Sabine is the poster child for science populism. She got chewed out by academia for having mediocre research ideas and now she loves to claim that there's a conspiracy to take funding from her favorite fringe fields and give it to the establishment. But when confronted she falls back on deflections about sexism in science. Now she's rage-bait content creator because no one wants to deal with her nonsense, science or otherwise.

Two things can be true; academia has a sexism problem, and the scientific community is tired of her particular brand of fringe bullshit (MOND and LQG). We can talk again when that fringe stuff can deal with observations of the cosmic microwave background.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

loved her earlier videos. But now she's doing mostly pure ragebait stuff. Even if it were true, there's 0 value on teaching people about it this way. In fact, it hurts everybody, as people are losing more and more faith in academic research and science (noticable when suddenly conspiracy groups like flatearthers are starting to quote her videos...)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Sabine is the poster child for science populism. She got chewed out by academia for having mediocre research ideas and now she loves to claim that there’s a conspiracy to take funding from her favorite fringe fields and give it to the establishment.

Gotta say you’ve got me sceptical.

I don’t follow her closely and am no mega fan or anything. But it’s not like it’s uncommon for good people to get pushed out of academia for shitty reasons.

Plus, I don’t think you need to conjure conspiracy theories before you start arguing that there are dominant dogmas, cultures, practices and even some sort of “establishment”. I’d wonder how many fields of science don’t have some internally recognised “establishment” and “counter-establishment” ideas.

And I’m not sure I see the “poster child … populism” claim? Sure, she’s probably popular, but for my money she does a decent job of YouTube science. Not sure she’s a household name or all over tv or anything.

Got any more substantive links/sources about her being mediocre or conspiratorial?

[–] bouh 4 points 5 days ago

She's terrible. Her science video are not as good as most others, and she has an extremely negative view of scientists and academia. That's infringing on anti-science propaganda. Which is a weapon of fascism.

[–] Fungah 2 points 5 days ago

Not to detract from the discussion but I just want to highlight that once upon a time virtually every reddit post was like this.

An article or video claiming something, someone in the comments providing a counterpoint, and then further rational counterpoints to those being made.

People rationally discussing two sides of an issue that arguably has two sides. Go figure.

[–] DoYouNot 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

On the one hand, I agree with a lot of what Sabine has presented here. But on the other hand, that email is sus AF... It proves her point perfectly and there's absolutely no way to verify it. I have to assume that it was written by/for her when weighting it as evidence, as a non-institutional email could have come from literally anyone.

[–] just_another_person 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There's a bigger problem here that she doesn't touch on that surrounds these people though. If they don't get work and the field shrinks, then it will mostly cease to exist.

SOME of this research is actually useful, and restricting funding overall will just kill the entire research community. Instead, we should have people who know better approving the funding so that it is applied to things the planet needs: clean energy, understanding and combating climate change, new materials or fuels for space exploration...etc.

R&D on any scale is speculative to begin, but I do agree there are a large number of people in this community exploiting that fact to get grant money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Yes this basically.

I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.

But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.

A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.

[–] PostaL 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

https://youtu.be/6P_tceoHUH4

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Thank you!

I’ve only watched the first minute or two, but I think I get the idea. Clickbaity generalisations etc … yea that makes sense and are obviously shitty (I guess I just expect that more from YouTubers who are otherwise reasonable people).

The whole “most research is BS” claim isinteresting though. I’ll be interested to see how the video addresses it. If we’re talking about >50%, and that it’s substantially imperfect in its constitution due to systemic issues, I dunno, I’d be interested in an actual investigation TBH.

Thanks again though!

[–] tomalley8342 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Is the DUNE neutrino experiment really being constructed purely to keep particle physicists employed?

[–] kiagam 5 points 5 days ago

I'm not finding the video right now, but basically ozempic came from research on 2 different animals and their ways of dealing wth certain proteins. two unrelated topics from decades ago were combined to create the top drug of the moment.

So is DUNE only being constructed to keep people employed? Maybe today. We can never know in the future what their data is used for. Discriminating research by only what can be useful right away is very short-sighted