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Sabine has a chip on her shoulder about academia and simultaneously she gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative. That also plays wel
by voxl 2y ago
Sabine has a chip on her shoulder about academia and simultaneously she gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative. That also plays well on HN where there is a cohort of people that like to pretend a PhD is useless and that PhD holders are less intelligent than themselves.
- barbazoo 2y agoDo you have a more specific criticism about the "chip on her shoulder" and how "gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative"?
- voxl 2y agoThe criticism is pretty specific: she has an axe to grind about string theory holding back fundamental physics and projects this onto all of science. One need only watch her videos to notice this. Another simple observation: her rant videos receive millions of views while her others receive significantly less. It doesn't take much speculation to see that an intelligent person that genuinely believes her own rant would prefer the output that also gives the most financial rewards
- eitally 2y agommmm... In this case, I don't think the "having a PhD is useless" is remotely close to what Sabine is saying, which is "academic science exploration and experimentation is broken". Yes, it's PhDs and career academics as core participants in the game, but there are plenty of valid reasons to pursue a PhD and then move into industry that are no incompatible with either 1) what Sabine is saying, and 2) the PhD experience in higher ed.
- layer8 2y agoThe current academic system certainly has a lot of flaws, but Sabine also has an axe to grind, so one should take what she says with a few grains of salt.
- MrLeap 2y agoDo you know the nature of the axe that she grinds? It's important to determine the kind of salt pairing. Often times people have grievances against systems because they aren't doing a good job achieving their aims or there's big injustice/corruption. Sometimes people take an ego wound from something and it causes them to be overly uncharitable or dishonest for revenge. The meme that permeates from academia about publishing quantity being more important than quality has me believing it can't be all ego wound. There's problems there.
- SiempreViernes 2y agoThe critiques she provided ten years ago, when still in academia, were interesting, but now that she's out its mostly tiresome. In other words, the axe she grinds these days is one provided by the youtube content mill, which demands ever more logs to its boiler.
- dingnuts 2y agosounds like the criticism still applies and is ever more relevant if you wish to understand that Trump voters, who by and large do not have college degrees, experience resentment when they hear academics are getting federal funds to do things that "sound cool" to support their "comfortable lifestyles." Why is it right for people who didn't go to college to be forced to pay for physicists to do useless research?
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoYou’re presuming it is useless just because it sounds useless to a layman.
- dingnuts 2y agoAs an academic you have a vested interest in holding that opinion and you should disclose that
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y agoYes, and the chip on her shoulder is that she never managed to produce research and the community told her that.