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My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.

For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.

It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture

> The term was coined by Eric Weinstein in 2018.

Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice

That particular meaning of "audience capture" might be Weinstein's coinage, but the term itself predates that; you can just search Google Scholar to confirm.

Mathematicians went nuts trying to invalidate Gödel. Imo similar phenomena to our senses; chasing an endlessly big numbers with no real outcome but growing some number that ostensibly represents an audience but who knows if its real or just numbers on a screen.

Religious belief is same biological phenom, chasing endless propagation of the religion.

Minds go fractal. It's like Snowcrash but they’re not blank, they speak in tongues, circumlocuting gibberish.

>Mathematicians went nuts trying to invalidate Gödel.

But they failed. Gödel's incompleteness theorm is now a widely accepted part of mathematical canon.

I didn't notice that!

Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming.

In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.

Touch grass.

Your comment sounds hyperbolic at first blush. But the more I think and observe and read about incoming evidence, it seems correct.

And if we take that as fact, that means Zuck's culpability is nigh unprecedented in private enterprise. The mega-scale profiteering of Apple & Microsoft & Amazon distort markets and elbow out competition but that doesn't compare to the personal misery and destabilization and resulting downstream poverty and violence caused by social media. Purveyors of booze and cigarettes are closer, but those things never threatened democracy or global order. Fossil fuel companies may contribute to climate change, but no one can saddle them with full moral responsibility for selling a product that's the lifeblood of the world. Weapons manufacturers didn't start the wars or cause the instability.

So Zuck and his algorithmic friends - what to make of them? The mind boggles.

I call social media the “tobacco companies of the mind.”

There was a time when it was a mixed bag with some bad stuff but some connecting of friends and letting people find new ones. Then the algorithmic timelines and other stuff came. Since then I think it has become a strong net negative.

On balance it’s the worst thing tech has built. Worse, I think, than crypto gambling. It might be worse than the mass surveillance stuff in terms of, as you say, mental destabilization and social harm.

> I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory.

I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to others. Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.

It happens for a reason. There's something deeply satisfying about being a contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.

To add to this, I think we have a tendency to underestimate how much of our mental model derives from "direct working experience" type hours vs discussion/reading/listening hours.

E.g. I've probably talked about various aspects and extensions to the ISIS routing protocol with in-field experts for more hours than I could think to add together... but the bulk of my practical understanding really comes from the (comparatively) small amount of time I spent building custom implementations, debugging other implementations, and deploying ISIS in various locations. I probably couldn't have done the latter nearly as well without the former, but the latter is where I went from suggesting protocol changes that sounded reasonable to making critiques that were actually actionable

Similarly, I know I know BGP more than your average person, enough to sound like the protocol experts, but I lack most all of the practical working and experimentation knowledge. If you asked me what I think should be changed about BGP I'd probably rattle off a decent list, and it'd probably sound pretty convincing, yet I doubt I would even agree with half of it if I had the other half of the mental model built (or I told it to someone who specialized in BGP). That kind of step doesn't (and usually can't) come from working deeply in a different area (even if similar) and "talking the talk" about the other area.

That said, what makes social media addicting, especially in areas where specialists like to coalesce (HN is one such place, IMO) is you can get a TON of that kind of conversation, data, and readings about anything. Then it makes you overconfident because you got that style of interaction without even doing anything remotely related to that area.

All of this reminds me I've spent far too much time on HN... and I'm entering 12 days of PTO. Time to set noprocast to something ridiculous :).

Someone once posted a video by Jonathan Bi, a lecture on Rousseau and his views that intellectuals with large egos eventually play contrarian positions just to have a chance to argue and prove how smart they are; Rousseau’s opinion was that the democratization of knowledge, the printing press at the time as he couldn’t foresee the internet, would amplify this phenomenon until society would lose itself arguing about pretty much everything, and people would delight being contrarian even about the most mundane of things.

https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared

I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.

> The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case.

Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...

But I agree social media has also made this dynamic more pervasive as well as distorted it in many ways

> Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...

