BarkeepCurrent Reality
xxce2AAb
Eager Eaglethe quote comes from this video where Sabine reported - over 1y ago - how she lost trust in the peer review process of scientific research in the field of physics
www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg
6min 55s
I was asked to keep this confidential
Snot Flickermanmcgill.ca/…/sabine-hossenfelder-asks-if-science-d…
While the Trump regime eviscerates science, Sabine Hossenfelder, a German physicist by training turned science YouTuber, published a video whose thumbnail states in large red letters, “Academia is Communism.” And an upcoming book called The War on Science, written by a coalition of grievance-mongers including Lawrence Krauss, Peter Boghossian, and Gad Saad, received a glowing, official endorsement from Hossenfelder: “Higher education isn’t what it used to be,” she wrote. “Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book.”
In her February video thumbnailed “Academia is Communism,” Hossenfelder argues that the defunding of academic research will probably happen, whether we want it or not, and she cites Elon Musk’s, Marc Andreessen’s, and Peter Thiel’s vilification of universities: that they’re bastions of communism and the enemies of progress, with their researchers essentially on government welfare. She expands on the arguments in favour of moving basic research to the private sector: that government grants tend to be short-lived while entrepreneurs plan for the long term; that serendipitous discoveries could still happen within companies; that silly research ideas would no longer be financed; and that private investors are better at taking risks than national funding bodies.
Yeah, she sounds like an absolute fuckwit to me.
You’ve got the throwing up communism as an evil canard and labeling Academia as communist, which if anything, Academia is corporatist and being twisted by corporations funneling money into flawed science. Yet, that’s literally what she supports, the privatization of science and having corporations have private ownership over scientific progress.
You’ve got the “cancel culture” and “DEI” canards that she claims is resulting in some form of self-censorship. Which is just a load of horseshit, come on.
This is exactly the kind of shit that leads idiot MAGA fucktards to distrust science entirely.
This bitch ain’t helping, sorry, not sorry.
Please, OP, I implore you to re-assess your view of this situation. Academia is far from perfect and has a lot of issues to be resolved, sure, but it is not communist by any stretch, nor is privatization of science in any way a fucking solution. That’s just handing the billionaires of the world the cyberpunk dystopia they so desperately want on a silver platter. If anything, science needs to be more open, not less.
I had never heard of this lady, and now I both regret hearing about her and also feel emboldened to tell people not to trust this fucking corporate dick sucking swine. I wonder how much corporations are paying her to push this swill against open research that’s publicly owned.
It’s wild this is posted in Linux Memes because she’s basically arguing for Microsoft and closed source here, by proxy.
EDIT: One final note
argues that the defunding of academic research will probably happen, whether we want it or not
Never obey in advance. That’s what she suggests we do here.
Sabine Hossenfelder Asks If Science Is Dying. It’s Not.
Physics is dying. It’s mathematical fiction. Science is failing. Most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. I don’t trust scientists. Would you believe me if I told you these statements came from a popular science communicator? While the Trump regime eviscerates science, Sabine Hossenfelder, a German physicist by training turned science YouTuber, published a video whose thumbnail states in large red letters, “Academia is Communism.” And an upcoming book called The War on Science, written by a coalition of grievance-mongers including Lawrence Krauss, Peter Boghossian, and Gad Saad, received a glowing, official endorsement from Hossenfelder: “Higher education isn’t what it used to be,” she wrote. “Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book.” Hossenfelder, who began her online career breaking physics down into digestible morsels for the public, has become a case study when contemplating the question of what responsibilities we have as science communicators, a job with no barrier to entry and no professional order to set and attempt to enforce ethical standards. “No one’s doing anything about it” I’m not disputing Hossenfelder’s skill as an educator. I’ve watched some of her science videos and found her to be gifted at explaining complexity without sacrificing nuance. The problem is her alarmist language, which misleads her 1.67 million subscribers on YouTube into thinking that universities are communist, groupthink sloughs where lazy fabulists engage in self-gratifying fiction to waste taxpayer money. Over the course of multiple videos, her claims widen to absurd levels: first, particle physics is dying, then all of physics is facing certain death, and finally science itself is on the verge of collapsing. “Because the future of physics depends on it,” she said a few days ago in reference to wanting people to listen to her warning. “And