Draft talk:Sabine Hossenfelder

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WTF Rational Wiki people[edit]

I would have thought that for the new incarnation of Rational Wiki there would be new standards for articles about living people. So you're going to start by creating an article about Hossenfelder with simplistic insults? And BTW I despise Hossenfelder as much as anybody. Pinkerite (talk) 18:23, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

Citations[edit]

This article is missing a lot of citations. Pinkerite (talk) 18:56, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

Some of the wording is just terrible ("…and his blaming seeming conflict on kayfabe") or just weird ("…she does not have the power to shut down physics departments and make the faculty work as farmhands"). It might be best to send it back to draft. Bongolian (talk) 05:51, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
Mao sent intellectuals to work in rice paddies. Until recently, Hossenfelder just wanted to change how research is funded, so calling herself "enemy #1" seems self-important. I would support moving this back to draft for light editing, remember that I am a volunteer and can take my time and do other things if it stops being fun. BTW. in the first paragraph, the second footnote should be to "Science is Failing" not "My Dream Died." Polydamas (talk) 06:09, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
Done. Moved back to draftspace. Spud (talk) 10:42, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
Uh, nobody gets paid here. Bongolian (talk) 19:43, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
If you want me to volunteer for your project in particular (and the mods have been begging people to "step up") then calling me "a terrible writer" and a liar is not wise, especially when the fact in question is easy to verify (Myers no longer identifies as a skeptic). I have contributed twelve articles this year plus lots of edits, including complex and controversial pages like Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander. I am going to log out for a few days to let tensions cool, but I am not short of demands on my time.Polydamas (talk) 06:06, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Characterizing third parties[edit]

User:Pinkerite wondered about "former skeptics".

IIRC Myers said he left the skeptic movement and did not want to be called a skeptic back in 2013 https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/05/i-officially-divorce-myself-from-the-skeptic-movement/ There was a drawn-out conflict in movement skepticism, science blogging, Atheism Plus, and related spaces back then with all kinds of twists and turns like Richard Carrier's career.

Nevertheless, it says in Rational Wiki's own entry for PZ Myers: "Myers is a feminist and promotes the role of women in the skepticism movement" and his "authority control" at Wikipedia lists him as "American skeptic." So he is not a former skeptic even if he said he has issues with the skeptic movement 12 years ago. Pinkerite (talk) 15:35, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
Myers called himself "a former member of the skeptic community" in 2023. He attends an event called Skepticon in St Louis but does not seem to identify as a skeptic or part of the skeptic movement.Polydamas (talk) 16:33, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
"Skeptic community" is not the same as "skeptic" and you said Myers was a "former skeptic." Pinkerite (talk) 01:51, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

I get the impression that Elevatorgate left bruises and Rebecca Watson left to do her own thing apart from movement skepticism (and more people-politics and party lines than in-depth research, her video on one of the LessWrong splinter sects was fun but not deep). Sharon A. Hill has one memory of that time https://sharonahill.com/please-dont-call-me-a-skeptic/ the page for Elevatorgate has another. So I see Myers as a former skeptic, I am not sure about Watson. I have not followed either for a long time.Polydamas (talk) 14:33, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

And the RationalWiki entry for Rebecca Watson begins "Rebecca Watson (1980–) is a skeptic and a feminist activist..." So maybe do a little research before you make statements, instead of relying on your impressions about people you haven't been paying attention to for a long time. Pinkerite (talk) 15:35, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
"Wiki says it" is not an argument! Many RationalWiki articles have not been updated for 10 or 15 years and take questionable positions. I had to update the pages on Julia Galef, Massimo Pigliucci, and ScienceBlogs to bring them closer to the present. Back in the day Myers said "I will no longer consider myself a 'skeptic'. I am a scientist" although he says lots of things on the Internet.Polydamas (talk) 16:21, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
If you are writing for a wiki, why do you declare Wikipedia irrelevant? At the very least, Wikipedia is indicative of public consensus. And although Myers said that thing 12 years ago, by any standard he has always remained a skeptic: his public views on religion, pseudoscience and the supernatural did not suddenly change, just because he wrote a blog post to distance himself from the right-wing assholes who came to dominate the skeptics movement. But your obvious goal is to smear Myers and present him as a "blowhard," so accuracy and non-partisanship were clearly not your priorities. Pinkerite (talk) 18:40, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
The stated positions of both Myers and Watson obviously identify them as skeptics. Distancing themselves from the organized skeptic movement does not in anyway indicate a renunciation of the principles of skepticism. Something neither of them have done. Antares (talk) 18:46, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
Yes, exactly. Pinkerite (talk) 20:46, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
I see four ways to decide whether someone is a skeptic. One is self-identity, the second is membership in a community, the third is shibboleths and stereotyped actions like making fun of woo and Bigfoot, the fourth is epistemology. I don't think either Myers or Watson is "yes" to all four, but I am not particularly attached to this specific phrase. As I also said "I do not consent to discuss these characters and my past encounters with them further in public." I do not anticipate replying to any further comments by User:Pinkerite since we are already going in circles and life is too short. Polydamas (talk) 15:39, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

Cranks and contrarians[edit]

"Contrarian" is a useful word, but I do not endorse the redirect contrarian = crank. Hossenfelder seems to resist the common thinking in any community, but until very recently she did not push her own improbable ideas. She is slipping into the role of the statistician who argued that smoking might not cause cancer, not the electrician with a Theory of Everything. Cranks and contrarians are two distinct things (although some people are both).

