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I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave v

• hughredline 1y ago
  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.
  • antithesizer 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
      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...
      • gdbsjjdn 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
          I ... Uh... That's not what capitalism means. Sorry. We have plenty of capitalist countries w/ great healthcare, and social programs. Capitalism means "free market" + rules. If you're unhappy about something, fix that, don't throw the baby with the water.
          • gdbsjjdn 1y ago
            I love that the two replies to this post are "capitalism isn't actually when wealth concentration" and "fascism actually isn't when right wing authoritarians take control by demonizing ethnic groups and imposing austerity".
          • capitotal 1y ago
            > "free market" + rules A contradiction! Some system.
        • Mainan_Tagonist 1y ago
          Maybe because what you call "Fascism" isn´t Fascism and, as far as i know, nobody wants to gut our (varied) social programs, but we are just conscious that in some cases, said programs are failing, unsustainable due to resources misallocation and/or grossly mismanaged. Having a slightly more dynamic entrepreneurial scene, where one is allowed to fail for instance, would be nice. In my view, the way forward and the example to follow is Switzerland, not the US.
    • tomhow 1y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Aunche 1y ago
    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?
    • owebmaster 1y ago
      I mean, Elon Musk? Yeah, someone still thinking great of Elon Musk might add a negative value
      • Aunche 1y ago
        "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.
      • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        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.
        • owebmaster 1y ago
          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?
    • shavvxh 1y ago
      [flagged]
• glenstein 1y ago
  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.
  • cycomanic 1y ago
    One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs
• f137 1y ago
  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.
• antithesizer 1y ago
  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.
  • ahartmetz 1y ago
    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?"
• dustingetz 1y ago
  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
  • shermantanktop 1y ago
    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.
    • m_fayer 1y ago
      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.
      • chatmasta 1y ago
        One could make a compelling philosophical argument that the core purpose of money is to separate individuals from their moral agency.
      • shermantanktop 1y ago
        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.
        • m_fayer 1y ago
          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.
    • 1y ago
• epgui 1y ago
  You're not the only one who has noticed this, no.
• vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  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.
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture
    • 0x303 1y ago
      > The term was coined by Eric Weinstein in 2018. Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice
      • hermitcrab 1y ago
        I didn't notice that!
      • tptacek 1y ago
        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.
        • tsongas4 1y ago
          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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• mc32 1y ago
  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.
  • cycomanic 1y ago
    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).
    • eecc 1y ago
      But does she make millions? I highly doubt that
      • cycomanic 1y ago
        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.
        • jcranmer 1y ago
          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.
    • mc32 1y ago
      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.
• amadeoeoeo 1y ago
  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.
  • cycomanic 1y ago
    Maybe she is projecting how she did science onto others?
  • senderista 1y ago
    Sometimes contrarianism is just sour grapes.
  • raattgift 1y ago
    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 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&hl=en&user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&cstart=100&pagesize=100&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=NaQZcyYAAAAJ:ns9cj8rnVeAC 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-at-lhc-status-update.html 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.
• Insanity 1y ago
  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.
• xenotux 1y ago
  > 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.
  • zamadatix 1y ago
    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 :).
  • 1y ago
• thewanderer1983 1y ago
  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.
• titzer 1y ago
  Attention is a shit economy and people who spend their time trying to acquire it inevitably become covered in and completely full of...shit.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  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.
• pcthrowaway 1y ago
  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?
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    Step away from yourself for a while and consider if people really want to watch a video (any video) about your dietary choices.
• api 1y ago
  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.
• causality0 1y ago
  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".
• donkeybeer 1y ago
  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.
• jjaksic 1y ago
  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.