the future of science depends on the future of physics, and the future of our civilizations depends on the future of science.” She’s not going for half measures, and I have to express amazement at her pronouncement on the entirety of science. How can one person accurately judge all of systematic knowledge gathering to be headed for a cliff? Why is science failing according to her? She believes the foundation of physics isn’t based on sound scientific principles, with physicists drunk on their own mathematics, conjuring up fake subatomic particles to fit models divorced from reality. Somehow, this alleged problem gets transposed to every field of scientific study. Her rants about science conking out, which tend to get her more views than her actual science videos, reveal a striking anti-establishment view. She paints publicly-funded researchers as accomplices in a giant scam: they apparently sit on committees to approve each other’s research funding knowing full well that it is all fiction meant to “produce useless papers that no one understands,” she says, “and therefore no one dares criticize.” I wonder if Hossenfelder has ever sat on a grant review committee. I have. I’ve even chaired one. I’ve also helped researchers assemble grant applications. I’ve witnessed scientists carefully document the long history of studies that led them to this one question they want to answer; put together detailed budgets; explain why they and their collaborators are uniquely qualified to tackle this question. To say this is all a scam is ludicrous. Dave Farina, a popular YouTuber who has a Master’s degree in science education, has criticized Hossenfelder’s language and the impact it could have on trust in science. Hossenfelder has since doubled, then tripled down. Confidence in science is a hard thing to measure, with media headlines often highlighting surveys that ask basic questions like, “Do you trust scientists?” When we dig down into specific scientific questions, we often notice gaps between what scientists agree on and what the public at large believes: on issues like climate change, vaccine safety, the theory of evolution, the safety of fluoride in drinking water. These rifts have been exploited by political movements based on science denial. Now listen to Hossenfelder’s words: “Science is failing. It’s failing right in front of our eyes, and no one’s doing anything about it.” Whether she means to or not, her hyperbolic attacks on academic research can only fuel distrust of science itself. What is Hossenfelder’s solution? Recently, she’s been contemplating privatization. Defunding academia In her February video thumbnailed “Academia is Communism,” Hossenfelder argues that the defunding of academic research will probably happen, whether we want it or not, and she cites Elon Musk’s, Marc Andreessen’s, and Peter Thiel’s vilification of universities: that they’re bastions of communism and the enemies of progress, with their researchers essentially on government welfare. She expands on the arguments in favour of moving basic research to the private sector: that government grants tend to be short-lived while entrepreneurs plan for the long term; that serendipitous discoveries could still happen within companies; that silly research ideas would no longer be financed; and that private investors are better at taking risks than national funding bodies. Is any of this true? The idea that universities are strongholds of communism is not only laughable but part of an explicit assault on education publicly spelled out by its architects, including Christopher Rufo who famously tweeted about how he was going to make the phrase “critical race theory” toxic. The red scare is not over, and calling universities “communist” is an effective way for its enemies to rally the public around them. That Sabine Hossenfelder has answered the call surprises me. Government grants are often limited in their duration, true, and academics spend a good amount of time begging for money. But the idea that private companies can fund basic research—with no immediate return on investment—and do so with long-term stability does not hold water to me. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, pivot. They abandon projects when they don’t appear to be paying off. They operate under the watchful eyes of their investors and must produce deliverables and quarterly reports. I have a hard time imagining companies investing in a researcher who’s dazzled by how many pea plants are smooth or wrinkled, when DNA hasn’t even been discovered. Why should they care when a monetizable application may be decades down the line? It thus incentivizes a shift away from “science to learn about the universe” and toward “science to deliver profitable technologies.” I can’t see the humanities surviving; yet, for all the vicious attacks on silly-sounding thesis titles, the humanities guide how we plan, execute, interpret and disseminate science. Privatization can also make safety more malleable in the pursuit of profits. A complete move of fundamental research away from universities would turn scientists into influencers, trying to get their ideas financed by the public at large and by temperamental oligarchs. If you still think billionaires from the richest countries on Earth