On Sabine Hossenfelder (Who seems to be very eager to capitalize on the latest scam aka "climate change")
5 minutes of internet research turned out these gems (I decided to look this up because i have quite a bit of interest in various topics in Physics):
I particularly love this one:
Before I really knew much about physics, I liked Sabine and thought she was “speaking truth to power” in a way. Now that I know quite a bit more, I find that the majority of her audience is more of the “pop-sci” crowd who aren’t really able to form their own opinions and therefore just believe what she says unquestioningly. Among this crowd, she has positioned herself to be an authority, which she really is not. I find her to be extremely opinionated in a way that does not allow for other opinions to exist, meaning that she sees other opinions as being “unable to accept the truth” (where “the truth” here is really just her opinion). One instance of this is how she hates anything related to naturalness and acts like people who want to use naturalness as a motivation for physics are simply “lost in math” (the literal title for her book), but she conveniently leaves out that naturalness has historically been a very good motivator and has found huge success. She also rails against any future colliders, saying they are a waste of money because no one can guarantee any new discoveries will be made at these higher energies, but this is so antithetical to how science works and human exploration in general, not to mention that if you want to complain about wasted money in society, there are WAY bigger fish to fry (like the inflated military budget for instance, which spends more money in 2 days than the entire LHC cost to build over a decade). I am also a bit turned off by the fact that her new role as a “science communicator” (meaning her YouTube channel) comes across as being a bit of a money making ploy, but then again I guess everyone has to pay the bills somehow.
And this
The reason she is something of a controversial figure in the physics community, is that she has very definite opinions - and they are just opinions - about how science should be done.
She presents these in an extremely authoritative way, as if her understanding of philosophy of science is both all encompassing and absolute, when in fact she is not an expert in philosophy of science, and the field is not understood in such an absolute way that views cannot be challenged anyway.
Because her audience is pretty wide, and she may be the only, or one of the few people they listen to on these topics, her opinions can be taken as received wisdom. This has an actual effect on both the popular perception of fields she decides to target (e.g. String theory), even of the perception of these fields by scientists in other areas who haven't studied them, and consequently on the funding that these fields receive.
It's hard to articulate a strong response to what she does, because she's very dismissive. See her recent extremely rude and dismissive twitter thread against a physicist Arttu Rajantie for an example. Arttu argued clearly on historical and scientific basis that an experiment was worth doing and Sabine dismissed him in a horribly disrespectful way, see her replies at the end of his thread. It's hard to see what more could have been done to convince her.
Another reason it's hard to respond to her is that the reasons for thinking string theory is a productive thing to investigate are quite technical sometimes, and although I'm sure some very talented person could make a convincing counterpoint in the popular science sphere, such a person isn't really out there, or if they are they don't have the same platform as Sabine, or people who follow Sabine take it that when she angrily dismisses someone, that's because their point doesn't make sense. This is not the case, her angry dismissals are an effective tactic to convince people to ignore the argument of her adversary.
There are good reasons to think that string theory is a productive field to study. It's not just 'being lost in the math'. Scientists aren't just cynically studying it for the grant money, it represents a possibly huge leap in our understanding of the natural world. When people say it's not testible, well that's a good argument, but you have to keep in mind that the theory is extremely complicated and still quite poorly understood. It is not at all unlikely that continued study will uncover new aspects of the theory which are accessible to experiment. The only way we ensure that this possible resolution to some of the deepest questions about the universe remains forever untested is to cut funding, and stop exploring it, and that's what Sabine wants us to do.
And this, particularly interesting as this goes into her actual field of study, which is Theoretical Physics
www.essentiafoundation.org
5 minutes of internet research turned out these gems (I decided to look this up because i have quite a bit of interest in various topics in Physics):
I particularly love this one:
Before I really knew much about physics, I liked Sabine and thought she was “speaking truth to power” in a way. Now that I know quite a bit more, I find that the majority of her audience is more of the “pop-sci” crowd who aren’t really able to form their own opinions and therefore just believe what she says unquestioningly. Among this crowd, she has positioned herself to be an authority, which she really is not. I find her to be extremely opinionated in a way that does not allow for other opinions to exist, meaning that she sees other opinions as being “unable to accept the truth” (where “the truth” here is really just her opinion). One instance of this is how she hates anything related to naturalness and acts like people who want to use naturalness as a motivation for physics are simply “lost in math” (the literal title for her book), but she conveniently leaves out that naturalness has historically been a very good motivator and has found huge success. She also rails against any future colliders, saying they are a waste of money because no one can guarantee any new discoveries will be made at these higher energies, but this is so antithetical to how science works and human exploration in general, not to mention that if you want to complain about wasted money in society, there are WAY bigger fish to fry (like the inflated military budget for instance, which spends more money in 2 days than the entire LHC cost to build over a decade). I am also a bit turned off by the fact that her new role as a “science communicator” (meaning her YouTube channel) comes across as being a bit of a money making ploy, but then again I guess everyone has to pay the bills somehow.
And this
The reason she is something of a controversial figure in the physics community, is that she has very definite opinions - and they are just opinions - about how science should be done.
She presents these in an extremely authoritative way, as if her understanding of philosophy of science is both all encompassing and absolute, when in fact she is not an expert in philosophy of science, and the field is not understood in such an absolute way that views cannot be challenged anyway.
Because her audience is pretty wide, and she may be the only, or one of the few people they listen to on these topics, her opinions can be taken as received wisdom. This has an actual effect on both the popular perception of fields she decides to target (e.g. String theory), even of the perception of these fields by scientists in other areas who haven't studied them, and consequently on the funding that these fields receive.
It's hard to articulate a strong response to what she does, because she's very dismissive. See her recent extremely rude and dismissive twitter thread against a physicist Arttu Rajantie for an example. Arttu argued clearly on historical and scientific basis that an experiment was worth doing and Sabine dismissed him in a horribly disrespectful way, see her replies at the end of his thread. It's hard to see what more could have been done to convince her.
Another reason it's hard to respond to her is that the reasons for thinking string theory is a productive thing to investigate are quite technical sometimes, and although I'm sure some very talented person could make a convincing counterpoint in the popular science sphere, such a person isn't really out there, or if they are they don't have the same platform as Sabine, or people who follow Sabine take it that when she angrily dismisses someone, that's because their point doesn't make sense. This is not the case, her angry dismissals are an effective tactic to convince people to ignore the argument of her adversary.
There are good reasons to think that string theory is a productive field to study. It's not just 'being lost in the math'. Scientists aren't just cynically studying it for the grant money, it represents a possibly huge leap in our understanding of the natural world. When people say it's not testible, well that's a good argument, but you have to keep in mind that the theory is extremely complicated and still quite poorly understood. It is not at all unlikely that continued study will uncover new aspects of the theory which are accessible to experiment. The only way we ensure that this possible resolution to some of the deepest questions about the universe remains forever untested is to cut funding, and stop exploring it, and that's what Sabine wants us to do.
And this, particularly interesting as this goes into her actual field of study, which is Theoretical Physics
The fantasy behind Sabine Hossenfelder's superdeterminism
Our Executive Director critiques physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's proposed 'superdeterminism,' which aims to account for the theoretical difficulties inherent to quantum measurements without departing from physicalist metaphysical assumptions.
www.essentiafoundation.org
️ SUDDENLY ☙ Tuesday, February 20, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 
