Hey everyone, so most of you saw my video last week about Sabine Hossenfelder. The response was mixed, but its detractors clearly missed the point of the video, so we now have to clarify some things. Let’s get into it.
Now I’m used to science deniers watching little to none of a particular video only to yell at me in the comments section, but I’ve never seen this behavior from so many academics. It really is appalling. Every single person who acted as though the theme of my video was “academia is perfect”, prompting them to launch into novella-length rants about all the problems they have encountered in academia, needs to go and take a long look in the mirror.
Let me give you the brief version of what you all missed. This. Thumbnails that say “I don’t trust scientists”.
That’s the problem with Sabine. Incredibly unprofessional damaging clickbait thumbnails like this. And statements like this.
Most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. That’s a ridiculous and totally indefensible statement that fuels science denial. What’s that?
Oh, Dave chopped out a bunch of super important context? No, I didn’t. This is what I played in my video that so many of you didn’t watch.
But I knew it was bullshit. Just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit, and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. Most of the work in a particular area, followed by an additional statement about academic research in general.
She is talking about all academic research, including all the fields which aren’t physics that she knows absolutely nothing about. So no, she is not exclusively talking about theoretical physics. She can insist that’s what she meant in retrospect, but it’s not what she said.
She’s lying. So I’m sorry, there is nothing for science deniers to “misinterpret”. All of the hundreds of you who complained about how it’s not her fault if science deniers twist her words in zany ways, you can kindly eat your own words.
They are twisting nothing. She tells science deniers exactly what they want to hear, which is why they’ve begun watching her videos in huge numbers, which is why she continues catering to them. That’s the problem with Sabine as of late, and that’s what I was talking about in the video you didn’t watch.
Because so many people felt compelled to rant exclusively about academia, we are going to talk about academia in a moment, as I said very little about it in my previous video. But it seems that I have to summarize an entire video in the first two minutes or most people won’t even hear it, so allow me to do that up top this time. The issue is not that Sabine brings up valid criticisms of academia, and if you don’t like it then too bad for you.
The issue is that she deliberately distorts these narratives to provide outrageous takes disparaging the entire scientific community and the entire output of science. That is what I was describing when I said “anti-establishment narratives”. It doesn’t mean anyone who challenges any institution in any way.
It means people who say things like “science is dying” and “don’t trust scientists”, which pushes the general public towards blanket science denial. People with an anti-establishment bias are very easy to manipulate, because any fraud can just say “government bad” or “university bad” followed by any ridiculous lie they want, and people prone to this narrative will believe them. When Sabine uses this rhetoric, she is pushing people in that direction and making them more receptive to lies and conspiracy theories.
This is how you get people who reject literally all science-based medicine in favor of snake oil and charlatans. It’s how you get anti-vaxxers that exacerbate a pandemic despite the mountain of science demonstrating the safety and efficacy of vaccines. It’s how you get hurricane victims open firing on FEMA workers who they believe helped manufacture the hurricanes.
Generally speaking, in America only 54% of the public believes climate change is a problem. Forget people who reject the efficacy of vaccines, there is a growing population who believe viruses are not real. This is the audience that largely consumes this content from Sabine, and she is throwing fuel on the fire that is consuming their ability to accept basic logic, professional expertise, and scientific consensus.
This is how we get politicians voted into office with fascist leanings. This is how the slide down the slippery slope towards theocracy gains momentum. This is how we get people trying to force religion into public schools, and into federal laws.
With Trump returning to office, he may follow through with his promise to put RFK in charge of the department of health. RFK. An anti-vaxxer who has said that chemicals in the environment can turn kids gay and trans and that HIV does not cause AIDS, may soon be in charge of the FDA, NIH, USDA, and CDC.
Are you listening to me? This is the battleground we face in society at the moment. This is the culture war that is shaping the future, certainly for America, but also in other nations where populism and fascism is rearing its ugly head, one of which is Germany, by the way.
As a global society we are sliding towards idiocracy, and our survival as a species is at stake. Sabine feeds people narratives that are conducive to those modes of thought, and in doing so she is pushing them further down the pseudoscience pipeline where they are more likely to be ensnared by actual demagogues and charlatans. And it’s not because they’re too uneducated to hear the nuance.
It’s because there is no nuance. Her choice of language is exactly what these people want to hear. They hear “don’t trust scientists” because she literally says that, and they react to it by baselessly rejecting anything any scientist says, just like they were told to do.
If you’re an academic and you can’t understand that, then you need to check your privilege and open your eyes a little bit. You may have the education that allows you to ignore this polarizing rhetoric from Sabine so that you are able to fixate on the kernel of legitimacy to some criticism she is leveling. That’s great for you.
