I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics.
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.
Why should you expect her to have the same opinions about Musk and Bezos as you? Do you think that everyone who likes them have nothing of value to contribute?
Sabine is european, we kinda have some experience with alternatives to capitalism here, so... Yeah. That's not a valid criticism, on anyone. Just because you get points online for saying capitalism bad doesn't mean it's not the best out of everything we've tried so far...
America is the heart of a dying empire that is increasingly abandoning the majority of its citizens. I don't understand the European desire to gut social programs and emulate the US when the post-Reagan era has led to massive wealth concentration and reduced quality of life for most people.
Europe also has a lot of experience with fascism and y'all seem to be willing to ride that bus as many times as you can.
Maybe because what you call "Fascism" isn´t Fascism and, as far as i know, nobody wants to gut our (varied) social programs, but we are just conscious that in some cases, said programs are failing, unsustainable due to resources misallocation and/or grossly mismanaged.
Having a slightly more dynamic entrepreneurial scene, where one is allowed to fail for instance, would be nice.
In my view, the way forward and the example to follow is Switzerland, not the US.
I ... Uh... That's not what capitalism means. Sorry. We have plenty of capitalist countries w/ great healthcare, and social programs. Capitalism means "free market" + rules. If you're unhappy about something, fix that, don't throw the baby with the water.
On the other hand "establishment" science get their hairs up when she criticizes them, so there is that.
She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.
I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.
Yes very admirable to dishonestly misrepresent scientific progress, and making millions by accusing scientists to steal public money by working on things that she calls bullshit (based on her misrepresentation).
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them.
Surely this can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted."
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
"Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case."
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts.
Actually this isn't true, at least as far as anything the public needs to care about is concerned. There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that. The model can use whatever intricate math it wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.
The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down.
If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman.
But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed.
You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
Maybe at some point, but as of now it’s much more applied and empirical. Aside from money, there’s nothing stopping you from training a new architecture or loss function and sharing the weights for everyone to use.
Very recently some researchers at a Chinese lab invented a new optimizer Muon Clip which they claim is better for certain types of LLM training. I don’t think there are enough AdamW fanboys out there for it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
> "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
> From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical
Most physics papers have not been debunked or have rebuttal papers written about them. If Weinstein was serious about his work, he would either respond to the criticism or revise his position to something which is useful. It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.
If I open a PR and it fails some CICD tests my next move should be to fix the PR or fix the tests. Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
Even if we are generous and accept that GU was more criticized than other bullshit papers, the claim still needs to prove that the difference of treatment is due to some real bias and not a simple fluctuation.
"I saw 2 persons being judged by a judge, and turned out they were both guilty of the same crime, but the first one got less than the second one. The first one had the same letter in second position in their family name as the judge, so it's the proof that judges are biased favorably towards people who have the same second letter"
But then, the problem is that "their own bullshit papers" is doing a very heavy lifting here. The point of Hossenfelder is that String Theory is as bad as GU. But is it really the case? Hossenfelder keep saying it's true, but a lot of people are not convinced by her arguments and provide convincing reasons for not being convinced. The same kinds of reasons don't apply to GU, so it already shows that GU and String Theory are not on the same level. Even if String Theory has some flow or is misguided on some aspect, does it mean that the level of rejection in an unbiased world will obviously be the same as any other bullshit theory.
Another aspect that is unfair is that a lot of "bullshit theory within the sector" dies without any publicity. They stop rapidly because from within the sector, it is more difficult to surface them without being criticized early. For example, you can have 100 bullshit theories "within the sector" and 3 survive and surface without being as criticized as GU while 97 have been criticized "as much" as GU during their beginning which stopped them growing. Then, you can just point at one of the 3 and say "look, there is one bullshit theory there, it's the proof that scientists never confront bullshit theories when it comes from within". Without being able to quantify properly how the GU-like theories are treated when they are "within", it is just impossible to conclude "when it is from within, it is less criticized".
Someone else posted this video of some physicists discussing the Weinstein video and it seems they say the same thing, she is creating a false equivalency.
Regarding her other points, she is definitely on the bandwagon of peddling "all academic research is bullshit". There are plenty of examples of that. Now as often there is some grain of truth underneath her points, but she is disingenuous in here arguments.
At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread.
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp.
Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
Sadly this is a common path for many people on Youtube. Once they reach a certain level of popularity the original topic of their channel becomes a vehicle for "content creation" which they try to maximize for "engagement". The quality of the original content always nosedives.
