It’s a real shame. I used to watch Sabine Hossenfelder videos regularly — she was explaining stuff far outside my background, so it was good to learn about it. Her recent escapades have me wondering how good her explanations actually were — maybe they were great? I don’t know. But now I’ve unsubscribed and all of her videos are unappealing, because they’re long and sometimes technically challenging and now I can’t trust her enough to make the effort.
Yeah, Sabine does it again. Her strongly pro-capitalist position is backed with bad and sloppy evidence, fails to recognize the deep flaws in capitalism, and is beginning to remind me of Ayn Rand. No, thanks. (If I found someone fanatically supporting communism with the same kind of mangled evidence, I’d also drop them from my approved list — this is not an ideologically framed decision.)
Oh, well. Youtubers are a dime-a-dozen, I’ll find a replacement.
By the way, I do wonder if what ruined Sabine Hossenfelder for me was capitalism — the need of prominent Youtubers to feed the sacred algorithm with click-baity bullshit. So capitalism is bad?
A system that robs workers of their surplus value whilst poisoning the planet with pollution and our culture with ignorance?
Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty bad.
As far as I can tell, her videos about her own field are pretty good.
The videos outside of it vary from meh to super cringe.
This is a common failing among experts, and she’s hardly alone in it.
What made me distrust Hossenfelder’s judgement was about a year ago when she decided it was smart to appear in a Pangburn discussion event with Lawrence Krauss. There’s a promo video of the occasion on YouTube, featuring Hossenfelder and Krauss as cartoon superheroes. Yes, it is as cringy as it sounds like! She also did an Origins podcast with Krauss, so, yeah, palling around with the likes of Krauss raises some pretty bright red flags for me.
The physicist lifecycle strikes again: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
YES. We (inc. physicist husband and niece) liked her for a long time, but not any more. Exactly as you describe, PZ, she does seem to have succumbed to the algorithm.
@rsmith Almost like… In literally every freaking case we have ever seen, you have to work harder to make sure you are right about things “outside your expertise”, than you do when its something in your own field, and 90% of people utterly fail at this, and instead fall prey to the flawed assumption that, “Because I am good at A, I must be just as smart about C through ∞!”
How many groups, and publications, have we seen with this problem, where we can literally say, “Way back when I used to like X from them, but then they started ranting about a mess of other things, often with an utter lack of comprehension of their own privilege, and/or comprehension of the subjects, or compassion for the people involved.”? Dozens? Some of which we followed, bought, etc.
I much prefer the people that, honestly, may not be “experts” on a subject, or even of they are, admit to having biases, struggling to not fall prey to this sort of thinking, and have actually caught themselves doing so, and corrected course (as apposed to being caught by someone else, faking an apology, then still doing it after). Though.. there is also a low tolerance, sometimes, for people making serious errors in their past, or even present, recognizing, possibly by even being called out for it, that they where very wrong, then trying to, and even succeeding, in completely rethinking their opinions on the subject, but still being “held accountable” for things they no longer believe at all. Some detractors just won’t accept that someone has changed, period, regardless of evidence, and I am sure some of us at least have/do follow people that have had accounts suspended for some dumb stupid thing they said when they where 16 and stupid, but no longer believe 20 years later, because someone that didn’t like them went hunting through old posts to find something to burn them with.
Again – more care needs to be taken when you don’t actually know a subject, or person, than if you can directly attest to the evidence of what is going on, and we all can fall prey to, “Well, this seems sensible to me, so here is all my bad reasons for thinking its true, even though I have no expertise or knowledge of the subject (or about a person) at all, and didn’t bother to do any real research on it.” You might be utterly correct, by happenstance, or you could be utterly wrong, but if you start babbling that you “know” one way or the other, then, I can never remember who said it (though Aron Ra quotes it a lot, so I should remember from his videos), but, there is a quote to the effect that, “A lie which proves by happenstance to be truth is still a lie.” So even if rambling videos like Sabine’s where correct, they would still be lies due to their shite evidence and false sense of certainty by the author that they are irrefutably right.” imho
Maybe this can help cheer you up – Scientists in China have synthesized spider silk from genetically modified silkworms. Only spider-adjacent, but quite cool.
One of the physics professors at my university was once asked a question by a student about some cosmology stuff that just hit the news. His answer “That’s not really my field, I don’t know much more about it than you. Ask Professor …, he’s the local expert on that.” I really respected that guy.