are rational, munificent arbiters of how humanity should spend its resources, I don’t think you’ve been reading the news lately. Even more fundamentally, scientific research is a collaborative activity. It thrives in disclosures: papers, pre-prints, presentations. The private sector is competitive and arms itself with non-disclosure agreements. How is basic research supposed to move forward if it is uniquely performed in silos? Sabine Hossenfelder accuses academic physicists of making up fictional particles, of weaving mathematics the way that Scheherazade braided tales to delay her death. The end result, according to her, is a lack of discoveries. As many actual researchers have pointed out, this is false. Physicists discovered the theorized Higgs boson. They detected gravitational waves, which led to a Nobel Prize. They imaged an actual black hole, found at the center of the M87 galaxy. They identified nearly 6,000 exoplanets so far—planets that orbit stars other than our sun and that can be detected indirectly using creative means. And since my own qualifications lie with the biomedical sciences, and since Hossenfelder’s worries extend to science as a whole, we have also made substantial progress on biological issues in the last decades: mRNA vaccines used in both humans and livestock; medications like Ozempic; targeted therapies against cancer; the sequencing of the human genome and the genetic material of many other species; the discovery of CRISPR and of small, non-coding RNA molecules like microRNAs; and the taming of HIV-AIDS from a deadly disease into a life-long, suppressed condition, to name but a few. A cynic may claim that we’re not innovating as much as we used to, when quantum mechanics was a fresh new proposition or when we put a man on the moon. But innovation within a field of study is not linear: the low-hanging fruit gets picked first, until we’re left with thornier rewards. This is normal. It’s not a sign that science has reached the end of its life. Knowing which bit of theorizing or of fundamental research will end up paying dividends is practically impossible to guess. I mentioned Mendel’s peas: this monk’s obsession with the statistics of pea plant progeny paved the way for the theory of evolution and our understanding of how traits like eye colour and predispositions to cancer are transmitted from parents to children. An interest in bacteria that thrive in hot springs led to a revolution in the lab, where DNA could easily be amplified and studied by harnessing one of a bacterium’s robust enzymes. The path from basic knowledge to technology is not always straight. Ideas come from everywhere. Basic research belongs in the open. It’s not dying; it’s imperfect So why, you may wonder, has Sabine Hossenfelder repeatedly agonized over the end of science? Dave Farina hints at it in his first video criticizing her: audience capture. With access to analytics, we can see what performs well and decide to do more of it, because this is what our audience wants. Content creators whose paychecks depend on views are incentivized to double down on what gets the best response. Hossenfelder’s grievance videos—initially just a story she told about her negative experience trying to work within academia, later becoming an on-going discussion of how science is collapsing—do well. High views lead to more ad revenue, better sponsorship deals, and more viewers donating to her Patreon. She’s currently making CAD 14,750 a month on Patreon alone. I’m happy that there’s room online for profitable careers in science communication. I also can’t rule out audience capture, whether conscious or not, encouraging Hossenfelder to keep posting new videos about how science is broken. The thing is, I could have gone down a similar path. As a Ph.D. student, I noticed worrying problems in the research I and others around me were conducting. Some findings in the literature wouldn’t replicate. One large dataset had to be analyzed via cherry-picking what we hoped would be promising. Molecular signatures in the blood were being published as a promising way to diagnose cancer, even though they didn’t overlap with each other for a given cancer type (I ended up publishing about this). A local talk by epidemiology rock star John Ioannidis—who would later turn COVID contrarian—opened my eyes even more: science had a problem. I abandoned the Ph.D. program a year after my committee members had asked me if I really saw myself graduating in this lab after rotating through multiple projects, some of which we were forced to abandon. I could have turned this experience of the difficulties, inefficiencies and failures of scientific research into a lucrative career as a science contrarian. I could have rung the bell, become a whistleblowing regular on the podcast circuit, written a book about the underbelly of academic research, where fraud and incompetence are routine. And I would have misled people in the process while enriching myself. Science is not broken, and it most certainly is not dying. It is an inefficient human activity. Its aspirations are marred by bad systemic incentives, like encouraging researchers to publish sexy findings in big journals. It needs to be improved, and many scientists are hard at work doing just that—to claim, as