rude to views or ideas, only to people, so that matters.
Now if she had been debating with someone who disagreed with her, and then she said "You're looking at history very sloppily" that might be rude, but that isn't the case here.
Also this is a storm in a teacup compared to the other things she does and says. Hossenfelder pretty routinely names specific physicists and states openly that they're defrauding the public by lying about their research in order to gain grant funding. She states this politely but so what, it's obviously far more severe of an attack than using the word sloppy. If you want to pick on her style you'd really want to talk about that, but it's hard to abstractly criticize her for that because it immediately goes in the direction of whether she's telling the truth or not.
If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.
People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.
if you have a good mic and camera, show your face, speak clearly, consistently upload, and - most importantly - you broadly make one-off videos about common denominator subtopics - never going too deep or numbering your videos - then I wouldn't bet against you. there really aren't that many successful science Youtubers
By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all.
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...
Where "analyzed" probably means something other than "got any views". In any case, the claim is unsourced, so I wouldn't put much stock in it.
The way I see it, people's ability to give attention is limited, but the ability to do something worth paying attention to is even scarcer, so even the most trivial feat (like writing a comment on HN) is likely to garner at least a few views.
Becoming famous is much harder than getting any views at all, because now you need to do something so attention-grabbing that some of your few initial viewers will tell others about it and your audience size snowballs from there.
Internet Archive's first capture is April 2023.
The most recent references within the report are for 2021.