Physicist here, and unfortunately, I have to say that I find even her work in physics to have moved into non-fruitful directions. She’s into some very outré stuff about foundations of quantum mechanics. Her videos about non-physics stuff are really not fun anymore for reasons others have pointed out. But she seems to have had her moment in physics, when she (IMO) rightly pointed out that particle physics theory and experiment have been badly off the rails for quite some time, and that we are over-prioritizing weird philosophical feelings about beauty and naturalness in seeking deeper physics theories. After her success as an author and popularizer, she seems to have stuck with the idea that she is a well-informed contrarian scientist, and she’s just not all that, again IMO. I don’t think she’s evil or anything, she just appears to have followed a career path that seemed fruitful to her a few years back, because lord knows there isn’t much in the way of accolades or lucre for theoretical physicists of ordinary ability just laboring away in the trenches of academia. She’s just way out beyond her expertise in talking about capitalism or the pandemic or trans issues or politics.
She started to lose me when she started to put out clickbaity videos on conspiracy-theory-tangential topics and asking people to “tell me in the comments what you think” about them. Then the awful transphobic video where she tried to “both sides” trans people and those who want to genocide us and portray herself as an “enlightened centrist” in it (that Rebecca also made a video in response to) came out and that was the last straw. Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest she’s continued this trend
Her latest video is , is there a point to the Universe?’
Those of us who read Douglas Adams 40 goddamn years ago already know the exact answer.
I’ve long followed Dr. Hossenfelder, but I’ve lately became upset with her non-science views and the sponsor ads that now haunt her videos. I think Dr. Myers would agree that professor salaries leave much to be desired, but pandering to capitalism is upsetting to say the least.
@Emily, #3: I think that’s an emergent property of physics and humans. I mean, “energy = half a quantity times a rate of change squared” crops up all over the place, and with the right simplifying assumptions — remember that, because it’s important — one kind of system behaves subject to the same equations as another kind of system. The exchange of energy between the electric and magnetic fields in a travelling wave, for instance, is described by the same equations as the exchange of potential and kinetic energy in a swinging pendulum. A human physicist can’t help looking for patterns, because pattern-matching is the human condition — and an understanding of physics yields an abundance of patterns to look for. And the older you get, the more places you will have have seen candidate patterns.
But it all comes back to those simplifying assumptions to which I alluded earlier; because, in the real world, one or more of them will not apply. There are no perfect conductors of electricity, no truly frictionless materials, no completely immovable objects, no perfectly elastic or perfectly rigid materials, and different things change in different ways with environmental variables such as temperature or atmospheric pressure. Curves look less like straight lines, the greater the portion you explore. The output of any amplifier is constrained by its power supply. And so forth, forever. You can, however, be careful to mitigate the differences between theory and practice. For instance, we can construct a pendulum in such a way that the expansion of three identical steel rods counteracts that of two identical brass rods (which just happen to expand almost exactly 1.5 times as much as a steel rod of the same length); and now the only thing making a difference to the length of the pendulum with temperature is the difference between that 1.5 (which we get from using 3 rods vs. 2 rods) and the ratio between the actual, measured coefficients of expansivity of the two materials. Careful construction was the secret to how analogue computers worked as well as they did, even long after we started building digital ones in the last century.
The assumption everyone forgets when applying patterns seen in physics to human phenomena, but upon which the physical phenomenon depends, is the assumption that a system behaves deterministically: i.e., given the same initial conditions, the same stimulus will always produce the same effect. But we know (or at any rate, ought to have learned by encountering enough people) that human beings behave in a strictly probabilistic way: given the same initial conditions, there exists a probability distribution for the effects that any stimulus will produce.
You might just about be able to make predictions about groups of people, by treating each one as an individual trial of a probabilistic phenomenon within an aggregate experiment to compare an observation with a theoretical probability. But any attempt to make predictions about individuals is doomed to failure.
There is also a confounding phenomenon built into this process: All the examples you selected as tests of the pattern already identify closely with it (or else you would never have identified the pattern in the first place). Therefore, there is inevitably some hidden confirmation bias. And by the nature of probabilistic processes, any prediction is more likely to be nearly right than flat-out wrong — which makes the latter case more noticeable when it happens.