Motives of contrarians vary. Hossenfelder would run a marathon to escape groupthink, whereas Robin Hanson likes to épater les bourgeois.Polydamas (talk) 16:21, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

That's a pretty bizarre thing to say "Hossenfelder would run a marathon to escape groupthink" considering that she's become a parrot of Peter Thiel talking points along with the rest of the Intellectual Dark Web. Pinkerite (talk) 18:45, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
A contrarian who is scared of groupthink can't manifest ideas from the zero-point energy field. Most of her ideas come from somewhere. But she can be very suspicious of ideas from local magazines, and less suspicious of ideas from celebrity billionaires halfway around the world. User:Pinkerite has admitted to not knowing any of Hossenfelder's writing before 2023, but I would really recommend skimming it because you can understand someone better from 20 years of writing than 1 year of videos.Polydamas (talk) 05:56, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
How is that relevant? What does it matter if, in 2023, I said I'd never heard of Hossenfelder? I've obviously had the opportunity to read what she's written before 2023, as evidenced by the blog post from last month in which I refer to an article she published in 2020. And in any case, she is clearly part of the IDW group-think now which is contrary to your initial assertion, which did not specify a time-frame. Pinkerite (talk) 13:38, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
Me: Sabine Hossenfelder is a contrarian who is scared of groupthink. You: How can she be scared of groupthink if she cites Peter Thiel? Me: In 20 years of posting she has cited all kind of people, and trusting a foreign billionaire over academia is not evidence of groupthink! I look at 20 years of writing and see a contrarian with IDW connections, you see 2 or 3 years of videos and see an "IDW grifter." Polydamas (talk) 17:09, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
You: if someone was scared of groupthink some time in the past, they will never participate in group think now or in the future, because nobody, certainly not Sabine Hossenfelder is capable of being corrupted by having large sums of money thrown at her by racist, fascist billionaires - causing her to parrot racist, fascist billionaire talking-points including defending the racist, fascist billionaire's primary lapdog, the crackpot Eric Weinstein. Therefore, Sabine Hossenfelder could not possibly be participating in groupthink now. Pinkerite (talk) 17:20, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
It would be better if there were no redirect from contrarian to crank. Contrarian means opposed to the dominant paradigm in any particular field (e.g., politics, religion, science, economics). Crank has a more uniformly negative connotation. Galileo was a contrarian against the dominant Catholic religion, but not a crank because he had evidence on his side whereas the Church only had doctrine. When the dominant political view is authoritarianism or fascism, then supporting democracy is contrarianism (hence "The Contrarian" on Substack[1]). Notably, Wikipedia has no page on contrarianism, but simply refers to the Wiktionary definition.[2] Bongolian (talk) 06:27, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Goals of this draft[edit]

My goals with this draft were to 1) fill a popular request on the To do list (service to RW), 2) understand how her earlier work relates to her new message, and 3) sketch her social network. I don't have access to transcripts of her new videos, so I can't search and skim them like I can search and skim her blog. Someone with the time and money is welcome to pick the problematic things out of her 2023 trans video, or the Professor Dave videos (eg. at minute 1:27 of the "Fraud" video he has numbers on how her rants about academia get more views than her science communication, the video where she quotes Thiel and Musk seems to be "Science is in trouble and it worries me").

In 2023 she criticized Elon Musk and Effective Altruism, and in 2022 she pointed out that nobody who is worried about trans women in sports objects when a very large 16 year old girl plays one who just hit puberty a year ago. Those don't sound like the messages that someone who just wanted to set up as a right-wing talking head would chose. With her education and experience she could get a job in data science, materials science, or academic publishing if she just wanted a comfortable life. Her work in 2024 and 2025 seems more consistent with someone who wants to be seen as a Rogue Scientist telling Truths They Don't Want You to Know.

I don't want to expose RW to legal liability. One of my footnotes to the Aella article collects stories of men in a space taking advantage of power over women without naming any alleged perpetrators. I avoid accusing people of being misandrist/misogynist/transpobic unless its very well documented (and because those terms mean different things to different people).

Its a bit rich for Professor Dave to accuse Hossenfelder of publishing videos "just so she could drop another Brilliant ad," when he is a full-time vlogger with millions of subscribers too (and just two minutes earlier in the "complete fraud" video he noted that she does lots of science communication, it just does not get as many views as her rants). Anyone who follows social media knows that drama gets clicks. His own videos with titles like "Avi Loeb is a fraud now" and "Dan Richards is a Pointless Troll" get hundreds of thousands of views, whereas his videos on Laplace transforms or Latin grammar get thousands to tens of thousands, so she is not the only one publishing clickbait for money. Both vloggers post 4 or 5 educational videos, then one telling readers who to be angry about.

