# Sabine Hossenfelder - anti-science? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 30, 2024, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449 "2024-10-30T15:19:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2025, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/61 "2025-03-01T22:04:06Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Basically she advocates for 0% state funding for science research. Her argument being that it’s all centrally planned (Is it? I think it’s rather more complex than that) and, with private funding, research will be better directed towards more promising areas (what does Sabine think stops private investors from investing their own money in promising areas today?) Sabine is once again (mostly) full of shit. First of all, private funding will almost always be directed to applied science, often applied science that has expected short-term results, so it’s basically just R&D. Pure science generally has multiple sources of public funding, both from public agencies and even from internal research grants from discretionary operating funds of individual universities. “Central planning” applies to mega-projects, not the funding of typical research, unless Sabine is thinking of the way the former Soviet Union funded tractor factories. And, incidentally, sometimes public funding can cross international borders, involving the agencies of multiple countries. This is probably routine in the EU (look at CERN, for example) but even here on this side of the pond, I once worked with a Canadian research group that had around half its funding come from a US government agency. (Of course, those were happier times; today the US government is probably shutting down science funding altogether!) ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2025, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/62 "2025-03-01T22:41:46Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > “Central planning” applies to mega-projects Even mega-projects are not centrally planned in the way she means. She makes it sound like there is some cabal that holds the purse strings and says, “Let there be Project X!”. She further poo-poos the system of having “decadal” planning exercises, saying it’s all too short-sighted. But that is precisely the sort of mechanism by which the expert community can discuss, with a regular cadence, where the most promising opportunities are and can direct what large-scale projects should be prioritized moving ahead. This includes both ongoing/current projects as well as proposed/future projects; it’s not like the whole slate is wiped clean every 7 to 10 years. The biggest projects will exist through multiple long-term planning cycles. And just because a project is massive and thus requires field-wide coordination doesn’t mean it’s akin to “communism” (her word). It just means it’s being, well, coordinated. You can’t execute a 30-year-long experimental program without substantial organizational effort over a comparable time frame. She has clearly not been engaged in such exercises to see how the sausage gets made – and it gets made in a (perhaps?) surprisingly merit-driven manner, with very real direction from the expert community working closely with federal agencies to understand the practical budget constraints. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/63 "2025-03-02T05:06:36Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > I disagree with Professor Dave slightly; he thinks the email is simply fabricated. I suspect it’s an embellished version of a real email from someone who has crashed out of academia. I guess it doesn’t matter though (it’s all academic, one might say). A German speaker in the comments section said that the email was almost certainly written by a German speaker because of various tells. What struck me is that the email calls her opinion piece a “paper” which is ridiculous. Real scientists know the difference between papers and opinions. Not saying there is anything wrong with opinion pieces, but perhaps she was building up her opinion a bit more than it deserves. > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > It would be great if big tech companies were actually sponsoring applied research like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but even when they are the tendency now is to retain all knowledge as proprietary and publish only superficial pr obvious details, and nobody is going to spend the billions of dollars into astronomy, cosmology, deep core geophysics, et cetera with no expectation of a return on investment regardless how much it enriches the corpus of human knowledge. When AT&T was a monopoly, much of Area 11 at Bell Labs was doing real research, and there were few restrictions on publishing. My group was half research funded, and that funding was for research 3 - 5 years out, with A11 “real” research further out than that. Development was most of the budget, of course, but a lot of people tried to give off the vibe that everyone in Bell Labs was doing real research, which of course was not even close. After divestiture things were a lot more focused. And if we want to blame physics for something, we can say it was all the fault of Penzias. ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/64 "2025-03-02T21:06:24Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Sabine has recently had a run of decent videos on science news I’d be interested to hear what videos you’ve found are decent. I might take a peek. With the recent thread activity, I decided to click on a couple other videos on her channel, and they were just more dishonest screeds structured to enable the desired finger-pointing conclusion that all those damn scientists are lying. I was further disheartened when I looked at the comments to see praise after praise, usually in the form of “I don’t understand any of the technical stuff here, but I’m glad you’re telling us not to trust these people! Keep up the good work!” She has a brilliant little business model here, because people who are interested in science are going to have some innate level of skepticism, but she is directing her audiences’ skepticism at some strawman system and the Lies They Keep Telling You rather than any actual science questions, and since she keeps the technical side impenetrable, she is free to say literally anything to support her “me against the world” schtick. Add in some half-way decent production values, and you have a compelling engine for ad revenue. But you do _not_ have science communication. So, even if she appears to sprinkle in more straightforward videos here and there, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to trust any of her content, because there’s no way a lay viewer will be able to distinguish fact from fantasy, by design. Best not to give her the clicks at all and just find better sources. