Professor Dave has made a video criticizing Sabine for increasingly publishing anti-science and anti-establishment rhetoric, on her site, and in her articles for The Guardian and in her book.
It starts out very civil but later he points out ways he thinks she is being dishonest and even lacking integrity.
The reason for making this thread is two-fold:
We were discussing Sabine as a tangent in this thread, so it seems this tangent now merits its own thread.
Both professor dave and Sabine are at the forefront of science popularizing so this is a significant development. Honestly, when I first saw the thumbnail, I assumed it was clickbait and Dave would turn out to be friends with Sabine and they were collaborating on something.
I guess I should add my own thoughts: well, to be honest it seems to me that her channel does effectively play both sides.
I was defending her in the parallel thread, but that’s because I hadn’t seen the videos that just blanket criticize all of academia, or have titles like “Why I don’t trust scientists”. I am only familiar with her frequent updates on new scientific developments. As professor dave points out though, the anti-science stuff are her most popular videos in terms of views.
It’s hard to disagree with Dave on such videos; it’s irresponsible for a science communicator to do these overly broad rants, that everyone from flat earthers to anti-vaxers can point at as evidence of science “dying”.
It’s hard to figure out what’s going on with her. There is some definitely woo/anti-Science stuff she’s been shifting.
It could be merely someone who’s found that going that way leads to fame and fortune (at least at the YouTube, etc. level). But I think it’s more entrenched than that.
It’s really sad that YouTube algorithms promotes her so much.
I’m not a follower of Hossenfelder but I did see some of her videos in the past. Based only on what I watched, I would have described her as an excellent science communicator, which indeed she is, at least when she sticks to science. The anti-science views that came up in the other thread and that you’re discussing here were news to me.
I watched the Professor Dave video and I thought his criticisms of Hossenfelder were well-founded and fair. It appears that she had some disheartening personal experiences with academia earlier in her career which have soured her on academia and, by extension, on scientific research. We all have a tendency to see the world in terms of our own experiences, but as Dave points out, her extrapolations are simply not factually valid or at best are misleading.
She is clearly not an outright science denier, and one can only speculate on why she persists in promoting this sort of cynicism about science. The above video offers one possible explanation. When she posts a video about a science topic, she may attract an audience of several hundred thousand viewers interested in the topic. When she posts a video like “Academia sucks”, she attracts a much larger audience of several million, because there are a lot more anti-intellectuals and science deniers than there are science geeks. So she can be a physicist with a small audience, or she can position herself as a controversial, contrarian philosopher of science, bravely challenging the academic establishment, and become rich and famous. Maybe Hossenfelder has made the latter choice.
In a nutshell, someone has figured out how to do quick’n’cheap small scale prototypes of stellarators, one type of magnetic confinement that was once a contender for creating controlled fusion. While not intended to be working fusion reactors, this approach allows researchers to test and tweak different models to evaluate how promising they might be. This in sharp contrast to billion-dollar warehouse-sized experimental reactors. I commented on the Mastodon site that pointed me to the article that this is reminiscent of the contrast between SpaceX’s fast iteration approach and the Old Space paradigm exemplified by Boeing’s SLS. There is a lot to legitimately criticize about Big Science.
There are real problems with academia and mainstream science research. It’s ok to point those out. The fact that some science deniers twist her words or interpret them in ways they were clearly not intended is not her fault (or really her problem). She does not cater to science deniers, and does not abide them. The worst that can be said about her is that some of the titles of her videos are salacious and hyperbolic. Considering everything in the aggregate, she is clearly a net plus for science education. As with everything in life, having a healthy amount of skepticism about our science institutions is a good thing in my mind.
I can’t comment on nuclear fusion research specifically, but “fast prototyping” is an engineering paradigm, not any sort of intrinsic approach to scientific research. It can be applied to software development, too, as much as to the development of any physical product. And SpaceX vs Boeing vs traditional NASA likewise all represent contrasting approaches to engineering, not science. None of this is evidence of any failures in “Big Science”.
Hossenfelder’s unwarranted hostility to scientific research absolutely does cater to science-deniers, anti-intellectuals, and those hostile to academia. That’s precisely why she gets millions of views on those videos compared to one-tenth that many on the pure science ones. That may also be precisely why she persists in doing them.
