Professor Dave demolishes Sabine Hossenfelder.
I feel that. The topic of my history class last week and this week is about bias in late 19th/early 20th century evolutionary biology, and how we have to be critical and responsible in our assessment of scientific claims. It’s tough, because I’m strongly pro-science (obviously, I hope?) but I keep talking about dead ends and errors in the growth of a scientific field, and I have to take some time to reassure the students that our only hope to correct these kinds of problems is…science. I also have to explain that the way the errors are discovered is…science, again.
I’m not specifically interested in Sabine Hossenfelder — I don’t watch her videos, not even the ones that might contain good information — but I am concerned with the general problem of how anti-science propaganda manages to advance the causes of dogma. If science gets something wrong, as it does sometimes, it does not mean that superstition or bigotry are right. Raging against the whole of the scientific establishment and the scientific method is how you get RFK Jr put in charge of the NIH. I don’t think that even Hossenfelder believes that will be an improvement.
I’ve got a collection of science YouTubers I follow, and she was briefly in that collection on the strength of some of her breakdowns of interesting physics topics. And then she did an episode on trans people in sports and it was… yikes. Obviously, she’s a crank- a crank with a narrow field of expertise and an engaging presenter, but an absolute crank nonetheless.
//Mostly it’s the PBS science channels these days, and credit to PBS Space Time for being remarkably in depth and unafraid of math
In the real world, science is amazingly successful and the basis of our modern civilization.
Look around you.
Our existence is supported by machines that do stuff. Computers, the internet, microwave ovens, cell phones, TV, radio, cars, farm machinery, electricity, running water, etc..
Our bodies are supported by modern medicine which has extended our life spans by 30 years in a century.
We feed ourselves with genetically improved crops and empirically derived agricultural systems.
All this is the product of science.
Science has taken us from the stone age to the space age.
Science is successful because we are good at weeding out false ideas. It is a strength, not a weakness.
I have enjoyed Sabine’s science videos over the years. I am not a physicist, but I am interested in the big picture of things like gravity, time, cosmology. Sabine was always quite lucid on these subjects.
Until she fell off a cliff. She posted a long video describing her experience as a theoretical physicist and it was quite dark. She was, apparently, kicked around quite a lot. It’s too bad she’s using her popularity to promote crankdom. But, she’s not the first science to go out of her Vulcan mind, as McCoy once quipped.
When you’re “right” about something, and it is confirmed, you feel good but you learn NOTHING.
Being wrong, and correcting the error? That’s when you LEARN.
I have learned a lot. Still more errors to make, though!
The ultimate consequence is that in the end, every idea we ever thought to be true may turn out to be false. Science is 100% false! Again, that is a strength, not a weakness.
It’s been obvious for a while now that Hossenfelder has succumbed to the clickbait gods.
Doc Bill @4:
FTFY
To the extent that SH has a point, it is a very narrow one. Yes, elementary particle (sub-atomic particle) physics has been a victim of its success. The basic theories of the fundametal forces that effect only sub-atomic particles, the strong and weak nuclear forces, were worked out circa 1970-75, a creative explosion which spoiled a whole generation of particle physicists, who keep waiting and hoping that the glory days will return. That is frustrating for them, but it is no justification for SH to say that “science is bullshit” or “I don’t trust scientists,” which she does, quite explicitly. Elementary particle physics is a small part of physics, which is a modest part of science in general.
Adding to the frustration is that particle theory has run into great difficulties of principle which is not surprising when combining quantum mechanics, relativity, and field theory. String theory was a promising new approach which, 50 years later, has yet to yield any real results. You can philosophize about science all you want, but at the end of the day, what makes science, science is whether you have learned something, whether you have results.
Even before string theory, Steve Weinberg said that both theory and experitment were reaching the limits of human endurance, not to mention science funding. So yes, progress is slow
Another frustration is that many people believe that science, even fundament physics, is basically simple. So there should be a new Big Idea, which will make it all make sense. But no one has thought of it. By that standard, everything done in the last 50 years, in particle theory, is boring, negligible.
