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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

She's more well known lately for making edgy clickbait youTube videos than doing actual physics

I’ve followed her for a few years now sort of in horror as she’s become a YouTuber. She seems contrarian for the sake of it.

I don't know if I'd call her "contrarian" but I think it's safe to say she's not exactly filled with starry-eyed optimism. Maybe a lot scientists generally become increasingly jaded and skeptical after years of seeing a lot of big claims and hopes much of which end up amounting to very little, but physicists seem to have had an especially rough time.

She's been that way on physics forever, and she was at least interesting there, but she's moved on to subjects outside of her field, and that hasn't worked as well at all.

Can you elaborate? Her channel seems to be about science, it's common that science popularizers discuss science outside of their field of expertise...

Science is a large field. Being an expert in physics won't make you an expert in other scientific fields, yet somehow people love to know the opinion of their favourite heroes of any topic.

Remind me of Jurgen Klopp rebuking some journos that wanted his opinion, as successful football coach, on COVID.

Just the field of physics is so large that most would probably not dare to state criticism in other sub fields. Like a Nobel prize winner in solid state physics would never judge the work of a high energy particle physicist and vice versa.

Hossenfelder is definitely qualified to talk about the OP, but her videos about transgender people shouldn't be given more credit than videos from almost any other person.

There is definitely value in people popularizing scientific consensus even when they aren't experts in the field, Bill Nye talking about climate change is useful even though he's not an expert. But when you aren't an expert and aren't trying to convey the consensus of people who are experts, you're Just Some Person With An Opinion.

It's when a popularizer starts having opinions that aren't widely shared in a field that they aren't themselves expert in that things can start to go wrong.

Being publicly contrarian about stuff you're an expert in can be interesting, being publicly contrarian about stuff you just don't know much about is at best not very useful and at worst harmful.

The thing is, progress in physics has become hard because physics has been extraordinarily successful. Between them, general relativity and the standard model (of quantum mechanics) explain all of the phenomena that humans see or create on earth and all the star-level things we can observe. Things only get hard once you reach enormous scales of the distribution of matter in the universe. So the situation can only seem "bad" to someone who isn't seeing the larger picture imo.

Clickbait implies she doesn't cover the topics in her thumbnails, or that they are misleading or inaccurate in some way. That hasn't been my experience watching her videos.

One person can do both things.

Her video on Flerfs is a good intro to the scientific method.

Edgy? Are you watching the same mild lady make tame puns?

Granted clickbait is what YouTube algorithm demand.

Sabine is great, and has made powerful enemies by calling out BS

Certainly, her value and contributions to society have been infinitely greater than a string theorist.

And made enemies by spewing BS e.g. her hot take on fusion scientists being deceptive is intellectually dishonest.

I mean, yes, but her opinion still means more than a random science journalist's.

Honestly, I'm watching a bunch of people punch down at imaginary people, I'm not sure there's really anything here than whining about a good article and bizarre irrational stack ranking

I'm not sure I know what you're talking about, but there's nothing imaginary about how bad some "science journalists" are, and the notion of a bunch of HN commenters "punching down" at either journalists or physicists with much bigger platforms than we have is dubious.

Some people reflexively do this "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about" type lead-in, then can't help themself from replying anyway.

I laugh at the silly attempt at negging and move on with my life.

Why?

- Comment is +5

- even though it cuts against the grain

- because it was such a boring boorish thread.

- you demonstrated you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I knew you were saying one of a couple rather weird things. I still don't know which, but I thought the substance of my comment addressed all of them and you haven't bothered to respond to that, so I guess my point stands? We were both nitpicking, so you don't get to claim the high ground.

I'm not arguing with you at all, it wouldn't make any sense to, you're not making any claim other than imagining I claimed articles where the journalist doesn't know anything about the topic are always good.

Recap: I observed the thread was absurd because:

- it opened complaining about the science journalist writer who didn't know the topic.

- after it was resolved the author wasn't a science journalist or someone who didn't know anything, people were arguing about the stack-ranking of the imaginary science journalist

Now you're here, continuing to argue against a strawman for no discernable reason. We all get it, you and some other people are making sure we understand we're wrong, it can be bad when people write things they don't know about.

> you're not making any claim other than imagining I claimed articles where the journalist doesn't know anything about the topic are always good.

I definitely never argued or even believed any such thing. I started off in this (granted, rather silly) thread with a lukewarm defense of Hossenfelder, then you took a weird tangent on it and I disagreed with your framing (or what I could grok of it). Maybe you have me confused with someone else?

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