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Comment by jxdxbx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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