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This is a strangely written paper. It reads more like a train of thought or YouTube video style that has been squished into the academic paper LaTeX template. A

This is a strangely written paper. It reads more like a train of thought or YouTube video style that has been squished into the academic paper LaTeX template. All of the casual comments, informal writings, the ChatGPT acknowledgement, and sentences that start with "I..." feel out of place after reading a lot of academic papers in the same format. I suppose not surprising coming from someone who built their career on YouTube. The author has become somewhat notorious in physics circles for groan-inducing takes. That's not to say everything she has produced is bad, because it's not, but she has taken a hard turn into audience capture and speaking over-confidently far out of her area of expertise. It will be interesting to see how the experts respond to this paper, if they do at all. Given the format I'm not sure it's actually designed to be submitted for publishing or if it's just formatted in academic paper style and uploaded to arXiv for some other reason. Note that virtually anyone can register for and upload a document to arXiv, so this being on arXiv.org doesn't imply anything specific.

MrGilbert 1y ago
> but she has taken a hard turn into audience capture and speaking over-confidently far out of her area of expertise. Sounds like she is doing Youtube to earn some bucks off it, then? Usually, you'll stir up a controversy or make bold claims to create engagement, which in turn pleases "the algorithm".
- Aurornis 1y ago
  Kind of, but there's a difference between trying to stir up controversy by "just asking questions" as opposed to attacking the actual experts while overconfidently pushing competing theories, for example. Lately she's been dabbling with soft support for well known grifters like Eric Weinstein, though last I heard she stopped short of actually endorsing his theories. I think there's just too many views to be had by courting that audience, so it becomes irresistible to engage with. The best thing a good physics communicator could do would be to completely ignore the well known physics grifters and focus on the quality content, but instead she has been leaning toward defensing Weinstein and others.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  She makes really really good money. Angela Collier recently made a sad video about this. Sabine makes a video with sponsorship included basically every day. With her subscription numbers, that's a LOT of money. Basically, screaming that "They don't want you to hear THIS" is extremely profitable. She's a very well paid member of the anti-science ecosystem.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    With that kind of description, I'm surprised she hasn't been tapped to join POTUS' administration.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      I mean, don't take my description for it, just scroll through her videos, watch some about things you understand, etc. I am critical of her, but I would not put her on the level of Alex Jones or other really awful people. However, her blurb on the back of that "War on science" book is pretty gross. Sabine absolutely is still capable of producing and understanding science. She chooses to make the content she does. She also clearly treats her youtube career as just business, making pretty good money from taking random science papers from random journals and using them as a reason to lambast all of science. Plenty of youtubers who do science, including people who post here like the guy from Applied Science, are pretty far from monetizing their content, sometimes to a fault, generally because they aren't looking to make crazy money, just cool stuff. I actually hope she publishes more. This paper looks..... not good, but every good scientist has put out papers that are more like afternoon fun than rigorous work. That's fine by me. I would love for Sabine to produce real science, it's vastly more beneficial for humanity than her "Here's how science LIES TO YOU" slop. I tried to watch her in the beginning, but even then it was clear the kind of audience she was trying to cultivate. It feels gross. I don't know if she truly believes what she says. Her complaints about being mistreated for being a woman seemed sincere, and not as trumped up as most of her videos, and there's plenty of sexism in science Academia, just like most places. It's hard to criticize Youtubers for their thumbnails and titles, as the soulless youtube machine forces them, but there's definitely a pattern. Basically, it's hard to look at people like NileRed, Explosions&Fire, Applied Science, Thought Emporium, etc who are literally running science labs through patreon funding and then Sabine says she's being silenced for her unorthodox views with over a million subscribers. I'm tired of people claiming they are silenced while parrot literal mainstream talking points to an audience of millions. Complaints about "The hubble tension shows we might not have everything right in our astrophysics models" is fine, dandy, I literally agree (I'm not a physicist), but complaining about string theory, which remember she's a physicist so she KNOWS nobody in physics actually spends any time, breath, or effort on string theory, and her claims that "Physics hasn't done anything in 50 years" is blatantly false and she is well equipped to KNOW this.
cubefox 1y ago
This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind. > the ChatGPT acknowledgement She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, not for writing the paper (she explicitly emphasizes she wrote it herself), which you didn't make clear. Many researchers today probably use it similarly for literature research (rather than just Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc), and there is nothing wrong with that. > I suppose not surprising coming from someone who built their career on YouTube. Phrasing it like that seems misleading. She has a PhD and has worked in academia as a theoretical physicist for most of her career, she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind. I actually opened the paper and started reading and I’m commenting on that. It’s frustrating that anything less than glowing positivity about YouTube influencers draws accusations of having an “axe to grind”. I don’t have any relationship to this person. > She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, Right, that’s the problem I was pointing out. Using ChatGPT for physics research (even if it’s just summarizing papers, though it’s not clear what she meant) is well known to be fraught with hallucinations. > she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel. This is fairly misleading as it’s not hard to see her YouTube channel has found a far larger audience than her physics blog or her academic posts at institutes like the the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. In the very beginning of the paper she says she’s seeking a new affiliation.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Bro she's an entertainer on an infomercial platform. Pretty fair to call that out. Like if someone said back in the day they get their science from infomercials whatever they had to say would be instantly discredited. But somehow once infomercials moved to Youtube they are now high level thought.

