In my words, it seems that she is good at science education but bad at both sociology of science and philosophy of science.
I suppose that many (most?) good academic scientists, who give impeccable upper level lectures, sometimes broadly generalize about their field, and related fields, in private conversation with friendly tolerant colleagues, graduate students, and spouses, going far beyond what they really know. I also think that to be a creative scientist, you need to be brave enough to spout some off the wall ideas. Some will be based on data, and some will be off. The problem here is that broad-brush generalizations, about hundreds of universities/institutes, and thousands of other physicists (much less scientists in general!), which are fine for a private conversation, are being presented as if she actually is some kind of sociologist or philosopher of science.
My semi-guess is that there are areas of science which are more stuck than others. If you are an entomologist, I suspect it is only medium difficult to find a new species, and not difficult at all to find a species where progress can be made in understanding behavior. Another semi-guess is that there are areas in mathematics where it is really hard to made much progress. But if someone was writing a book on the contemporary sociology of mathematics, I cannot see the focus being that we are wasting money on math research – although that might come up, in a limited way, in context with examples of breakthroughs.
Hossenfelder’s off the wall lectures may one day be good primary sources for history of science, but not the history itself.
Scientists and physicians have the right to speak out on subjects outside their areas of expertise
They do need to be cautious about expounding on such matters and to make sure they’re not preening on the attention they get to the detriment of factually educating the public.
Hossenfelder’s forays into trans controversies and 5G fearmongering may not be enhancing her reputation.
The title is click-baity but she does clearly believe there is a crisis of sorts in Physics. It is a subjective opinion but a legitimate one to hold. I don’t agree with everything she says. I think the “math guessing” criticism she levels is weak and somewhat misplaced.
But I really don’t think she has to take any responsibility for antivaxers and flat earthers too.
The Standard Model predicts that once past the Higgs particle there’s an energy desert until you get to the Grand Unification energy, which with current technology would require an accelerator with a circumference comparable to the Ort Cloud to reach. If the Standard Model is correct, high energy particle physics is done, period. So high energy physicists are in the peculiar position of having to hope that their very best theory of particle physics is wrong; this is inherently speculative. They’ve now spent decades trying to think of increasingly imaginative ways that the Standard Model might be wrong; and all of the low-hanging fruit has now been ruled out.
Probably the worst thing about Hossenfelder is how she insists on saying “Einstein” using German pronunciation while speaking in English. Who is this “Einschtein” person you keep speaking of?
This is a very important point that I wholeheartedly agree with. Science is constantly under threat by anti-intellectuals and anti-academics who are gaining increasing influence with the rise of right-wing populism. This is a far, far greater threat to our future than lack of sufficient criticism of our institutions of science.
Climate change denialism and the demonization of climate scientists as mendacious “alarmists” seeking grant money is just one small example. Hossenfelder is legitimizing this broad contingent of anti-science propagandists even if one grants that her criticisms are entirely well-intentioned, but it seems increasingly obvious that many of them are closer to clickbait than to well-considered constructive criticisms.
This bears repeating. She isn’t just randomly criticizing physics; there are very well founded reasons to believe that the currently popular approaches will not bear the desired results, and the people who are trying don’t have any observations to point to that are better explained by their alternative theories. They are hoping to make unexpected observations because it would be nice and exciting if we did, not because they have an unexplained phenomenon to test.
You are definitely hearing her message as she intends, but you are hearing an incorrect message. As I enumerated in the other thread, she uses a mix of false statement, misapplied statements, and supporting examples that are actually counter to her conclusions if you look at what’s behind the jargon. And she has videos saying “Example A is garbage (eyeroll)” right next to videos saying “Example A is super exciting and worthwhile,” which should be reason enough to not trust her scientific messaging generally.
The vast majority of resources in particle physics are aimed at real observational issues, concrete theoretical problems, or both. The idea that the field is just “making up particles and then looking for them” should sound absurd, because it is. That’s not even close to what the field is doing, despite whatever over-weighted attention the media may give to the most extreme corners of the field.
When you say:
can you elaborate on how you have drawn that conclusion? What about dark matter observations? Dark energy? Cosmic inflation? The observed baryon asymmetry of the universe? The g-2 anomaly? The hierarchy problem? The lack of strong CP violation? Neutrino anomalies? The unknown underpinnings of neutrino mass? The source of proton spin? Etc., etc.
This jargon dump isn’t on its own going to be very meaningful, but my point is that even these brief examples of concrete issues are what particle physics is actually about. It’s not whatever cartoon of a picture Hossenfelder is giving. (I’m happy to elaborate on any of the above or any other specific open questions. In the meantime, though, know that the overwhelming majority of practicing physicists aren’t wasting their time doing stuff that isn’t scientifically well motivated, even if Hossenfelder felt like she did for a spell.)
To be clear, the Sabine video I referenced was specifically about particle accelerators. The exciting advancement in physics today are, to my understanding, mostly done in astronomical research. Even neutrinos are, to my layman’s understanding, something we try to capture from space, not generate.
Anyways, I’m not totally dismissive of particle accelerator research, but I also don’t think hearing from a skeptical voice is such a disaster.
That does happen for sure, but lots of neutrino research is done with terrestrial, human-made sources. Such sources actually dominate the field whether ranked by number of people involved in the work, number of distinct experimental efforts, or raw number of neutrinos detected.