Hossenfelder does, that no one is doing anything about it is foolish. In the span of my own short career in labs, I have witnessed the rise of open science, the repeated questioning of certain popular statistics in papers, and better reporting of papers that get retracted, as well as an increased awareness on the part of journalists around animal studies and preprints. Deficiencies in science won’t be solved by taking an axe to the whole thing. It requires coalitions, transparency, and positive incentives. Sabine Hossenfelder often complains about the negative feedback she receives after, for example, getting an op-ed published in The New York Times or The Guardian, but no deontological police is going to come after her for misleading people about the state of science. We science communicators don’t have professional orders. Our mistakes are pointed out by peers, by topic experts, and by the public at large. We can choose to focus only on the insults as a way to dismiss all criticism, but it won’t improve our game. We need to be accurate when describing the state of scientific research. When we catastrophize, we feed a disillusionment which political actors can weaponize to get rid of scientific evidence they find inconvenient. That’s when science communication starts to skid toward propaganda. @jonathanjarry.bsky.social
Wow, I enjoyed her videos now and then; sounds like she’s a fucking asshole actually. Not going to interact with her shit anymore.
I mean, it sounds like she’s got some valid critiques in respect to her own field of study, but her offered solutions of privatization are pretty off the mark. She also really can’t speak for other fields of study but apparently feels comfortable doing so.
She’s bringing real “You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.” energy.
OinksHer endorsement of the stupid Krauss book is the most damning thing she did objectively, but she went off the rails earlier than that with her transphobic videos. She presents “science without the gobbledygook” except when it’s trans people, then she pulls out random junk studies that make her feel justified in her disgust reaction, apparently. Now of course she openly aligns with Physics cranks like Eric Weinstein and the Trump administration so there’s absolutely no doubt left about what she’s doing even if you ignore her non-Physics videos.
The Krauss book is funny in a morbid way too, it keeps talking about how Biden will do this or that while releasing while Trump was (is?) doing unprecedented budget cuts for all kinds of scientific institutions. Oh and most of the other guest writers for the book are former Professors who were fired for sexually abusing their students, that must be this “Cancel Culture” thing Hossenfelder is talking about.
Oh so she’s a TERF, too? That tracks…
I wonder how much corporations are paying her to push this swill against open research that’s publicly owned.
Probably nothing. I’ve been following her for a while and it seems to me she’s just been betrayed and disappointed by academia to an extreme that made her turn a 180 and defend private funding, when that’s clearly doomed from the start.
I wouldn’t take these bits too seriously, but she does make good arguments overall and exposes some real problems and concerns that I’ve also seen as a grad student in a different field. I can’t agree that privatization is the way forward, but there’s more to her channel than that. I follow mostly because she’s a great explainer of the more complex concepts in quantum physics, and overall seems to know well what she’s talking about when it’s in her field.
Right, academia has a whole boatload of problems, but her proposed solutions are a non-starter for for anyone with a brain
Damn, making a whole video full of excuses for Thiel-backed Eric Weinstein, and going as far as removing the article criticising his “Geometric Unity” theory from her own blog, all for the love of the game? Not sure of it’s any better than straight up being sponsored tbh.
refs: her video (appears to be removed): www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiFYcuoK490 archived article: web.archive.org/…/guest-post-problems-with-eric.h…
Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein -- and they should be
Sabine is one of the most influential scientists today. You haven’t heard of her? She does amazing work and spreads knowledge, new science discoveries, new theories. I mean she did sell out a little bit in the last two years with the ads, but the videos are still brilliant.
She does criticize academia now and then, but I haven’t heard any critique from her that wasn’t completely justified.
But I never heard her say anything remotely what you posted here.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=htb_n7ok9AU
Here’s her “Academia is Communism” video.
posthillpress.com/…/the-war-on-science-thirty-nin…
Here’s where the pull quote she made for the War on Science book is listed.
From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Many who have spoken up against this threat have lost their positions, and a climate of fear has arisen that strikes at the heart of modern education and research. Banding together to finally speak out, this brave and unprecedented group of scholars issues a clarion call for change.
