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Shit Sabine Hossenfelder would say. (She funny tho..)
Edit: I had no idea about her questionable actions so that is news to me.
She also did an interview with a holocaust denier so…
Oh ew, really? I'm not overly surprised to be honest, her video on trans people was awful.
Absolutely horrendous. I stopped watching her after that. I don't care if it was good intentioned or not, she obviously should have expanded her understanding of the topic before presenting herself as an expert on it, and that makes me wonder how many other topics she covers in this way.
I didn't see that one on her view of trans people, but her recent one on nuclear power was nearly biased and selective enough to be called "disinformation".
Honestly the intro of it was enough for me to click out of it initially. She says
On the one side you have people claiming that it's a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it's saving the lives of minorities who've been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I'm here for.
As a cis-man, I detest the notion that wanting trans people to have access to healthcare and equal human rights to the rest of us is in any way "crazy."
She further goes on to cite a disputed article in an open-access journal regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria from a known biased source as though it carries actual weight.
The article in question basically claims that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is an actual phenomenon because the author polled parents of children on a transphobic forum, about whether or not the child "becoming trans" was a sudden event. There are multiple problems with this
- The parents are the source of supposed truth
- The parents likely have an inherent bias (being that they are on a transphobic forum)
It is possible - and in my opinion - plausible that the parents experience it as having a "rapid onset" because the children spent a lot of time hiding this aspect of themselves from the parents because the parents express LGBT+ phobic views. I concealed many parts of my personality from my abusive mother, and I know several trans people who didn't come out to their parents until such a time they felt it safe to do so.
From the parents perspective their kid moved out (e.g. to uni) and spontaneously changed gender from one day to the next, but at that stage their friends had been referring to them by their chosen names and pronouns for years.
This is what I took away from it as well. The fact that she so readily quoted really biased and disputed articles and presented them as though they carried as much weight as the actual science sat really wrong with me. She clearly didn't spend very long looking into the articles she presented.
It makes me think of LLMs, really. She talks with authority about a lot of subjects, but ultimately she's a physicist. Sure, she's scientifically literate and that can be used to make sense of articles and studies in other disciplines, at least to an extent. However, it doesn't make her an authority in any of those disciplines. Then there's the time constraint to keep in mind as well; she might be able to analyse the literature and give a sensible take on the matter, but not when her schedule involves making one ~5 minute video on any given topic per day.
That means you missed her video on how capitalism is good actually. It's about as horrid as you'd expect.
Is she the reincarnation of Ayn Rand?
Not that bad. She's still dapable of logical conclusions. Just ignorant, really...
Oh is this the one where she claims that without capitalism there'd be no innovation?
Yeah, and she doesn't properly explain what it is, reproduces the barter myth, etc.
But I feel after that, she has mostly stuck to physics stuff right?
The titles on some of her videos manage to be too fishy for my taste, they appear a lot on my feed due to watching a lot of videos from channels like PBS Spacetime and The History Of The Universe, stuff like that.
You can tell that she knows her stuff, but clickbait titles somewhat like, I paraphrase here: "A year ago I lost my faith in science, here's why", raise my suspicions and I move on without clicking. Right on the blurry edge between science and something else beyond that line, something that's not quite legit and not good for you.
Same for me. I had watched one video of hers because I watch those same channels and afterwards i looked her up and saw the controversial shit. The clickbait doesn’t help her image either. Hard pass for me.
This is the conversation I needed to finally block (or "not recommend", or whatever YouTube calls it) her videos on my feed.
Astrum also sometimes gives me an uneasy feeling, but so far the content appears to be solid, although I don't watch all his videos.
Hey, let me recommend one of the best channels out there in the vast sea of science/history YouTube content, the name is ParallaxNick.
He's been doing incredibly well-research videos on the history of astronomy, recently he's been doing a series that went into detail on Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, I suspect (fingers crossed tight) he's gonna follow with Newton, then Huygens, Halley and the Herschels.
Ok, that I didn't know. Off to find some references.
(I have fairly strong opinions about people like that. Hell, I refuse to watch any Tom Cruise movies because of his association with scientology, just as an example.)