But you are not the general public, and YouTube is not an academic journal, the venue where such criticisms ought to and do regularly take place. That Sabine is trying to use this other medium to launch criticism isn’t inherently the problem, it’s her choice of language. She doesn’t make videos called “my qualms with the state of particle physics”.
She says “science is dying”. She doesn’t say “my issues with the distribution of grant money”. She says “I don’t trust scientists”.
Again, this is just like James Tour shouting “we are clueless about the origin of life” all over the internet, instead of publishing his criticisms in reputable journals. Because he doesn’t have any legitimate criticisms. He’s just a charlatan with a script of lies.
For Sabine to be doing relatively similar things on YouTube is unprofessional and problematic, and she does them for money. I can’t spell it out any clearer for you. I don’t know if any of the people who left these tone deaf comments will watch this video, since they didn’t make it through much of the first one, but it is in these comments that we see so clearly how they missed the point.
Here’s the top comment everyone was drooling over, and this guy says that these people, the conspiracy theorists, are largely irrelevant. They can’t influence the course of science, just ignore them! It is astounding how wrong this person is.
It’s not about academia, it’s about society as a whole. These people vote. They bring people into office who enact legislation that steers nations towards fascism and theocracy.
This is not about academia, it’s about populism and culture wars. Despite what anyone may claim, it is specifically the duty of the science communicator to help the public understand science and the scientific community in such a way that they are immunized against this influence. They should not be themselves contributing poisonous rhetoric that fuels science denial among the public.
I can’t possibly have been more clear about this in my other video. When you plant a seed of anti-establishment bias in a person, it will inevitably rear its ugly head in the form of rejecting scientific consensus on any other matter imaginable, and in ways that produce quantifiable harm or even elevated death tolls, given situations like a pandemic or other events that pose an existential threat to humanity. People who make content that feeds conspiracy will amplify societal problems.
Bad science communication enables bad faith actors in the culture war which polarizes the public against science. That was the point of my video. Not “academia is perfect”.
This comment everyone is salivating over, as well as the several dozen below it, perfectly encapsulate how these critics did not understand what I said and did not watch the whole video. A person who exclusively does what these people think Sabine is doing, talking with measured language about specific issues within academia, absolutely would not garner the attention of science deniers and conspiracy theorists, nor would they require commentary from me. It’s her rhetoric that brought the science deniers like moths to a flame, which is how she gets these inflated numbers on these videos.
Fortunately, a lot of you immediately understood and resonated with this, acknowledging that it was about time somebody speak up about it. But that video has already been made and is still available for those who didn’t watch the whole thing. So let’s now address the disgruntled academics regarding what they erroneously thought the video was about, the particulars of academia.
Because that’s another totally separate and very interesting topic that can be discussed. Let’s discuss the narrative that science is broken. This is the narrative that is evoked by science deniers and propaganda peddlers to foster distrust in scientific expertise, and which is exacerbated by Sabine’s clickbait titles.
Is there any validity to this premise? Assuredly not. And even if the narrative stems from a kernel of truth, describing actual problems in scientific practice, this sentiment is twisted to provide an overgeneralized narrative to manipulate the public, which enhances the capacity of partisans to discredit specific areas of science for political and financial purposes.
This includes genetic engineering, vaccines, climate change, any area of scientific inquiry that contains findings which are ideologically uncongenial to them. This is why science communication is so important. Accurate narratives can increase public understanding of the process that results in scientific discovery.
It can also convey the inevitability of a variety of false starts or missteps, as well as occasional fraudulence, as science is a human endeavor like any other. Describing scientific advancement in a comprehensible way while responsibly publicizing breaches of integrity within this advancement is precisely what is needed in this post-truth era, as a combination of information and accountability will bring clarity to the public while establishing trust. I know that many of you think Sabine does exclusively this.
She does not. She peddles deceptive sensationalism, which is precisely contrary to what is needed. So what can we say regarding the specifics?
So many fraudulent studies, so many retractions, researchers publishing mediocre work just to boost their h-index and get more grant money, so on and so forth. How true is this? There is some truth to it.
But much of it is simply something that goes hand in hand with the rapid expansion of the scientific community and its output. It’s hardly a secret, and many are actively working to rectify it. For example, the publication Nature says that 10,000 scientific papers got retracted last year, worldwide.
That sounds like a huge number. But put it in the proper context. The database of this literature continues to explode at an unthinkable rate.
Tens of thousands of scientific articles are published on the internet every single day. This situation is very different from science in the 1970s. It is physically impossible with our current infrastructure to keep up with the output.
