Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

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> people have a hard time coming up with complaints that are actually about the subject matter

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

That second video is a horrible example of a counter argument. At the start of the video, the creator admits to having an agenda against Sabine due to her past comments on LGBT stuff. She also says at the start that she believes capitalism lead to most of society's ills. She also states clearly in her video that she doesn't have the proper knowledge of economics to be able to make a commentary. There is such a blatant predisposition and agenda that I am seriously baffled that you linked that video as an objective critisism of Sabine.

> She also states clearly in her video that she doesn't have the proper knowledge of economics to be able to make a commentary

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.

These are fair criticisms. No matter which side of the 'capitalism is good' debate you are on this video was so bad, with errors of history and even of definition, that I was left doubting how good a scientist she actually is.

I don’t think this is—nor should it be—a judgment on her quality as a scientist. Rather this should be a judgment on her as a person.

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.

I think you're right about her having personal reasons for this. I watched her video on GAC after writing the comment above. I think what it has in common with the capitalism video is that she is trying to back up a personal bias with poorly reasoned and evidenced arguments.

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

>she opens with the "money emerged to fix barter" origin story

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.

The thing is, the penicillin anecdote was the only evidence she cited as the reason for capitalism being good, which is the main thesis in the video.

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.

Any video that tries to condense all of economics into 16 minutes is going to be wrong to a certain extent, but I think anyone without a strong negative opinion of capitalism would get the point she makes. Penicillin would be useless without industrialization, and industrialization wouldn't have happened without capitalism, so therefore capitalism is good.

There are allot of assumptions in your line of reasoning. It can be argued that it is just as likely—if not more likely—that the only people watching this video that came out of it with a positive opinion on capitalism, are the people that already believe these assumptions to be true, don’t need any evidence to further believe them—may even reject the evidence showing the contrary—and already held the faith that capitalism is good.

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.

I didn't make any assumptions. Most people, including Karl Marx, agree that capitalism is what lead to industrialization. All Sabine did is make the obvious connection between capitalism, industrialization, and the widespread availability of penicillin. "Ackchyually, there was some resistance to pharmaceutical companies conducting research for penicillin production" is something you care about if you're being hypercritical.

It is still an assumption, and an ahistorical one at that. Many countries industrialized without capitalism, and humanity has seen much greater technological revolutions without this system. And yes, Karl Marx was wrong about many things, if he stated that industrialization would not happen without capitalism, he would be wrong.

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.

> Many countries industrialized without capitalism

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.

> 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.

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