I don't see how you can make this claim. Putting aside the fact that these two groups were diverse, contrarian they were not. (Socrates, known for posing questions to fellow Athenians and his students, wasn't a contrarian. He was interested in arriving at the truth and challenging the Sophists, the quintessential bullshitters, who were interested in power.)

If anything, modernism tends to be more contrarian, and even when not by intention, then at least by construction. Think of the philosophical positions that fall under this label. Skeptical denial and making weird assumptions is sort of characteristic.

> Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.

That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?

Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.

Several of her first-or-sole-author minimal length quantum gravity phenomenology papers have more than a hundred citations:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en

and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.

Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".

Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.

There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.

> at least those I read

You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence

> She is pure show

less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.

Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.

Sometimes contrarianism is just sour grapes.

Maybe she is projecting how she did science onto others?

I read her books, FWIW, I quite like them. As with anything, take things with a grain of salt, and I see it more as 'interesting food for thought'.

I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.

It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.

Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.

I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.

One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs

This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.

I stopped being willing to consume any of her content after she made that video about "Academia is terrible and everyone I worked with were poopyheads and that's why I have to make these videos even though I hate it and all my viewers are stupid losers".

Being likable and presenting yourself as an open-minded skeptic is the current winning formula for being an influencer grifter.

Some or most of what these people discuss might be true, often because it’s low stakes or obvious. This builds trust and leads people to believe that the person is a universally trustworthy source.

Then they drift into topics where they are incorrect, don’t understand the subject matter, or have been misled by other grifters but they deliver the message just the same as everything else. To the uninformed parts of the audience it feels every bit as accurate and genuine as all of their other content.

This is a very common pattern in the health and fitness world. Andrew Huberman is the current most famous example of someone who has some narrow scientific knowledge but has shared a lot of incorrect and misleading content outside of his domain. He’s the guy who claimed he had to stop wearing Bluetooth headphones because he believed the radio waves were hearing his skin up and he didn’t like it, for reference. He’s been caught out recently as his fan base has started to realize he’s not the genius about every topic that he presents himself as.

i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days

By default, people have moral agency for what they do. Exceptions exist, of course, but “I wanted to make more money” is not one of them.

Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.

One could make a compelling philosophical argument that the core purpose of money is to separate individuals from their moral agency.

Do they lose moral agency? Having practical reasons to take an action is not the same as ceding moral agency.

We are not perfect creatures and sometimes do immoral things, for various reasons. But we did those things, nobody else did them.

That also suggests a practical guideline: whatever your rationale for taking action, anticipate living with that rationale for years and years. If you can’t see it looking the same 10 years from now, perhaps that is a strong clue.

Talk to me about agency when it’s the wellbeing of your vulnerable dependent loved ones, young or old or sick, that’s on the line.

When it comes to physics it is even weirder than this. I’d argue there really isn’t anything at stake anymore. Einstein was able to make predictions and get them verified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.

Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)

The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.

One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time

and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot

I have two friends who are in trade school after studying physics. They're applying physics everyday. They'll make a perfectly adequate living in a few months and meanwhile they're both getting paid to go to school.

I submit Sean Carroll, and his podcast, for contrast.

I'd add PBS Space Time (Matt O'Dowd), Becky Smethurst and, to a lesser extent (more because she has a much broader remit that doesn't always focus on science -- that said, it's always insightful) Angela Collier.

I'm not really in the habit of watching content in this genre, I suppose. But Sabine Hossenfelder has published one of the best videos on the dangers of sugar alcohols (which I happen to be incredibly sensitive to), which is now my go-to recommendation for those who ask me why avoid them.

But I'd like to avoid other associations people now have with Sabine Hossenfelder; does anyone know of a similar quality video on the topic?

Step away from yourself for a while and consider if people really want to watch a video (any video) about your dietary choices.

The important thing is are you a mathematician or physisict? If you are not then you never were understanding or engaging in the first place, just reacting to tone and presentation, could have been she was always bad, you can't say. I don't know enough ohysics and math so I avoid watching people like Sabine.

You're not the only one who has noticed this, no.

As a physics layman I sometimes watched Sabine's show and found it interesting. The one where she defended Weinstein was the one where she lost all credibility to me and I stopped watching her.