“Higher education isn’t what it used to be. Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book. This collection of essays tells of threats to open inquiry, free speech, and the scientific process itself. A much-needed book.”
—Sabine Hossenfelder, Physicist and Author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions
And hey, Richard Dawkins was good at presenting science to people, too. Didn’t mean he wasn’t and isn’t also an asshole with some real stupid ideas like when he proposed we shouldn’t let children read fiction because they may not be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Should we defund academia?
Did you watch the video?
I don’t need to watch it to understand that conflating academia with communism is fuck-stupid and that privatizing science is a fuck-stupid solution to academia’s very real problems.
Also other folks here are pointing out she rejects science she doesn’t like when it comes to transgender science, for example.
As I said elsewhere, she’s bringing real “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole” energy.
she rejects science she doesn’t like when it comes to transgender science
I don’t think so… her content on trans people sounds almost as impartial as it could be, but prove me wrong if you have a better source
I think you should watch her content and draw your own conclusions about her instead of trusting clickbait-y articles or lemmy upvotes
Well for one she’s a physicist, not a biologist or psychologist, and you can find plenty of threads online where people are pointing out that she is cherry picking her data, and seems to pretend that numerous other studies on the subject simply don’t exist.
Also, the person I originally responded to claimed:
She does it for the field is theoretical physics, the field she knows.
Well, shocker, she totally does it for other shit she has no relevant background in, like transgender studies, and feels like she has all the knowledge at her fingertips while conveniently ignoring other research.
Ah, maybe you should watch though. I don’t think the article represents her views.
The article reads like someone wants clicks and they used a famous person to get them.
NatanoxI’ve no clue why this is in this channel, I didn’t expect to see anything about this TERF here. She’s singing the same song the US regime sings, she just happens to be one of the first those people are going after.
Edit:
This picture is even AI generated and was cropped, what the fuck. Everything about this is garbage. OP needs some ratio.
Reality - Lemmy.World
In contrast to the person who sent this email, I don’t think that taxpayers are stupid. We’re not paying physicists for crazy new hype. We want to see results and soon taxpayers will start asking some tough questions, an example. So, they told you that this due next experiment that’s being built from some billions dollars of public funds at Formula will tell us why we exist, or why the university disappear. I regret to inform you that it won’t do any such thing, regardless of what the result of the experiment will be. It’ll not tell us why the universe contains more meta than antimatter, because this question is impossible to answer within the context of our current theories, the matter antimatter symmetry are duna supposedly shedding light on is a pseudo problem. You’re not supposed to ask you’re supposed to believe that you’re too stupid to understand what it’s good for, but let me fill you in it’s good. You’re not supposed to ask you’re supposed to believe that you’re too stupid to understand what it’s good for, but let me fill you in. It’s a good Article physicists employed. Meanwhile, the Chinese are laughing. They are so soft that you think it makes your country worth defending, but that particle physicists have created these bubbles of useless research is not a problem that can be fixed from inside the community. The only way to fix the problem is to stop paying them. I am afraid that this is exactly what’s going to happen. I didn’t want this to happen. This is why I wrote my 2017 comment, but at this point, it’s too late for them to change anything about it. I’ve read this email dozens of times, and each time I’m struck by how condescending it is to all the people who do honest work and whose taxes pay for academic jobs. It makes me sick, and it makes me glad that I no longer have anything to do with their so-called research area that’s rotten to the core. If you are one of the many physicists who know full well what nonsense research I’m talking about, but you still keep your mouth shut if you’re one of those who laugh at me, because no one believes what I’m saying. If you’re one of those who spread lies about me, like that story, that I was invited to give a talk at CERN, but was afraid to go. Did you make that up? I hope it was amusing, but Jesus, use your fking brain. Your problem isn’t that I’m making noise. Your problem is that you’re lying to the people who pay you. Is that your cowards, without a shred of Integrity? Your problem is that every bubble eventually bursts, by the way.
Little8LostCame here to link to the other post after ive seen it
good job o7
Brummbaer