As with everything in life, fact-free broad generalizations like that are meaningless, and downright harmful when they’re used to justify falsehoods. The relevant observation here is that much of Hossenfelder’s criticisms are misleading or flat-out wrong. For example, trying to show that science is “stagnating” by trotting out charts showing a dwindling pace of new discoveries. All it really shows is that new scientific fields tend to produce big discoveries at a rapid pace, while mature fields with a vast accumulated body of knowledge tend to proceed more incrementally, with fewer big spectacular discoveries of the kind that impress the general public.
Nah, this Professor Dave guy is exactly on point. Even if you set her titles aside, the poison is deeply present in the actual content.
As I said over several posts in the other thread, her approaches in the nay-saying content are as dishonest as it comes, with widespread inconsistencies, falsehoods, and erroneous leaps to conclusions all carefully crafted, hidden behind techobabble, and veiled by a snarky attitude so that it will be taken by non-experts as insightful or clever whistleblowing or the like. And these videos do stand in stark contrast to her honest content.
I’ve watched one or two of her videos and was not impressed. Then I watched one on chip design, which I know about, and discovered that she didn’t have a clue.
The only thing that surprises me is that Professor Dave started out civil. I subscribe to his channel, and his vitriol is almost always well merited.
This reinforces the notion that her negativity, which seems to have been originally informed by bad personal experiences with academic research earlier in her career, leading to sincere if misplaced cynicism, has now become full-on contrarian trolling to maximize her viewership by attracting hordes of anti-intellectual misfits.
Indeed. Are there some problems in the system? Of course. Is everyone just grinding away under false pretenses to optimize some sort of academia money-making engine? The absurdity in that sentiment is off the charts and has all the makings of a good ol’ conspiracy theory.
I’m not sure we will see eye to eye on this. I will just say that disagreeing with how science is conducted is not the same as disagreeing with science or its importance to an advanced society. I agree that she is prone to hyperbole and generalizations and her rhetoric on these subjects seems to be heavily prejudiced by her own experiences. I respect and understand the points you are making, but I think we simply disagree on the severity and nature of what she is saying. In any event, I think we can probably both agree that however grave we consider her faults, she is not some crackpot, and is far down the list of those peddling science disinformation whom we should be excoriating.
All I can say is that I can’t stand her style. She wants to come across a cleverer that all the other scientists, again and again. That is a bad sign. After a while I clicked on “don’t show me this content again” and feel fine with that decision. I use the ignore button much more often in You Tube than in this board.
Did you watch the video in the OP? Timestamp 5:47 of that video (for about one minute) is one of many instances where she states quite concretely that the whole enterprise is a sham. But everything she is saying there is nonsense. I don’t discount her specific experience at some unnamed institution with some unnamed professor, but her generalization in the clip is absolutely wild.
In the other thread mentioned above, I spoke mostly toward the “What’s wrong with particle physics?” video, in which she espouses the same silliness, saying that people just work on nonsense to keep the “engine” running and not even trying to do science, etc.
The Dave Farina (“Professor Dave”) video in the OP contains a bunch of extracts from her videos where she essentially implies exactly that, along with the claim that academic institutions are comprised of women-hating misogynists who prevented her from being hired.
Look, she may be a competent physicist in her own right, and I did say that I appreciated some of her scientific insights, but the woman has a chip on her shoulder the size of a boulder. Read some of the other comments in this thread if you haven’t already.
Regarding that clip specifically (but not in isolation), her implied understanding of grant proposals and reviews, permanent versus temporary staff, university budgets and overhead, choices in research directions, the hiring of people at all career stages, the general career outlook at each career stage, etc. all indicate either (1) she doesn’t know how any of that stuff actually works or (2) she is willing to spin minor outlier observations into broad “earth shattering” generalizations that are dangerously wrong. I fear it is the latter, based on how she mishandles and manipulates her arguments and evidence in the “What’s wrong with particle physics?” video, as I enumerated in the other thread but am happy to return to here if there are specific prompts.
Same here. I watched a number of her videos when The Algorithm decided I should see them, and I just got an untrustworthy feeling from them and ended up telling YouTube to stop shoveling her stuff my way.