Her (expletive-laden) message was essentially: "Weinstein is my friend. Yes, his theory is bullshit, but so is all of theoretical physics." Seriously, aren't you one of them? You would rather throw your entire academic field under the bus to defend your friend? (And mind you, what a great way to defend your friend, calling his theory bullshit.)

This blog post is incredibly illuminating and explains a lot. It's a prime example of "Don't expect someone to understand something when their YouTube paychecks depend on them not understanding it", a.k.a. audience capture.

It's also an important reminder of the precarious situation laypeople are in - being unable to tell what's true and what's bs, and often relying on social cues like how confident someone sounds. We are all laypeople in most fields and are subject to easy manipulation by various confident-sounding grifters and LLMs.

Attention is a shit economy and people who spend their time trying to acquire it inevitably become covered in and completely full of...shit.

I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.

It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.

I’ve talked to a few podcasters and every one of them has at one point quipped about how much more money they could make if they had no moral or intellectual standards and pandered to whatever the algorithm said worked. Usually that’s either conspiracy stuff THEY don’t want you to know about or culture war rage bait.

I had a similar trajectory, but I would add that she lost me when she started sucking up to public figures and corporate interests I despise.

People like musk and bezos and ai hype et al.

Made me realize I was projecting some aspects of her interest in rational thought all wrong.

[flagged]

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sabine is european, we kinda have some experience with alternatives to capitalism here, so... Yeah. That's not a valid criticism, on anyone. Just because you get points online for saying capitalism bad doesn't mean it's not the best out of everything we've tried so far...

Why should you expect her to have the same opinions about Musk and Bezos as you? Do you think that everyone who likes them have nothing of value to contribute?

I mean, Elon Musk? Yeah, someone still thinking great of Elon Musk might add a negative value

"might add a negative value" can be said about anyone. Many high profile engineers at SpaceX who revolutionized the industry have given high praise to Musk that is significantly more specific than what you'd expect from merely appeasing his ego.

This view seems mostly driven by his political associations with Trump, and his recent behavior on places like Twitter/X, which you have to distinguish from his other activities.

That being said, I thought the idolatrous fawning over Musk about 10 years ago, by the same people who now hate him, was obnoxious and sickening even then. Which goes to show: simply wait 5 minutes for the mob's little gods and petty messiahs to fall from grace, before they move onto the next celebrity to worship.

What I could understand from your message is that you still worship Elon Musk just like 10 years ago? And you are complaining about the people that worshiped him with you and now hate him?

I noticed exactly the same thing with Sabine. Her spiral into crankery has been disappointing.

It's very pleasant to see someone else saying it, too. Thank you.

My Hossenfelder experience was: "Oh nice, somebody is getting kind of famous for calling out string theory for being probably hogwash" followed (years later) by "Why is YouTube recommending this dumb clickbait by... Sabine Hossenfelder?! to me?"

On the other hand "establishment" science get their hairs up when she criticizes them, so there is that.

She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.

I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.

Yes very admirable to dishonestly misrepresent scientific progress, and making millions by accusing scientists to steal public money by working on things that she calls bullshit (based on her misrepresentation).

As a publicly funded scientist there is nothing I find more frustrating than witnessing colleagues peddle bullshit to funding bodies and waste tax payers money, and more importantly waste opportunities for young scientists and the country to do something worthwhile with the available resources.

But does she make millions? I highly doubt that

She has close to 2M subscribers, puts out several videos per months with 10s of thousands to millions of views and wrote a (or more) popular science book i suspect she would be on 6 to 7 figures. But that's a reasonably uniformed guess.

Ad revenue runs around $1/1000 views, and her output looks roughly daily with a few hundred K views per video on average. That means she's grossing maybe a few hundred K/year. But that's gross, not net; she still has to pay for all of her expenses out of it, and converting that to a net income... I suspect the average Bay Area tech worker has a higher take-home pay than she does.

I think it's admirable that she wants to avoid government waste and boondoggles. Of course, lots of science careers depend on doing things that get nowhere. She favors science that results in tangible or discernable results instead of waste like the next super duper McCollider face.