She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
the scientific enterprise has undermined itself already. Look at how we lost decades of research in alzheimer's as a good example.
This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
Sketchy. It really is only apparent in hindsight after investigation.
When something turns out to a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy.
When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that?
You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?
I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.
It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.
But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Sure, academia is the worst system except for all the other ones.
Academia is what she is criticizing, btw, not the "scientific enterprise," even if she doesn't say it all the time. You know what else she doesn't say? What we should do instead.
Here's what she thinks we should do instead: privatize academic research. Can you think of any problems with that?
She has done nothing of the sort and this kind of narrative is exactly the self-victimization that science-academic industry tells itself to insulate its own thinking. Sabine does not have that much power or influence.
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
Probably, kind of funny that the irony is completely lost on her.
I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD.
A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
> PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
It depends, many fields intersect, and there are interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. The generalist approach is to be T-shaped, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. The T might be shallow on some ends, but deeper on others, so you may even have a prong, trident, or comb. Truly, it depends.
Sure, I don't disagree with that. If you have a PhD in theoretical physics, you're probably in a good enough position to talk about different types of calculus, and maybe some other forms of physics depending on if there's overlap. But I think a lot of people will see "Dr." in front of the name and assume that these people are like the professor from Gilligan's Island and understand everything about everything.
It's entirely possible that a PhD theoretical physicist does know a lot about biology (maybe they got a job in a biophysics or something) but I'm saying it's definitely not implied, and it might even suggest that they don't have expertise in that field.
Exactly she used to say this all the time and now she's weighing in on topics ranging from EVs to nuclear power to 5G causing cancer (yes she did a show on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs and she was peddling to the "sceptic" crowd by saying that "she doesn't have any reason to believe that it's is unsafe, but ..." and pointing to doctors saying smoking was save in the 50s).
Back in my days of devouring popular physics we had Peter Woit and to some degree Lee Smolin. But people were mostly getting their pop physics from books, not online, so the velocity of contrarianisn was throttled.
I always thought Weinstein was a creep but he’s a physics crackpot too? Sad that Hossenfelder got involved but it’s so strange to see the spectrum of outsiders and insider-outsiders and outsider-insiders that showed up for that. Never saw a real physicist threaten a lawsuit over criticism but the paranoid and delusional do it all the time.
Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)
There are other motivations besides money for cranks.
In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.
I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.
> obscurantist
Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
i mean he's not a physicist of any sort so i don't think there's anything amiss about this? the "deeply unserious" part is that people can't (refuse to?) recognize that he's not a physicist.
There are numerous "everything theorists" who appear in a bunch of yt channels/podcasts. Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Langan, Terence Howard, Eric, etc.
Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.
(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).
Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.
I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.
There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:
> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science
But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.
I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.
My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.
I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.
It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
Note that I am not saying that what this author is saying is necessarily wrong. But I don’t like the inclusion of the anonymous author, so I made a point of it.
I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
Anonymity is a great way to criticize published research because it necessarily focuses attention on the content of the critique rather than reputation
Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?
Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?
> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone
Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.
Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
If I was reaching out to academics and public figures to criticize someone else’s published work, I would use my real name. Otherwise it’s all a game, and we’re just being tools for someone else’s benefit. Anyone can also then just make up a story about who the anonymous author is, and spread any number of disinformation and misinformation takes. Is that good for science or any scientific discourse? I think it creates less drama when people are cool-headed and don’t assume enemies of everyone.
Is there a legitimate fear of mob justice from political opponents, or some type of covert mafia action instead? Sure, but remember that this climate is so polarized that anyone who gets “cancelled” now will instead become a hero for one faction or another. So, you have a real chance of becoming either AOC or MTG in this extremely polarized political climate instead of becoming cancelled.
But I don’t care about politics per se, I just don’t like how extremism has permeated every sphere of life. So how to conduct truth-seeking under these circumstances? It seems to me that the best course of action is to instead have serious discussions, like workshops. It would make sense to also invite your opponents, and other neutral parties from the field, and try to understand whatever the issue is with an open mind.
That said, from what I can tell Hossfender has criticized GU as a theory. But it seems she’s being castigated for not breaking ties with people who are political enemies of some groups.
Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.
When I was still in the physics world, almost every high energy guy I talked to thought string theory was a scam. It seems like everyone that wasn't a string theorist thought it was scam. I don't know enough of the topic to know one way or the other, but it seemed a common idea.
