Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real' physics to make it all sound very convincing. (By that I don't mean that she says factually wrong things, but that her conclusions or extrapolations from established facts seem to me, well, outrageous). However, I don't know enough physics to be able to tell if this is a correct feeling, and the Youtube comments are, as usual, one big fanboy fest, which is true for any large enough channel - even those of flat earthers and similarly delusional content).So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this?
fruffy|1 year ago
I know nothing about her but the video on her experience in academia is spot on. It's a pretty common experience among STEM academics. You will face the point where you have to compromise your academic "purity" and curiosity for trendy topics to survive. This also implies publishing "bullshit" papers and "bullshit" grants. Only certain types of people make it through that.
prof-dr-ir|1 year ago
I am asking this because HN neems to be so much more negative of academia than what I am seeing around me.
More generally I think it is worth stressing that any site like this can be a terrible echo chamber at times. Generally there are smart people here, but on some topics I suspect that the consensus could be completely misguided.
contrarian1234|1 year ago
nonrandomstring|1 year ago
Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research.
Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on almost everything) has given knock-down commentary that I find impossible to ignore on how academia went to seed, and is now unfit for teaching, learning and honest research.
From a personal perspective; I worked in universities for over 30 years. What we have now is unrecognisable from the institutions I started teaching at in the early 1990s. Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. It is fake to the core. I no longer recognise these places as universities. I've seen brilliant colleagues go crazy, retire early, turn to alcohol and drugs, commit suicide, or just wander off to live in the mountains and grow vegetables. I refuse to believe all those smart and dedicated people are/were "weak". Academia is a very toxic place and I would not advise any "smart and sensitive" person to go into that life if you value your health.
When you consider how much it costs a nation to educate someone to PhD level and then look at the churn and attrition, it's a massive bonfire of wealth.
I've written numerous pieces in the Times Higher on specific failings of universities, but one cannot halt a juggernaut of change with words alone. Now I am left only with curiosity at how higher education will change and what will come after.
My response has been to conduct and publish my own research independently outside the "academic system" and to start my own companies for teaching. By my standards, both are successful.
edit: grammar
lll-o-lll|1 year ago
> Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators.
Not just academia.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
AlanYx|1 year ago
gosub100|1 year ago
My biggest criticism of hers is that she is cynical and spends too much time tearing down other ideas rather than promoting anything.
But overall she does great things with showcasing the more ridiculous side of academia. She is adept at taking published research and showing that it is quackery. She shows how they manipulate data and mislead the media, often for more research money. I also applaud her counterpoint in particle physics regarding the waste involved in building yet another gigantic particle accelerator. It's a POV I wouldn't have considered, but I agree that the money could be better spent in other areas.
stdbrouw|1 year ago
eru|1 year ago
Tazerenix|1 year ago
Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians she presents a biased and exaggerated view of things in order to stoke engagement, and unless you are an expert it can be difficult/impossible to determine whether the view she is giving is balanced.
This is a classic issue with string theory critics, because string theory has many legitimate problems with it, but many of the critics are intellectually dishonest and you probably shouldn't listen to their criticisms on principle (but even I must admit it's quite hard to find good quality intellectually honest criticism of string theory which is digestible, so these contrarians tend to be the only loud voice).
In Sabine's case it is not so bad, because it is clear from some of her other positions that she is basically a crank. MOND and superdeterminism are basically crank physics at this point but she supports them purely because she is a contrarian. On this evidence alone you should not trust anything she says on any other subject, otherwise you're falling for a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia.
prof-dr-ir|1 year ago
I would like to add that Sabine's video on her academic experience was quite a tragic thing to watch. If her allegations are true then the behavior of her PhD supervisor was completely outrageous.
She also did seem a bit too dreamy-eyed about academia. Sure you can criticize everything you want, but she never seemed to have understood that tone of voice still matters. Academics are busy people with emotions, and not likely to engage with someone whose claims appear to have more loudness than substance.
n4r9|1 year ago
It's bizarrely parochial to suppose that every single photon is magically correlated with the experimenter's future measurement choices in a way that will exactly violate Bell's Theorem.
Another way to put it:
> If such a theory did exist, it would require a grand conspiracy of causal relationships leading to results in precise agreement with quantum mechanics, even though the theory itself would bear no resemblance to quantum mechanics. Moreover, it is hard to imagine why it should only be in Bell experiments that free choices would be significantly influenced by causes relevant also to the observed outcomes; rather, every conclusion based upon observed correlations, scientific or casual, would be meaningless because the observers’s method would always be suspect. It seems to us that any such theory would be about as plausible, and appealing, as, belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control.
Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell, Wiseman & Cavalcanti, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.06413
eru|1 year ago
beezle|1 year ago
On the latter, her beef is not that HEP has not made signficant discoveries in the past, rather that the costs going forward can no longer be justified and starve many, many other areas of physics of needed funding. Compounding her disdain for future projects are the increaingly lofty claims of what will be discovered since inception of LHC. Do you really think she is alone on this?
On the former, who is the crank here? The person with the advanced degree calling out the failure of a 50 year old theory to make one scientifically provable and confirmed prediction? (I could say 80 years if going back to the beginnings with S-matrix theory)
I'll grant that some maths have been developed that may be tangentally useful but other than enriching the publishing industry, what has string theory brought? Zilch. It seems that the more public this becomes, the louder the cries of those with deeply vested interests. I can think of no other large theory that has gone for so long with no experimental confirmations at all and is not likely to in mankinds future either.
As to MOND like theory, Sabine has had varying degrees of support over the past twenty years as data has come in and theory has changed. Very frankly, the reason to give a degree of trust to her on other subjects too is because she is willing to be objective and call people out on their BS.
voxgen|1 year ago
You shouldn't just "take her seriously", you should take what she says *critically*. Hear the information and opinions, then decide for yourself whether to accept them.
Aurornis|1 year ago
This sounds awfully similar to the “do your own research” defense that is often used as a cop-out disclaimer for quackery topics.
When someone presents themselves as an expert on a topic and invests a lot of time into making convincing videos about their beliefs, defending them with a “do your own research” feels like a tacit admission that they’re not actually the expert they present themselves as.
This feels somewhat like the high-brow intellectual equivalent of Joe Rogan making confident statements about COVID and then defending himself with “I’m just a comedian, do your own research”. You can’t have it both ways.
evilduck|1 year ago
Someone speaking provocatively and authoritatively on topics they don’t have credibility in is where you should think critically and turn it off.
andai|1 year ago