So here’s the next round in the ongoing feud, due to Professor Dave. I think what he’s mostly accomplished with this is taking the title of ‘being right in the most obnoxiously thin-skinned and petty way’ from Richard Dawkins.
By the way, looking at Hossenfelder’s videos, I’m not actually sure the ‘her anti-science content gives her the most clicks’-narrative is borne out. The video with the most views is one entitled ‘Does the Past Still Exist?’, with the ‘I failed (why academia sucks)’ coming second with a little more than half the views (however, it’s also the newer of the two). Then most of her most popular videos seem to be ordinary science communication (going by the thumbnails). It might be that over the last year or so, anti-science content has been gaining more momentum, but that’s hard to evaluate without looking in detail at how many views are generated over what sort of timespan, and frankly I don’t care enough to put that amount of work in.
Looking back over her videos reminded me that we could be much worse off, though—she could start singing again.
Sabine has recently had a run of decent videos on science news, so I was starting to warm to her again, and then this dropped yesterday:
Yes you read that thumbnail right.
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?)
If you’re in any doubt, along the way she completely mischaracterizes DEI as being anti-scientific progress, suggest oligarchs like Elon Musk are best placed to figure out which research should be funded, and says you cannot disagree with consensus in science any more; that it’s all about groupthink.
Her videos sure have a way of elevating my blood pressure, since they show no respect for honest discourse. This one follows her standard recipe of bombarding the viewer with rapid-fire, loosely connected statements that are generally false but not in a way that non-experts are likely to notice and then linking them together over a long video using unfounded leaps of “logic”. Her dozens of supporting points are all vague enough and are so plentiful that a lay viewer will be bowled over by it all, despite the “spin”-to-“fact” ratio being like 30 to 1. Pulling supporting quotes from Musk and Thiel along the way is, of course, amusing.
It’s decidedly not centrally planned. Science funding uses rather distributed decision making. She paints a fantastical picture here, in the true sense of “fantasy”.
It’s clear that she found herself trapped by her own points in places, for instance needing to say, “Well, I would pay for pure research, so clearly there is monetary/commercial value in it, and thus it can all be privatized,” which is about as sound financial planning as saying, “I like gardening gloves, so a store dedicated to gardening gloves is definitely commercially viable.” Never mind the fact that you would want experts to weigh in somewhere in the process to ensure your crowd funding of science is going to real, practicable efforts and not vaporware, so maybe you would require that your funding goes only to things that have been reviewed by a rotating, randomly selected set of technical experts in each subfield to look for potential issues upfront before spending your money on it. Oh wait, that’s exactly what happens right now. Are there inefficiencies? Sure, every system has them, although I’d argue that most of what she calls inefficiencies aren’t (e.g., her declaring that XYZ research is useless means nothing; popular demand does not equate to merit.) But in any case, bulldozing it all and trying to do it privately would be unimaginably worse, and meaningful, useful progress would grind to a halt in most areas.
Professor Dave has responded to this one also, the first part being a response, the second interviewing three scientists (the first two at least from MIT, I haven’t gotten to the third) about what is really going on.
Thanks, but in fact that’s responding to another of Sabine’s crazy videos: I had forgotten about the one where she reads out an email and starts going crazy.
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).
Perhaps Dave will do another response video, but it’s obviously whack-a-mole at this point.
If current politics is any guide, there has developed a hefty subculture of people who simply love to listen to / watch a skillful Gish Gallop. And will pay dearly for the privilege of being shown the same.
Short attention span? Check. Simple ideas? Check. No dissenting POVs presented? Check. We have a winning formula.
Wow…I’ve avoided most of her non-physics videos for a couple of years because they put off a “I’m a physicist so I’m an expert in everything else” vibe, and while I’ve been somewhat on board with some elements of her rants against searching for mathematical ‘beauty’ over evidence (and against building a next generation hadron collider without having some more firm theory than just straining for dark matter gnats), she’s really gone off the rails and that video is the absolute nadir. The idea that academic research is somehow “centrally planned” is so obviously wrong I’m not sure where to even begin with that. Except for applied research into weapon systems, I can’t think of any research—certainly not in basic scientific research—that is in anyway planned and organized in any central fashion (sometimes to the detriment of researchers doing completely redundant work).
Academic has a lot of problems but it is not in how basic research is conducted. Applying a thesis of absolute efficiency to research is completely antithetical to the openness and creative experimentation required for real innovations. Her list of “people who think about the long term progress of human civilization” are a litany of billionaire exploiters who view actual humans as “work units” or at best consumers to be milked. And her assertion that if “we hadn’t left nuclear fusion research to academic in the 1960s the world would be a completely different place today’, as if the problems of achieving controlled nuclear fusion are just motivational.
I quit the video after her third point, which was some confused claim that people would pay for abstract research in physics because ‘people’ are curious. I guess we should just be Kickstarting research projects, I guess? I couldn’t make heads or tails of how she thinks this should work, but her assertion that private investors are much more scrupulous about investing in worthwhile research is pretty risible given examples like Theranos (and there is plenty more where that came from). She seemed to have totally bought into the SiVal, corpro-libertarian mindset that money fosters innovation rather than the other way around. 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.