At one point there was a New York Times article which derided a scientist who said that we could send a rocket to the moon.
As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
It depends who you are picking on and in which field. From direct experience some fields are very well organised when it comes to protecting their lack of scientific integrity.
I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics.
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture
> The term was coined by Eric Weinstein in 2018.
Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice
I didn't notice that!
Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs
This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
By default, people have moral agency for what they do. Exceptions exist, of course, but “I wanted to make more money” is not one of them.
Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.
One could make a compelling philosophical argument that the core purpose of money is to separate individuals from their moral agency.
You're not the only one who has noticed this, no.
I had a similar trajectory, but I would add that she lost me when she started sucking up to public figures and corporate interests I despise.
People like musk and bezos and ai hype et al.
Made me realize I was projecting some aspects of her interest in rational thought all wrong.
Why should you expect her to have the same opinions about Musk and Bezos as you? Do you think that everyone who likes them have nothing of value to contribute?
I mean, Elon Musk? Yeah, someone still thinking great of Elon Musk might add a negative value
When she took a firm stance against free will my ears perked up.
When she took a firm stance in favor of capitalism I unfollowed.
Sabine is european, we kinda have some experience with alternatives to capitalism here, so... Yeah. That's not a valid criticism, on anyone. Just because you get points online for saying capitalism bad doesn't mean it's not the best out of everything we've tried so far...
62% of Americans think the government should make sure everyone has health care: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
America is the heart of a dying empire that is increasingly abandoning the majority of its citizens. I don't understand the European desire to gut social programs and emulate the US when the post-Reagan era has led to massive wealth concentration and reduced quality of life for most people.
Europe also has a lot of experience with fascism and y'all seem to be willing to ride that bus as many times as you can.
Maybe because what you call "Fascism" isn´t Fascism and, as far as i know, nobody wants to gut our (varied) social programs, but we are just conscious that in some cases, said programs are failing, unsustainable due to resources misallocation and/or grossly mismanaged.
Having a slightly more dynamic entrepreneurial scene, where one is allowed to fail for instance, would be nice.
In my view, the way forward and the example to follow is Switzerland, not the US.
I ... Uh... That's not what capitalism means. Sorry. We have plenty of capitalist countries w/ great healthcare, and social programs. Capitalism means "free market" + rules. If you're unhappy about something, fix that, don't throw the baby with the water.
I noticed exactly the same thing with Sabine. Her spiral into crankery has been disappointing.
It's very pleasant to see someone else saying it, too. Thank you.
On the other hand "establishment" science get their hairs up when she criticizes them, so there is that.
She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.
I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.
Yes very admirable to dishonestly misrepresent scientific progress, and making millions by accusing scientists to steal public money by working on things that she calls bullshit (based on her misrepresentation).
Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless.
His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons.
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them.
Surely this can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school
There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted."
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
>But the other common denominator is Nguyen
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
This is supposed to be about science.
Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed.
He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.
"Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case."
Touché.
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts.
Actually this isn't true, at least as far as anything the public needs to care about is concerned. There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that. The model can use whatever intricate math it wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.
The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein :
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
It all seems very odd.
apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
As entertainment goes, I would personally prefer a good movie or a concert to a jargon filled paper.
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down. If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman. But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
All the best scientists release their work on Joe Rogan and threaten to sue anyone who criticizes their work.
ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
Maybe at some point, but as of now it’s much more applied and empirical. Aside from money, there’s nothing stopping you from training a new architecture or loss function and sharing the weights for everyone to use.
Very recently some researchers at a Chinese lab invented a new optimizer Muon Clip which they claim is better for certain types of LLM training. I don’t think there are enough AdamW fanboys out there for it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
> "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
> From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical
Most physics papers have not been debunked or have rebuttal papers written about them. If Weinstein was serious about his work, he would either respond to the criticism or revise his position to something which is useful. It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.
If I open a PR and it fails some CICD tests my next move should be to fix the PR or fix the tests. Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
Even if we are generous and accept that GU was more criticized than other bullshit papers, the claim still needs to prove that the difference of treatment is due to some real bias and not a simple fluctuation.
