“Innovation is slowing, research productivity is declining, scientific work is becoming more disruptive. In this video I summarize what we know about the problem and what possible causes have been proposed. I also explain why this matters so much to me.” – Sabine Hossenfelder
Any thoughts from less bigoted creators would be welcome. Not in the mood to watch anything with this person.
what exactly is your problem with “this person”, aka phd holder in her respective field?
Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, author, science communicator, and YouTuber. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology, and of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
She’s ableist and transphobic:
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org
well, that’s unfortunate. if you are familiar with the topic, i encourage you to add that to the wiki page.
The second link was exactly what I was thinking of, thanks for finding those!
Sure, we’re happy to help!
If I remember right she did a video about trans healthcare and kept referring to a shitty study that was either disproved or had some other issue that made it mostly dismissed by mainstream psychology. She is a physicist not a psychologist and she’s even criticized people for speaking outside their field at one point, then she made a video blowing the risks of transition for trans people way out of proportion. She also just didn’t use or didn’t know about multiple studies showing transition is an effective and accepted treatment for gender dysphoria, basically disagreeing with the general consensus on the effectiveness of transition. I don’t recall all the details but it was at that point I just stopped paying attention to her stuff. I think she’s also been criticized for kinda shitting on niche studies as “for funsies” projects because the existing science disagrees with the hypothesis, which is no reason to not try something. Like string theory and stuff like that.
thank you. might be worth updating the wiki article, if you feel competent to do it.
I’ll say this for her stuff: for a person so willing to argue that mainstream positions on her field are wrong or disregarding data out of conservatism she sure tends to latch on information she agrees with in areas where she’s not an expert and disregard other information.
I’d argue in this specific one her dismissal of “we could argue about how these guys are measuring innovation, but all the papers seem to find the same thing” seems like exactly that, but hey.
I, too, am curious about this whole Hossenfelder imbroglio that I’m first hearing about.
I think the YouTuber Professor Dave just did some videos about her encouraging science denialism. The podcast Decoding the Gurus has also done an episode on her with similar commentary, “good science communicator but also encourages denialism” is the tldr.
She’s a good science communicator in her specialised area from a particular POV (No, Sabine, physics, also theoretical physics, has made progress in the last 50 years) but past that she neither has a clue nor the discipline to work towards having a clue, or the sense to work with people who have a clue.
She lacks that one crucial virtue of a scientist: Considering herself to be clueless. And as a science communicator you need to be a good scientist – not in pedigree of your degree, but approach to knowledge.
Isn’t this a classic correlation/causation bias? There are more storks, why not more babies? Maybe big discoveries are less likely, but detailed knowledge is improving all the time.
Exactly. It honestly feels like she thinks paradigm shift is the only indicator of progress in science.