(One attempt to reconcile deterministic classical mechanics with probabilistic quantum mechanics is based on combined probability distributions becoming closer and closer to deterministic behaviour as more particles are considered. This makes sense intuitively. Quantum mechanics says there is a tiny but finite probability that any of the sub-atomic particles comprising my body might suddenly jump to somewhere else in this or another universe, and maybe even find its way back; sheer weight of numbers suggests enough of me will still be here not to make much difference even if that does happen.)
In regard to how to safely harness capitalism, without getting overrun by robber barons and oligopolies, I recommend this 15-year- old book
Harold Wilensky :”Rich Demicracies ”
It compares USA with Japan, Israel, Canada, New Zealand, Britain* and several western European countries.
.
The point is, it is possible to do things differently and have a strong capitalist (or rather, mixed) economy (Fox News and the Republicans will of course say that is “communism”).
Sadly, the book is out of print and quite expensive.
*the book was written long before Brexit.
The headline for my next video will be “Why Fascism is Good För You”.
bluerizlagirl @13:
Where do you get the idea that there is an exchange of energy between the electric and magnetic fields? There isn’t. Maxwell’s equations in empty space dictate that the electric and magnetic fields of a plane wave be at right angles to each other, and in phase.
The warning signs were there at least a year ago when I stopped watching her.
Dr. Pablito @9.
I too have a doctorate in physics and didn’t follow her for long. I found her take to too often have too much contrarianism/sensationalism for my tastes. Someone on youtube I do like is Anton Petrov.
This claim is factually wrong in the case of her weekly science news videos.
They’re not that long, they’re spattered with her humor, and they are not particularly long or technically challenging.
(Also, I am not one of those who immerses themselves in a media bubble and ignores anything that does not accord with my own viewpoints)
I’ve given up on him, Sabine is better, and less clickbaity.
Hossenfelder is part of the vast army of theoretical physicists whose work has no demonstrable connection to experimental reality and therefore have plenty of time to write popularisations, notably represented by Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, and blog favorite Max Tegmark. (Readers may be surprised to learn that there is still no experimental evidence whatsoever for Hawking radiation.) I have always wondered why anyone would expect such a person to hold well-grounded views on observable phenomena like economics or gender.
@13–
I assume you’re referring to the energy equation for pendulums, E = (1/2).m.v^2 + (1/2).k.x^2, and the energy equation for photons, u = (1/2).e0.E^2 + (1/2).(1/mu0).B^2, in which case the deeper principle here is that both pendulums and EM fields rotate through space over time.
It can be useful to look at similar equations to see if there is a deeper understanding to be drawn (i.e. why Hawking won a Nobel Prize and Bekenstein didn’t), but it can also lead people astray. When the Scholes-Black equation boomed in financial circles, part of its appeal was its formulaic similarity to entropy. The result was a lot of financiers treating it as a way of working out the ‘real’ value of assets, which contributed to the Black Monday share crash of 1987. The equation itself was not the problem and its limitations had been well described by Black and Scholes at the outset. But most financiers ignored the caveats and their lack of knowledge of thermodynamics (and indeed, their own knowledge of finance). The mistake was in thinking ‘entropy is real and calculable, therefore this similar equation gives precise values for assets.’ The reason for the similarity is not coincidence: the B-S equation was derived by assuming asset price follows geometric Brownian motion, hence entropic properties.
If you have phenomena oscillating along a circular path, you get (1.2).k.x^2 terms in your equations. If you assume phenomena follow geometric Brownian motion, you get k.log(x) in your equations. That’s the deeper significance.
felixd:
Always, eh?
Sure, if one is watching her channel in order to try to learn stuff about economics or gender, one is doing it wrong. But if not, why would one have that expectation? It is in no way necessary, outside her areas of expertise.
Which I think are physics type stuff and communicating and entertaining.
Again: her weekly science news videos are sharp, quick, and witty. And I’ve yet to see any misrepresentation or misapprehension of the topics discussed.
Nothing wrong with her presentation and summation of the purported room pressure/temperature superconductor, for example.
In short, there is no need to hero-worship or expect her to be correct about all topics to appreciate what she does well. I don’t disagree that she has over-extended, but it doesn’t bother me.
Unlike PZ, who decided she’s dead to him, it makes zero difference to me that I don’t rate her opinions about some subjective-type topics.