"I saw 2 persons being judged by a judge, and turned out they were both guilty of the same crime, but the first one got less than the second one. The first one had the same letter in second position in their family name as the judge, so it's the proof that judges are biased favorably towards people who have the same second letter"
But then, the problem is that "their own bullshit papers" is doing a very heavy lifting here. The point of Hossenfelder is that String Theory is as bad as GU. But is it really the case? Hossenfelder keep saying it's true, but a lot of people are not convinced by her arguments and provide convincing reasons for not being convinced. The same kinds of reasons don't apply to GU, so it already shows that GU and String Theory are not on the same level. Even if String Theory has some flow or is misguided on some aspect, does it mean that the level of rejection in an unbiased world will obviously be the same as any other bullshit theory.
Another aspect that is unfair is that a lot of "bullshit theory within the sector" dies without any publicity. They stop rapidly because from within the sector, it is more difficult to surface them without being criticized early. For example, you can have 100 bullshit theories "within the sector" and 3 survive and surface without being as criticized as GU while 97 have been criticized "as much" as GU during their beginning which stopped them growing. Then, you can just point at one of the 3 and say "look, there is one bullshit theory there, it's the proof that scientists never confront bullshit theories when it comes from within". Without being able to quantify properly how the GU-like theories are treated when they are "within", it is just impossible to conclude "when it is from within, it is less criticized".
Someone else posted this video of some physicists discussing the Weinstein video and it seems they say the same thing, she is creating a false equivalency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA
Regarding her other points, she is definitely on the bandwagon of peddling "all academic research is bullshit". There are plenty of examples of that. Now as often there is some grain of truth underneath her points, but she is disingenuous in here arguments.
"GU continues to be entertained by Hossenfelder". Last I knew she had a video critical of GU and Weinstein.
At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread.
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
This is not a criticism of the author—we know what people have to do on the internet. But it's in keeping with what we're optimizing this site for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
(Submitted title was "Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder a Crisis of Credibility")
Thank you, Mr. Defender of Curiosity on Hacker News.
Reading this makes me feel that smart muckrakers are a heavily undervalued resource online.
if anyone wants to go through it:
https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...
possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw
and that's like 95% of available documentation :)
Hossenfelder is absolutely the BS detector and takedown machine that physics needs :)
Sabine's early video's seemed pretty sincere, and had a lot of valid points.
But later, I think the pressure of creating constant content, and moving into non-expert areas, has gotten just as pop-sci as anybody else.
Still think she is on another level from Eric who will throw out any crazy idea he can if someone will listen.
For anyone who doesn't already know, the term for the phenomenon is 'audience capture'
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
I think "just as pop-sci" is a bit generous. https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1956336194352230570 explains it better than I can.
I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp.
Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
Max Planck is the source of the famous quote.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
>>> The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
I think Paul Feyerabend debunked that idea.
Disclosure: Old physicist.
> Science progresses one funeral at a time
Sadly this is a common path for many people on Youtube. Once they reach a certain level of popularity the original topic of their channel becomes a vehicle for "content creation" which they try to maximize for "engagement". The quality of the original content always nosedives.
You must be one of the aliens trying to deceive humanity.
She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
the scientific enterprise has undermined itself already. Look at how we lost decades of research in alzheimer's as a good example.
This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
Sketchy. It really is only apparent in hindsight after investigation.
When something turns out to a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy.
When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that?
You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?
As oppose to industry that blows hundreds of billions of dollars on hype bubbles every couple of years.
I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.
It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.
But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
Yeah, that's a problem too. Keynes:
By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Sure, academia is the worst system except for all the other ones.
Academia is what she is criticizing, btw, not the "scientific enterprise," even if she doesn't say it all the time. You know what else she doesn't say? What we should do instead.
Here's what she thinks we should do instead: privatize academic research. Can you think of any problems with that?
I think it’s Elite Overproduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Being a contrarian is often an intellectually dishonest way to seek power. Goes all the way back to the serpent in Adam and Eve.
She has done nothing of the sort and this kind of narrative is exactly the self-victimization that science-academic industry tells itself to insulate its own thinking. Sabine does not have that much power or influence.
Pointing out that something is bullshit is valuable in science, even if you don't have a better theory.
Sure, but just going around and calling everything bullshit without any expertise is not valuable is just grifting.
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
Probably, kind of funny that the irony is completely lost on her.
I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD.
A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
> PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
It depends, many fields intersect, and there are interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. The generalist approach is to be T-shaped, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. The T might be shallow on some ends, but deeper on others, so you may even have a prong, trident, or comb. Truly, it depends.
Sure, I don't disagree with that. If you have a PhD in theoretical physics, you're probably in a good enough position to talk about different types of calculus, and maybe some other forms of physics depending on if there's overlap. But I think a lot of people will see "Dr." in front of the name and assume that these people are like the professor from Gilligan's Island and understand everything about everything.
