She is (was) a physics researcher, perhaps a mediocre one, most are. But saying she has no idea what she's talking about requires some justification.
Specifically, what do you disagree with her about?
Why would you say "was" - she's still a fellow at FIAS and lists herself as a researcher on her own website. Conversely, her only publication in the last decade with more than 100 citations was her popular science book aimed at non-physicists and most of the things before that were borderline hack stuff, basically going back to Milgrom's theory with very little content that would justify moving this research from fringe to mainstream [1]. She definitely hasn't established herself as an authority on foundations of quantum mechanics or string theory, which she has taken a liking to discredit. So the commenter above was not wrong.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en
If you were a research fellow in virology or immunology, and you had read and understood the relevant papers, then I would listen to you, yes. That doesn't mean I would take what you said as the final word.
How would you know that if I hadn't published papers on the relevant topics and only published in adjacent, non-mainstream topics?
And yes, the bar for string theory is high. Not every research fellow in theoretical physics would be qualified to comment here - quite the opposite actually. In the same way any honest theoretical plasma physicist will refuse to comment on quantum computing papers. Inside academia it is well known that you often can't even expect people to create qualified comments across neighbouring offices inside departments. Regardless, there are quite a few qualified people in this area. If someone with caliber like Susskind, Gross, 't Hooft, Witten or from the respected younger generation came out and said it's all a hoax, you can bet everyone would listen. And they have come out with specific critique, but you'll find it very different from the likes of Hossenfelder and it is usually not discussed in popsci literature. Noone in the field cares about people who haven't even shown they understand it, let alone contributed to it.
> How would you know that if I hadn't published papers on the relevant topics
No, that not the question. You don't get to assume that people are incompetent until they've presented incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. You're the one making ad hominem arguments, the burden of proof is on you.
What? Have you even read OP's article? A direct quote from the article has her saying this physics research is "religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics." If that's not insinuating a hoax I then don't know what is.
IMHO religions are just religions. As much as you can't scientifically prove the existence of god, you can't disprove it either. It's not necessarily a hoax.
Leaving aside the setting of ridiculously high bars for the moment, that level of evidence would be different depending on who is observing. A car mechanic is going to be able to spot clear evidence of incompetence in another car mechanic long before it’s apparent to a layperson observer.
Sure, it's not experimental physics, but as long as it's _bound by reality_ somehow, it's still science.
So the way a good physicist operates is to say "fine, I can't do the experiment, but let me see what is allowed by current experimental bounds". This is good. It's also an idea as old as science itself.
In contrast it's tremendously ironic that physics poopooers like Sabine and that other peter woit guy typically choose to work on special-relativity-violating theories, which are immediately outside of the bounds that the experiments we do have impose. Do you understand what I'm saying? This person is claiming "we can't directly probe a string therefore string theory is religion", but then she works on something which is worse than religion - something which we know is experimentally disproven. (I'm talking about the loop quantum gravities, and entropic gravities and so on and on - they're all inconsistent with one of the most toughroughly experimentally tested laws, special relativity). If they weren't so good at convincing the public that no one knows anything, their tragedy would be comic.
Not sure what you are referring to here. If it is her work on theories involving a minimal length scale: Heisenberg and Planck also hypothesized about minimal length scales. Hardly controversial even if difficult to combine with Lorenz invariance.
Experimental testability is important in physics. It doesn't mean anyone doing something not directly testable is a hack, but I think it's good people have been raising the issue more recently.
So it’s good science to color within the lines not try to redraw them through new experiments we CAN conduct.
I don’t know; sounds like sheer laziness and lack of true creativity if you can only play inside a decades old sandbox.
Along with the entitled tone and “I’m doing 10x better in industry than colleagues in academia” kind of feels like you’re doing it for bragging rights not science.