I don't know if I'd call her "contrarian" but I think it's safe to say she's not exactly filled with starry-eyed optimism. Maybe a lot scientists generally become increasingly jaded and skeptical after years of seeing a lot of big claims and hopes much of which end up amounting to very little, but physicists seem to have had an especially rough time.
She's been that way on physics forever, and she was at least interesting there, but she's moved on to subjects outside of her field, and that hasn't worked as well at all.
Science is a large field. Being an expert in physics won't make you an expert in other scientific fields, yet somehow people love to know the opinion of their favourite heroes of any topic.
Remind me of Jurgen Klopp rebuking some journos that wanted his opinion, as successful football coach, on COVID.
Just the field of physics is so large that most would probably not dare to state criticism in other sub fields. Like a Nobel prize winner in solid state physics would never judge the work of a high energy particle physicist and vice versa.
Hossenfelder is definitely qualified to talk about the OP, but her videos about transgender people shouldn't be given more credit than videos from almost any other person.
There is definitely value in people popularizing scientific consensus even when they aren't experts in the field, Bill Nye talking about climate change is useful even though he's not an expert. But when you aren't an expert and aren't trying to convey the consensus of people who are experts, you're Just Some Person With An Opinion.
It's when a popularizer starts having opinions that aren't widely shared in a field that they aren't themselves expert in that things can start to go wrong.
Being publicly contrarian about stuff you're an expert in can be interesting, being publicly contrarian about stuff you just don't know much about is at best not very useful and at worst harmful.
The thing is, progress in physics has become hard because physics has been extraordinarily successful. Between them, general relativity and the standard model (of quantum mechanics) explain all of the phenomena that humans see or create on earth and all the star-level things we can observe. Things only get hard once you reach enormous scales of the distribution of matter in the universe. So the situation can only seem "bad" to someone who isn't seeing the larger picture imo.
Clickbait implies she doesn't cover the topics in her thumbnails, or that they are misleading or inaccurate in some way. That hasn't been my experience watching her videos.
Honestly, I'm watching a bunch of people punch down at imaginary people, I'm not sure there's really anything here than whining about a good article and bizarre irrational stack ranking
I'm not sure I know what you're talking about, but there's nothing imaginary about how bad some "science journalists" are, and the notion of a bunch of HN commenters "punching down" at either journalists or physicists with much bigger platforms than we have is dubious.
I knew you were saying one of a couple rather weird things. I still don't know which, but I thought the substance of my comment addressed all of them and you haven't bothered to respond to that, so I guess my point stands? We were both nitpicking, so you don't get to claim the high ground.
I'm not arguing with you at all, it wouldn't make any sense to, you're not making any claim other than imagining I claimed articles where the journalist doesn't know anything about the topic are always good.
Recap:
I observed the thread was absurd because:
- it opened complaining about the science journalist writer who didn't know the topic.
- after it was resolved the author wasn't a science journalist or someone who didn't know anything, people were arguing about the stack-ranking of the imaginary science journalist
Now you're here, continuing to argue against a strawman for no discernable reason. We all get it, you and some other people are making sure we understand we're wrong, it can be bad when people write things they don't know about.
> you're not making any claim other than imagining I claimed articles where the journalist doesn't know anything about the topic are always good.
I definitely never argued or even believed any such thing. I started off in this (granted, rather silly) thread with a lukewarm defense of Hossenfelder, then you took a weird tangent on it and I disagreed with your framing (or what I could grok of it). Maybe you have me confused with someone else?
Yes, but in the article under discussion, she's writing like a science journalist. A theoretical physicist's criticism of the paper belongs in a published paper of her own, not a pop science article.
I think it's important to point out that reading the abstract and then throwing it into gpt4 would result in a more informative article than the current one.
The article spends about a third of its time waxing loquacious about MOND - hossenfelder's own theory - before dismissing the current paper for having equations that are just "too simple" .
Now I'm not a physicist. I'm an applied category theorist working in business process modeling of all things. But when I was reading hossenfelder's article I was hoping it would describe how oppenheim models the spectral dispersion of stochastic gravity. This is the linchpin of how oppenheim predicts physically observable phenomenon from the model.
That was missing. There have been other articles, which at least mentioned it in passing. I was hoping hossenfelder, being a physicist, could help clarify that for a wider audience. They made a choice not to.
> waxing loquacious about MOND - hossenfelder's own theory
"Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) [...] Created in 1982 and first published in 1983 by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom" [1]
"Born 1946" [2]
"Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German" [3]
I suppose a SciFi story where it eventually turns out that they are the same person (presumably as an unintended consequence of an experiment designed to test their theory) could be fun.
In your reference [1] we see that hossenfelder has worked on their own version of MOND:
"Testing MOND using the redshift-dependence of radial acceleration – Sabine Hossenfelder and Tobias Mistele propose a parameter-free MOND model they call Covariant Emergent Gravity and suggest that as measurements of radial acceleration improve, various MOND models and particle dark matter might be distinguishable because MOND predicts a much smaller redshift-dependence.[81]"
That is the theory I'm talking about.
It also seems like I exaggerated how much of the article was dedicated to MOND, which was my bad.
The article is still poor coverage of the actual research
Yes, and for non-specialists it's enough to know that the paper isn't even peer reviewed yet, and not waste time on bla-bla-heavy clickbaity pop article..
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03116