MrGilbert 1y ago

> but she has taken a hard turn into audience capture and speaking over-confidently far out of her area of expertise. Sounds like she is doing Youtube to earn some bucks off it, then? Usually, you'll stir up a controversy or make bold claims to create engagement, which in turn pleases "the algorithm".

Aurornis 1y ago
Kind of, but there's a difference between trying to stir up controversy by "just asking questions" as opposed to attacking the actual experts while overconfidently pushing competing theories, for example. Lately she's been dabbling with soft support for well known grifters like Eric Weinstein, though last I heard she stopped short of actually endorsing his theories. I think there's just too many views to be had by courting that audience, so it becomes irresistible to engage with. The best thing a good physics communicator could do would be to completely ignore the well known physics grifters and focus on the quality content, but instead she has been leaning toward defensing Weinstein and others.
mrguyorama 1y ago
She makes really really good money. Angela Collier recently made a sad video about this. Sabine makes a video with sponsorship included basically every day. With her subscription numbers, that's a LOT of money. Basically, screaming that "They don't want you to hear THIS" is extremely profitable. She's a very well paid member of the anti-science ecosystem.
- dylan604 1y ago
  With that kind of description, I'm surprised she hasn't been tapped to join POTUS' administration.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    I mean, don't take my description for it, just scroll through her videos, watch some about things you understand, etc. I am critical of her, but I would not put her on the level of Alex Jones or other really awful people. However, her blurb on the back of that "War on science" book is pretty gross. Sabine absolutely is still capable of producing and understanding science. She chooses to make the content she does. She also clearly treats her youtube career as just business, making pretty good money from taking random science papers from random journals and using them as a reason to lambast all of science. Plenty of youtubers who do science, including people who post here like the guy from Applied Science, are pretty far from monetizing their content, sometimes to a fault, generally because they aren't looking to make crazy money, just cool stuff. I actually hope she publishes more. This paper looks..... not good, but every good scientist has put out papers that are more like afternoon fun than rigorous work. That's fine by me. I would love for Sabine to produce real science, it's vastly more beneficial for humanity than her "Here's how science LIES TO YOU" slop. I tried to watch her in the beginning, but even then it was clear the kind of audience she was trying to cultivate. It feels gross. I don't know if she truly believes what she says. Her complaints about being mistreated for being a woman seemed sincere, and not as trumped up as most of her videos, and there's plenty of sexism in science Academia, just like most places. It's hard to criticize Youtubers for their thumbnails and titles, as the soulless youtube machine forces them, but there's definitely a pattern. Basically, it's hard to look at people like NileRed, Explosions&Fire, Applied Science, Thought Emporium, etc who are literally running science labs through patreon funding and then Sabine says she's being silenced for her unorthodox views with over a million subscribers. I'm tired of people claiming they are silenced while parrot literal mainstream talking points to an audience of millions. Complaints about "The hubble tension shows we might not have everything right in our astrophysics models" is fine, dandy, I literally agree (I'm not a physicist), but complaining about string theory, which remember she's a physicist so she KNOWS nobody in physics actually spends any time, breath, or effort on string theory, and her claims that "Physics hasn't done anything in 50 years" is blatantly false and she is well equipped to KNOW this.

cubefox 1y ago

This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind. > the ChatGPT acknowledgement She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, not for writing the paper (she explicitly emphasizes she wrote it herself), which you didn't make clear. Many researchers today probably use it similarly for literature research (rather than just Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc), and there is nothing wrong with that. > I suppose not surprising coming from someone who built their career on YouTube. Phrasing it like that seems misleading. She has a PhD and has worked in academia as a theoretical physicist for most of her career, she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.

Aurornis 1y ago
> This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind. I actually opened the paper and started reading and I’m commenting on that. It’s frustrating that anything less than glowing positivity about YouTube influencers draws accusations of having an “axe to grind”. I don’t have any relationship to this person. > She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, Right, that’s the problem I was pointing out. Using ChatGPT for physics research (even if it’s just summarizing papers, though it’s not clear what she meant) is well known to be fraught with hallucinations. > she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel. This is fairly misleading as it’s not hard to see her YouTube channel has found a far larger audience than her physics blog or her academic posts at institutes like the the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. In the very beginning of the paper she says she’s seeking a new affiliation.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Bro she's an entertainer on an infomercial platform. Pretty fair to call that out. Like if someone said back in the day they get their science from infomercials whatever they had to say would be instantly discredited. But somehow once infomercials moved to Youtube they are now high level thought.