Not that I can unsubscribe, since for that I’d have to be subscribed, and for that, I’d need to make a YouTube (or Google or whatever) account.
Anyway. There’s nothing wrong with discrimination, in the sense of being discriminating. So, watch the good bits, ignore the others.
Same as with anyone, really, unless one thought they were malevolent or evil.
Which she surely is not.
chrislawson @23:
No, the energy of a photon is (h/2π)ω, where h is Planck’s constant and ω is frequency.
The energy density of a (classical) em wave is what you wrote above, but there is no transfer of energy between the electric and magnetic fields, as I wrote in #17.
@22–
[1] Hawking was not really a populariser. He wrote one book that was meant to make his field more approachable to lay readers, which was an unexpected bestseller despite being nearly unreadable without a college maths/sci background.
[2] Hawking never popularised transphobia, quantum woo, climate change denialism, or capitalist apologetics.
[3] Hawking did a lot more than just Hawking radiation, and some of his theoretical predictions have been observed experimentally. One example: black hole area theorem experimentally verified.
[4] Hawking radiation is by definition very small compared to the usual energies we see in the universe, with the exception of tiny black holes near the end of their life. Attempts to find these micro black holes evaporating have come up empty so far, but nobody really expected to find them given that this only applies to small (hence ‘micro’) black holes of <10^12 kg mass, none of which will have formed by the usual process of stellar collapse so must be ‘primoridal black holes’ left over from soon after the Big Bang, and none of which have been observed even ouotside the search for Hawking radiation. Secondly, such black holes that emit detectable Hawking radiation only have a lifespan of months to years before they completely evaporate, and the Fermi mission that looked for them only had the sensitivity to search within 0.03 parsecs (i.e. the inner Oort cloud).
[5] Essentially we don’t expect to be able to see Hawking radiation with our current experimental capacity, and while this does represent a challenge for the theory, all of the predictions of GR and black holes that have been testable so far have been consistent with the theory. Similarly, there is no evidence against Hawking radiation, for the same reason. And while it is possible that we’re looking at a situation like alchemy’s universal solvent which we now know didn’t exist, it’s also possible that the situation is like stellar parallax which was used as an argument against Copernican theory until telescopes got good enough in the 19th century.
@25–
Sorry, Rob. I agreed with you and didn’t think to repeat what you said about the lack of energy ‘transference’. It’s just rotation, not transference. I should have used the term energy propagation or field equation rather than just energy to describe the EM equation. It is an energy equation (the ‘u’ stands for energy), but it was an unhelpful shortcut given the topic at hand.
Also, Hawking never won the Nobel Prize.
@24
Yes, “always” during my career as a physicist. For instance, I never thought Max Tegmark had a leg to stand on intellectually when I used to have lunch with him 20 years ago at MIT, either.
@26
Perhaps I’m a curmudgeon, but AFAICT the explosion of work in never-gonna-be-tested physical theory (e.g. string theory, multiverse theory) has demoralised physics as an intellectual discipline, given laypeople a completely skewed idea of what physics is about, and enabled a generation of physics media stars that go on to opine about anything and everything.
felixd:
Um. How is your status as a physicist supposed to trump her status as a physicist?
Again: your claim: “I have always wondered why anyone would expect such a person to hold well-grounded views on observable phenomena like economics or gender.”
Do you mean to suggest that, once you became a career physicist, you started wondering why anyone would expect such a person to hold well-grounded views on observable phenomena like economics or gender?
(Not exactly subdisciplines of physics, are they?)
Ah well, I have observed the observable: that the rest of my comment — the more substantive part — has been hitherto ignored. Of course, not being an anthropologist, I remain ignorant of the significance of that.
(I can of course speculate)
Heh.
Just looked, and she has a new video out:
Does the universe have a purpose?Obvious clickbait, of course. Some bloviating, perhaps some pop philosophy.
I can do that, too:
The very concept of purpose only makes sense in relation to something done by some entity for some particular reason. No entity, no purpose — it’s just happening. It’s basically asking whether God exists, given the subject.
Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Obs, I shan’t be watching that one.
In order for me to stop watching someone I would have had to have been watching them and to be honest these recent issues are the first time I heard of her. It certainly has not incentivised me to to start watching someone who is obviously not very good at doing their background research.