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/65 "2025-03-02T21:19:28Z")
> [@Pasta](#): > > I’d be interested to hear what videos you’ve found are decent, maybe just to take a peek. Well if you go to her channel and click [videos](https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/videos) you see them in reverse chronological order. e.g. The recent videos on the earth’s magnetic field changing, CMB anisotrophy and Microsoft’s quantum computer chip were all reasonable. It feels weird linking her channel though, since I’ve personally blocked it: the “science is failing” stuff is just too irrational and irresponsible to tolerate. > [@Pasta](#): > > I was further disheartened when I looked at the comments to see praise after praise, usually in the form of “I don’t understand any of the technical stuff here, but I’m glad you’re telling us not to trust these people! Keep up the good work!” Hmm, I was actually heartened with the “Academia is communism” video that so many of the comments were from people explaining the flaws and bias in her reasoning. However it’s true that these videos massively appeal to people who want to believe that it’s all just groupthink guesswork and “what the bleep do we know?” It’s why I emphasize just how irresponsible this is. I get that Sabine has her beefs with the particle physics community and she does have something of a point about maybe not spending so much on ever bigger particle colliders. But when she goes increasingly broad into “science is failing” and “why I don’t trust science” of course people are going to use such videos to prop up their own desire to believe in antivax, climate denialism, even flat earth – generally, stop listening to scientists and ignore research findings. (and yes, she may have e.g. pro-vax videos somewhere in her library but they don’t get anywhere near the views of the anti-science stuff). ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/66 "2025-03-02T21:30:21Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > and she does have something of a point about maybe not spending so much on ever bigger particle colliders Her arguments on this point are more of the same misleading nature, though. One of the recent videos I clicked on was regarding the meta-stability of vacuum and how a Higgs factory can explore that. Rather than talk honestly about the merits and risks, she stitched together an empty argument that felt like a three-card Monte scam, threw in a little ad hominem for good measure, and delivered it all with her convincing eye-roll style. Her conclusion was (as always) that it’s all being pushed through on lies, which shows either her immense misunderstanding of the physics or her dishonesty (or maybe both). > [@Mijin](#): > > e.g. The recent videos on the Thanks, I’ll peek at those. ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/67 "2025-03-02T21:49:56Z")
Starting with the CMB one, I score it “bad”. She starts by framing the whole thing as scientists ignoring a problem because they’re scared of not having an explanation. This is in fact a well-discussed problem, but it is fundamentally limited by statistics (since we only have one universe to sample), so it’s just not that exciting. There _are_ theorists who have and continue to suggest new ideas for why the effect is there, but since the level of significance can’t really get bigger, no new theory will ever be terribly compelling. Her story that physicists should have been looking into it all this time can only mean that they should have been making up new physics theories, but if she looked at any of those, she would spin it the other way and say, “Look at all this fantasy they are making up just to get grant money!” After all, that’s her bread and butter. As for the actual preprint she is discussing, the group used publicly available data and re-ran previously used analysis techniques with some slight tweaks, and they got the same conclusions seen previously. From the abstract itself: “Our emphasis here was to revalidate the LVE method in various ways,” and “By and large, our results are in agreement with earlier reported ones.” I would bet good money that this was a nice grad student project, where the student could take public CMB data and learn some analysis techniques with it. They did so, and they turned their thesis work into a preprint, with some minimal hope to get it published somewhere if there’s enough novelty in the analysis tweaks (and thus as a methods paper, not as a new science result). Edited to add: Actually, I can do the other two quickly as well. Earth’s field: This one seems okay, but geomagnetism is very far away from my area of expertise, so I can’t say much without some reading. At least there was only one subtle dig at scientists. Microsoft’s thing: I can’t view that video. It says only channel members can see it. (But it’s well established that Microsoft’s PR campaign on this result was face-slappingly hyperbolic. Not sure how it was spun in this particular restricted video.) ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2025, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449/68 "2025-03-02T23:19:52Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > But when she goes increasingly broad into “science is failing” and “why I don’t trust science” of course people are going to use such videos to prop up their own desire to believe in antivax, climate denialism, even flat earth – generally, stop listening to scientists and ignore research findings. It’s a proven formula for generating clicks and revenue. Explaining mainstream science and consensus based on strong evidence is bo-oring and even threatening to people who don’t want to face issues like emerging diseases and climate change. What sells is positioning yourself as a Brave Maverick challenging conventional paradigms and standing up for da Troof in the face of hostility and persecution. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sabine-hossenfelder-anti-science/1009449.md?page=3)