Its useful that he watches her recent videos and points to topics of concern, but he is not charitable or nuanced. Polydamas (talk) 05:54, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Professor Dave makes excellent points about Hossenfelder. If you have an issue of any of those points you should say exactly what and why, rather than complain about nuance and charity. Pinkerite (talk) 02:51, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

More Connections[edit]

A book that is supposed to call for more spending on research guided by wild ideas is Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_book) Klein is connected to the LessWrongers and EA through Vox (website) and econ blogging, but has a background in prestige journalism. I don't think RW has pages for YIMBY or Progress Studies, but they are movements with significant overlap with EA, LessWrong, and the GMU economists.

Professor of chemistry turned industrial chemist turned science communicator Jim Baggott is another critic of the state of theoretical physics eg. Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth (2013). Wikipedia mentions that he was interviewed by Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef when they had a podcast together, and says he spoke at James Randi's The Amazing Meeting in 2015. He appears on British media like BBC Radio Four and The Guardian and is the type of person Hossenfelder would talk about if she wanted to position her ideas correctly (he is not mentioned on her blog but Woit and Smolin are).

I don't know if we have pages on the replication crisis in psychology, the Reinhart-Rogoff scandal, and other bad social science.

One of the many news articles where physicists ask "is another big particle accelerator the answer?" Doubts about string theory, the LHC, and grant-funded science seem mainstream, some of Hossenfelder's language in 2024 and 2025 does not. — Unsigned, by: Polydamas / talk / contribs

A mathematician who works at Google DeepMind criticizes Geometric Unity and Hossenfelder's recent turn. He uses the words "grift" and "contrarian" and says that he has discussed things with her which she denies knowing in public. https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-weinstein-sabine-hossenfelder-and-a-crisis-of-credibility/

One of Professor Dave's videos pretends not to know that academic quit lit is a whole genre and often goes viral because when people can't make a living in the career they spent a decade preparing for they are pissed and intense emotion = social media shares. He is a grad school dropout so must have read some of those blog posts or seen PhD students and postdocs flame out. Hossenfelder's 2024 quit video was middle of the road, its her conspiratorial videos that are of interest to RW. Polydamas (talk) 15:17, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

Citations need:
  • One of Professor Dave's videos pretends not to know...
  • academic quit lit is a whole genre
    Pinkerite (talk) 14:44, 24 August 2025 (UTC)
    A web search for "academic quit lit" will show you articles like https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/08/18/reading-academic-quit-lit-how-and-why-precarious-scholars-leave-academia/ and https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/loves-labor-lost-and-found-academia-quit-lit-and-the-great-resignation/ One by an American with a PhD in German literature became as famous as the one by the contemporary historian but I have forgotten her name. I don't have time or will to sort through the terrible YouTube transcripts to find the bit on her quit video for an Internet acquaintance, but people inspired by this talk to watch the videos for the first time can consider my opinions and context as they watch them. Polydamas (talk) 05:13, 25 August 2025 (UTC)
    You're still missing evidence for the claim that "One of Professor Dave's videos pretends not to know that academic quit lit is a whole genre..." Pinkerite (talk) 15:52, 25 August 2025 (UTC)
    I already told you why I am not going to get that info out of videos for a single stranger on the Internet.Polydamas (talk) 14:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
  • I have emphasized the grandiosity of Hossenfelder's new videos because grandiosity is often a sign that someone is transitioning from a scientist to something else eg. "Of course, (Holocaust denier David) Irving has discovered new documents and obtained new evidence, for example, by interviewing surviving eyewitnesses of the time. But this is true of a vast number of other historians too. The difference is that normal professional historians do not make such a fetish of it." https://www.hdot.org/evans/ So is presenting oneself alone against a vast conspiracy. I don't think that Professor Dave has ever published academic research or been paid to work in a chemistry lab, but he does invite scholars to speak on his show and he does not claim to stand alone against the world. Polydamas (talk) 14:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

    Wall Street Journal on Hossenfelder and Weinstein. Does not say as much about why she and Weinstein sound so similar as Pinkerite would. Author notes that Professor Dave uses similar rhetoric to Hossenfelder because he is incentivized by the same payment system, he just attacks individual influencers instead of the scientific community. Cameo by computer scientist and genocide apologist Scott Aaronson. https://archive.is/ADjdy Polydamas (talk) 07:28, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

    Peter Woit chips in on the WSJ article. His objection seems to be that "I don’t think the WSJ should turn itself into yet another place recycling meaningless internet drama for clicks. If it is going to do this, it should be adding some serious understanding of what is going on to make sense of the drama. I’m sorry, but there’s no evidence you have the expertise needed to do this." ie. he wanted an article on the state of theoretical physics not on Internet personalities and their flamboyant behavior. "Be aware that if you’re trying to understand the state of fundamental theoretical physics, watching Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan, Professor Dave, etc. podcasts is just going to fill your mind with crap. Reading articles about these podcasts is worse. If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts." https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15206 Elsewhere on his blog he is criticizing Scott Aaronson's genocide apology. Polydamas (talk) 17:15, 15 September 2025 (UTC)