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Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is blowing up all over the place, see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg

Sabine has a chip on her shoulder about academia and simultaneously she gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative. That also plays well on HN where there is a cohort of people that like to pretend a PhD is useless and that PhD holders are less intelligent than themselves.

mmmm... In this case, I don't think the "having a PhD is useless" is remotely close to what Sabine is saying, which is "academic science exploration and experimentation is broken". Yes, it's PhDs and career academics as core participants in the game, but there are plenty of valid reasons to pursue a PhD and then move into industry that are no incompatible with either 1) what Sabine is saying, and 2) the PhD experience in higher ed.

The current academic system certainly has a lot of flaws, but Sabine also has an axe to grind, so one should take what she says with a few grains of salt.

Do you know the nature of the axe that she grinds? It's important to determine the kind of salt pairing.

Often times people have grievances against systems because they aren't doing a good job achieving their aims or there's big injustice/corruption. Sometimes people take an ego wound from something and it causes them to be overly uncharitable or dishonest for revenge.

The meme that permeates from academia about publishing quantity being more important than quality has me believing it can't be all ego wound. There's problems there.

I don’t know what caused her to go down this path, but she has become more radical and sensationalist over the years, and her convictions about fundamental physics border on crackpottery IMO. I don’t see her engaging in good faith on all these topics.

That could be because she optimizes for views, willingly or not. There is a reason why a lot of podcasters and youtubers move toward more extreme and polarizing views, that's what attracts more viewers and creates more engagement. Same reason why places like twitter or facebook pushed the emotionally charged posts up... keeps the viewers engaged and locked.

Re: interpellation [0]. This was highlighted in a recent article about Mr. Beast [1].

Hadn’t considered this being a truth for her channel, but I can see what you mean.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)

[1] https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...

The critiques she provided ten years ago, when still in academia, were interesting, but now that she's out its mostly tiresome.

In other words, the axe she grinds these days is one provided by the youtube content mill, which demands ever more logs to its boiler.

sounds like the criticism still applies and is ever more relevant if you wish to understand that Trump voters, who by and large do not have college degrees, experience resentment when they hear academics are getting federal funds to do things that "sound cool" to support their "comfortable lifestyles."

Why is it right for people who didn't go to college to be forced to pay for physicists to do useless research?

You’re presuming it is useless just because it sounds useless to a layman.

Do you have a more specific criticism about the "chip on her shoulder" and how "gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative"?

The criticism is pretty specific: she has an axe to grind about string theory holding back fundamental physics and projects this onto all of science. One need only watch her videos to notice this.

Another simple observation: her rant videos receive millions of views while her others receive significantly less. It doesn't take much speculation to see that an intelligent person that genuinely believes her own rant would prefer the output that also gives the most financial rewards

Yes, and the chip on her shoulder is that she never managed to produce research and the community told her that.

As an academic you have a vested interest in holding that opinion and you should disclose that

The totally real leaked email from a dastardly fraud-physicist that 100% confirms Hossenfelders's worldview? From a guy who supposedly wishes to be discreet, but also sends an email to a Youtuber with 1.6M subscribers with an axe to grind about this exact topic, using his full name? Which then Sabine courageously exposes anyway, despite the wishes of this evildoer. He basically admits he's a welfare queen to her because... reasons?

Sureeee, I can't wait for the next Musk tweet where a absolutely not fake EPA employee sends a nice email explaining how they are sipping Piña Coladas and playing mini golf with office furniture everyday. It might not be the best uses of resources, sure, but it feeds his family and is pretty sweet, so please stop doing the DOGE thing.

She is a captivating speaker, but I like to think that partical physics research is important to future technology. I want to see mankind reach beyond the stars.

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