Thomas Kunh says that there is normal science, punctuated by revolutions. Revolutions are rare, so you have long stretches of normal science. The problem with particle physics is that its normal science tends to be rather boring and sterile, even for physicists. Which makes waiting for the revoltion particularly difficult.
And SH wasn’t able to get a job. Boo, hoo, me too. But that doesn’t justify lashing out at those who are still trying. Especially when there are plenty of anti-science and anti-vax types who will uncritically gobble up what she says.
I’ve noticed in some of her recent videos that she includes snide little asides mocking topics in social justice. I’m sure that further endears her to the dudebro crowd. They’re welcome to her.
She’s wanted a job in a part of physics with no practical applications. Such jobs are far a few between.
Rather than whining, she could try to explore things like the effects of the power struggle between administrators and professors which has had a real affect on her world.
I agree that her takes on trans people are horrible – the classic story of physicists thinking they know everything from first principles and don’t have to learn a field before publishing. (I’m a retired physicist.) No better than the NY Times.
I stopped following her after her ill-informed video about capitalism (-click-). I unsubscribed after that and I ticked the “do not recommend this channel” option. Thus I completely lost track of her and I do not regret it.
Huh, forgot that the URLs on FtB end by default with a slash but it cannot be at the end of a URL in HTML tags in comment. So here we go again -click-
In Sabine’s anti-neurodiversity autism video, she acknowledged her primary source was “an active troll misrepresenting the movement” and published it anyway.
She also promoted BetterHelp, despite the infamy it’d garnered sponsoring YouTubers. Less egregious, but yet another instance of disregard for vetting what she says or the welfare of her audience.
I don’t think Sabine was accusing science of failing, just those scientists pursuing anything remotely plausible for the sake of getting published and possibly having a career that’s not an eternal life-sucking existence as a post doc. I advise Dr. Myers and his followers to check into arxiv.org and look at some of the paper titles and reports themselves, particularly those in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology. Over the many years that I’ve followed the site, the papers have become impenetrable mathematical nonsense that has nothing to do with empirical science.
I have not watched any of the videos but science is clearly in big trouble. The latest machine learning conferences are putting the limit of maximum 20 submission per person (because people keep send the same rejected papers over and over again), they are receiving 10k+ submissions, they are doing around 3k accepted papers and the reviews are done very quickly in a matter of weeks, and very sloppily, they are random as fuck and mostly done by students and it is very common for the reviewer to have zero clue about the topic at hand and to say absolute gibberish and objectively and mathematically wrong statements.
Oh and I forgot to add that these are the top of the top conferences. The most prestigious. Rank A+ with all the deans and faculty heads and so on chasing these fucking accepted papers in huge numbers.
raven @2
Not quite. A longer life expectancy from birth mostly means there are fewer infants and young children dying now than in the past.
Now that’s still a very good thing but it doesn’t mean the average adult has 30 more years of life than in the past.
Cosmologists like Hossenfelder, and their pals the string theorists, are mostly marginal to the progress of useful science. Almost all of them spend their lives making up theories that will never be observationally tested. This leaves them plenty of free time to write popular science books about – you guessed it – cosmology and string theory. Since they don’t have a real scientific function, it’s not surprising they don’t generally have a grasp of how science is actually done.
I didn’t say that.
FWIW, babies and children are people too.
While they might not care if they are dead, their parents do.
There is a lot more to science than just cosmology and particle physics.
Biology, medicine, chemistry, paleontology, planetology, astronomy, computer science, robotics, etc..
While her chosen field might be stuck, hopefully temporarily, other science fields are making huge progress right now.
Oh, how else can what I quoted be interpreted?
No shit. I never wrote anything contrary to that point.
Well, perhaps as “A longer life expectancy from birth mostly means there are fewer infants and young children dying now than in the past.”
All that was said was our life-spans have been extended 30 years. It could be interpreted wrongly as the typical adult now lives 30 more years, but it could reasonably be interpreted as collectively the average life-span is now 30 years longer. To declare that only one possible interpretation is possible after the statement was clarified seems just a little belligerent to me.
“extended our life spans by 30 years” is pretty unambiguous, woozy.
Life span being the duration of a life.
—
Of course, a better metric is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
You are an illiterate idiot.
You need to take a class in English as a First Language.