@ 31 John Morales
“This video is bad. Of course I shan’t be watching it.”
Bad paraphrase, Silentbub. You’re really not very good at getting me.
What I wrote, again, is “Obs, I shan’t be watching that one.”
And what I wrote, again, is “Obvious clickbait, of course. Some bloviating, perhaps some pop philosophy.”
It doesn’t appeal to me, and I doubt she’ll come up with anything with which I’m not already familiar.
However, I will watch her next science news update. Because so far, so good on that front.
Again, as I wrote: “There’s nothing wrong with discrimination, in the sense of being discriminating. So, watch the good bits, ignore the others.”
Not everyone is as simplistic as to believe it’s either all or nothing, bub.
So. Not because it’s bad (how can I know that? I’ve not watched it nor do I plan to watch it), but because it sounds unappealing and I don’t think she has particular expertise about that subject. Not worth my time.
And I will watch the next news update not because it’s good (how can I know that? I’ve not watched it nor do I plan to watch it), but because it sounds appealing and I like her presentation. Worth my time.
So. A more proper paraphrase would be:
“This video is unappealing, and therefore I shan’t be watching it.”
No value judgement about its merit, for another person it might introduce concepts with which they are unfamiliar. The so-called “paradox”, for example.
For me, no.
(Remember? Existential vs universal claims)
@ 31 Morales
It would be good if for once you could engage your brain before typing. You are an entity, are you not? Therefore entities exist. With that established, proceed.
Heh heh heh. Bub, I do love your flailing.
Me: “Just looked, and she has a new video out:
Does the universe have a purpose?”Me: “The very concept of purpose only makes sense in relation to something done by some entity for some particular reason. No entity, no purpose — it’s just happening. It’s basically asking whether God exists, given the subject.”
You (totally missing the implication): “You are an entity, are you not? Therefore entities exist. With that established, proceed.”
I’m not an entity that made the Universe for some particular reason, am I?
Entities that made the Universe for some particular reason are not known to exist.
The very question presumes teleology; the universe can’t be purposeful unless it has been purposed; purpose implies a purposer; and many other formulations.
Gotta love the obliviousness.
[I suppose someone should mention the pan-dimensional beings that manifest as mice, for tradition]
Myself @ 11
The pan-dimensional mice are cool, but not even they could sort out the 42 business.
Hossenfelder only has 3+1 dimensions, so it would be unfair to ask her to sort it out.
.
Meanwhile, there are an infinite number of flavors of capitalism- the European Union is doing a good job of taming the beast (which is why the oligarchy financied the Brexit campaign).
If you move to Norway or Denmark you can enjoy the domesticated variant.
(I can no longer recommend my native Sweden, the populist party has too much influence over the ruling coalition.)
There may be many flavors of Capitalism in practice, but no matter how benevolent a version you may implement, you’re never going to be able to rid it of the inherently exploitative systems and practices on which it’s based.
@Dr. Pablito:
Do you refer to her “super determinism” and her opinions on quantum mechanics?
Meanwhile, there are an infinite number of flavors of capitalism- the European Union is doing a good job of taming the beast (which is why the oligarchy financied the Brexit campaign).
And why lots of Britons are now expressing “Brexit regret” and petitioning to rejoin the EU.
I trust that “blog favorite Max Tegmark” was sarcasm.
@42: Heh!!
Douglas Adams weigh in om “purpose” on a Youtube video
https://youtu.be/v8mJr4c66bs
@43 Of course…
@41
A big Rejoin demonstration in London today.
The police refuse to say how many (gagging order from the government?)
Participants say more than 10,000 conservative media claim just 2,000.
There is an interesting history of science blog / The Renaissance Mathematicus where Thony, the blogger occasionally has a few critical things to say about non-historians or inept historians writing or talking about history.
Rebecca’s take-down of Sabine Hossenfelder was rather mild compared to some of Thony’s. Here is his most recent and rather mild rant Incorrect casual assumptions
Another rather fun take-down by Spenser McDanial at Tales of Times Forgotten reads:
“In other words, of the three people Pinker lists as having supposedly been burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, only two of them were actually burned alive at all, only one of them was executed by an Inquisition, none of them were executed by the Spanish Inquisition, none of them were executed in the Middle Ages, and none of them were executed for the reason he gives. ”
Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/07/24/steven-pinkers-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-debunked/