It's entirely possible that a PhD theoretical physicist does know a lot about biology (maybe they got a job in a biophysics or something) but I'm saying it's definitely not implied, and it might even suggest that they don't have expertise in that field.
Exactly she used to say this all the time and now she's weighing in on topics ranging from EVs to nuclear power to 5G causing cancer (yes she did a show on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs and she was peddling to the "sceptic" crowd by saying that "she doesn't have any reason to believe that it's is unsafe, but ..." and pointing to doctors saying smoking was save in the 50s).
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA
"Professor Dave" interviews 6 physicists regarding Hossenfelder including one guy whose name you particle physicists in particular might recognize.
Oh, This is the first time I have seen Michael peskin. I have known him through his famous QFT book. I did not even know he is still alive.
Feels good putting a face to the author of one the books that made you struggle but also enjoyed.
Back in my days of devouring popular physics we had Peter Woit and to some degree Lee Smolin. But people were mostly getting their pop physics from books, not online, so the velocity of contrarianisn was throttled.
The connection between Eric and Sabine seems a bit... weak in this article. It sounds like 90% guilt by association, and 10% substance.
I always thought Weinstein was a creep but he’s a physics crackpot too? Sad that Hossenfelder got involved but it’s so strange to see the spectrum of outsiders and insider-outsiders and outsider-insiders that showed up for that. Never saw a real physicist threaten a lawsuit over criticism but the paranoid and delusional do it all the time.
Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)
There are other motivations besides money for cranks.
In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.
I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.
> obscurantist
Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
> Weinstein released his Geometric Unity paper on April 1, debuting it on Joe Rogan’s podcast
We live in deeply unserious times.
He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
i mean he's not a physicist of any sort so i don't think there's anything amiss about this? the "deeply unserious" part is that people can't (refuse to?) recognize that he's not a physicist.
There are numerous "everything theorists" who appear in a bunch of yt channels/podcasts. Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Langan, Terence Howard, Eric, etc.
Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.
(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).
Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/
[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
Weinstein = Wannabe Einstein
Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.
I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.
There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:
> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science
But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
The author has previously published an article with a detailed analysis of the math of GU, and why it doesn't work: https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.
I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.
My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.
I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.
It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
Anonymity is a red herring here, since the original GU critique has a named and significant co-author (the author of this post).
Note that I am not saying that what this author is saying is necessarily wrong. But I don’t like the inclusion of the anonymous author, so I made a point of it.
I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
Anonymity is a great way to criticize published research because it necessarily focuses attention on the content of the critique rather than reputation
Is nis0s your real name? Why not?
Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?
Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?
> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone
Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.
Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
If I was reaching out to academics and public figures to criticize someone else’s published work, I would use my real name. Otherwise it’s all a game, and we’re just being tools for someone else’s benefit. Anyone can also then just make up a story about who the anonymous author is, and spread any number of disinformation and misinformation takes. Is that good for science or any scientific discourse? I think it creates less drama when people are cool-headed and don’t assume enemies of everyone.
Is there a legitimate fear of mob justice from political opponents, or some type of covert mafia action instead? Sure, but remember that this climate is so polarized that anyone who gets “cancelled” now will instead become a hero for one faction or another. So, you have a real chance of becoming either AOC or MTG in this extremely polarized political climate instead of becoming cancelled.
But I don’t care about politics per se, I just don’t like how extremism has permeated every sphere of life. So how to conduct truth-seeking under these circumstances? It seems to me that the best course of action is to instead have serious discussions, like workshops. It would make sense to also invite your opponents, and other neutral parties from the field, and try to understand whatever the issue is with an open mind.
That said, from what I can tell Hossfender has criticized GU as a theory. But it seems she’s being castigated for not breaking ties with people who are political enemies of some groups.
Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.
When I was still in the physics world, almost every high energy guy I talked to thought string theory was a scam. It seems like everyone that wasn't a string theorist thought it was scam. I don't know enough of the topic to know one way or the other, but it seemed a common idea.
She's trying to get into the populist Sagan, Greene, Kaku, Tyson type pundit game.
At one point there was a New York Times article which derided a scientist who said that we could send a rocket to the moon.
As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
It depends who you are picking on and in which field. From direct experience some fields are very well organised when it comes to protecting their lack of scientific integrity.
Gotta bag those conference expenses!