Our is a collective term referring in this case to the class of all humans. It has zero to do with the distinction between adults and children
It is a correct statement.
More technically, it refers to life expectancy at birth today versus a century ago.
Now run along and go troll someone else.
You are wasting my time.
In that case, it’s good that I didn’t make such a declaration. My question of how else the statement that I quoted could be interpreted differently wasn’t a rhetorical one. I was legitimately asking since I didn’t see any other way in interpreting it and raven hasn’t yet provided a clarification on what they actually meant.
And for what’s it worth, the average life expectancy from birth has gone up around 20 years for men and 17 years for women since 1924. The increase is even smaller if the life expectancy is taken from later in life such as age 8.
Chill out. Seriously.
I’m someone on Internet who, at best, misinterpreted something you wrote.
Save the vitriol for someone who’s actually writing something heinous
The point is that life expectancy changes by age. The increase you stated, which by the way isn’t correct, would be less dramatic if taken from later in life than birth.
You made it seem like the average person in the 1920s dropped dead in their late 40s which wasn’t the case.
Now you’ve clarified but your figures are still wrong.
That’s funny since I’m not forcing you to read or reply to my posts.
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
(Written in some old collection of stories)
Science as a whole is doing well, but I’d agree with Sabine that particle physics and cosmology are in trouble. They are failing to self-correct.
@28 — Do you have any examples of extant failures to self-correct?
The average 19th century person died during childhood from causes that were easy to avoid once a good understanding of bacteria and hygiene emerged.
Today, the challenge is to deal with cancer and age-related neurological disease and it is very hard to progress once the low-hanging fruit are harvested.
Quarreling wether the extended life span for us elderly is based on medical science or better diet/exercise is not something I find productive.
.
I kind of agree with SHs criticism of AI, bitcoin and other hyped ideas.
-But for a reasonably rounded insight in new science I go to the library and read New Scientist.
Online, I find Phys.org and Medicalxpress.com are decent sources but it is hard going for a layman like myself to absorb information with minimum context.
@19/ raven : .”FWIW, babies and children are people too.
While they might not care if they are dead, their parents do.”
Pretty sure past a certain age when they get an inkling of what death is, most children do care whether they live or die..
#14 weylguy proves exactly what this video maker was talking about. What a maroon.
PiZed, you do tend to have a very long attention span and you post videos of people who take forever to make their point. I kinda don’t blame the likes of #14 too much TBH. Even in this video where he sulks and finally chooses to not bury the lede slathering a whole bunch of resentment upon it so much so that it is hard to hear his actual point, he then buries the new lede. When I finally heard him get to his new point at 25 minutes in, I was done with him. blah blah blah blah blah blah
It’s entirely possible he has something important to say in his last few minutes. I find it impossible to care. He wants to not be ignored? He thinks he’s being pithy and for him he may be, but for YouTube, and me who does have a college degree in science (go figure!) he is not.
Is Dr. Sabine a total malicious harmful meany mcjerkpants dickhead voicing the paranoia of the barbarians at the gates of civilization? Yep! Yes, yes she is. Can I have my 25 minutes of life back?
I agree — this is a major flaw with YouTube. If a professionally written, directed, and acted movie is 2 hours long (3 hours if they want to try our patience), why is this random, conversational, impromptu video of someone sitting in their car going on for 5 hours?
Brevity is hard. Overlong videos are easy.
Would you believe that the YouTube algorithm punishes you for being short and pithy?
There’s a perverse incentive to fill time for ads.
Yeah, nah.
This is as far on the other of her take as can be, no less hyperbolic.
A woman who monetises her videos and (not that big) supplements her income thereby?
Coasting on her cred? Sure.
Doing the “saying it like it is”? Sure.
But hey, I am not a hater.
Gotta take things as they are, old an new, by anyone.
And, hey. It is an opinion piece.
(As is the video featured in the OP)
CA7746: “There’s a perverse incentive to fill time for ads.”
I feel sorry for anyone who actually has to endure YouTube ads.
(But hey, adaptation is a thing, and I find it perverse to put up with ads needlessly)
Oh, right.
cf. https://buffer.com/resources/youtube-shorts-monetization/