The result is that you end up with a larger proportion of papers being of mediocre or even poor quality, not properly refereed, research that could be considered inconsequential filler to stack a researcher’s CV, and so forth. It’s possible that artificial intelligence will be a solution to this problem. It’s hard to say.
But in the meantime, the publishing industry is aware of the problem. Several journals have been completely shut down specifically because of a disproportionate number of retracted papers. Wiley is currently shutting down 19 Hindawi journals, which were responsible for 8,000 out of the 10,000 retracted papers from last year.
Taylor & Francis launched Green Biomaterials last year and already this year they shut it down because of the invasion of substandard content from paper mills. This activity is regularly denounced on PubPeer, an online platform where scientists discuss bad papers and bring them to the attention of the editors. Virtually everyone would agree that paper mills are bad and should be done away with.
But this does not mean that scientific publications are to be automatically distrusted as a default position. It just means they can be approached with scrutiny. When you have a cockroach infestation you don’t burn your house down.
You gas the bugs and clean up the mess. So let’s clean it up. Another problem is unwarranted self-citation, which contributes to an inflated h-index.
This is precisely what indicted journals like MDPI and Frontiers. Because of this, scientists are rethinking h-index as the key metric for measuring impact, even if bureaucrats are behind the curve. But there is more.
The journal ET Nano has been indicted for publishing fake papers for a fee. Routine cost of publishing is a problem too. Last year there was a mass walkout at Elsevier, where the entire board resigned over the greed and profit margins they were faced with.
Corruption exists in every nook and cranny of society. Anywhere that money is to be made, it’ll be there, and peer-reviewed scientific literature is no exception. But this does not invalidate the scientific community as a whole, nor the massive output of proper science that is occurring on a minute-to-minute basis.
Important advancements occur regularly, which are subsequently checked and verified by hundreds of labs. For every unscrupulous researcher who builds a career based on questionable papers and excessive self-citation, there are a hundred passionately steadfast ones doing excellent work. Scientists are not to be arbitrarily distrusted across the board due to the actions of these other few.
Let’s look to this PNAS paper on scientific progress despite irreproducibility. The so-called “replication crisis” of course is another favorite talking point of so many, which hardly applies to the physical sciences, but let’s highlight some key takeaways. First, given the enormous volume of scientific output, it is not necessary for every paper to be groundbreaking for a field to progress.
Regarding neuroscience, for example, were a mere 10% of research being presented to be regarded as valid and important, that would still result in daily progress for the field. Another important detail is research cost inflation. The rapidly increasing cost of research is not matched by similarly increased funding.
This graph depicts cost per publication in a given year regarding penicillin in red and CRISPR in blue. The sharp increase since the beginning of the previous decade is hard to miss. This does not justify but at least explains the way the scientific community modifies its approach in the interest of attaining what funding is available, a kind of survival of the fittest.
These are broad macroeconomic issues that should inform our politics as a society, and therefore how we approach the culture wars we are seeing, at least in America. Because make no mistake, the situation can get much worse for science, depending on who we vote for. See that?
Paper mills! Profit margins! Bootlicking establishment shill Professor Dave can criticize scientific publishing and academia too!
The difference is that when I do it, it actually makes sense, and doesn’t mobilize science deniers. Do you know why? Because I’m genuinely commenting on the situation in order to convey information to the public.
It’s not to get people to click and mindlessly nod along because they like the story I’m telling. Not you disgruntled academics who ignore the problematic rhetoric and praise the details. I’m talking about the general public.
Because this is how the public interfaces with reality now. Stories. The implications of this trend for science communication are massive.
As the paper states, there are incentives in journalism to emphasize failures rather than success. Fixating on failure and crisis drives the selection of certain narratives and headlines. This is what we see in the publication world as well as with some self-employed YouTubers.
The unintended result is a devaluing of science which is ultimately destructive. The intent must be shifted towards helping the public understand how the advancements outweigh the problems by orders of magnitude in nearly every sector of public life, despite the propaganda and science denial that would tell you otherwise. And for all those who complained about my use of this term, science denial, I just don’t know what you’re upset about.
The term is self-explanatory. For example, research has shown conclusively that COVID vaccines did not produce significantly more adverse reactions than other vaccines in widespread usage, and also saved millions of lives. That’s science.
Those who insist otherwise with zero basis are science deniers. They deny the validity of science in favor of a fabricated reality, whether they are the duper or the dupee. I could give a thousand other examples, but I won’t, because you should all know better.
That so many people watching are probably having a conniption about what I just said, because their minds have been poisoned with mountains of lies regarding COVID vaccines, is precisely the problem, so let’s look at this other paper from the same issue. Rethinking media narratives about the well-being of science. This is a lengthier read, so I won’t dive too deep here, but I’ll link to both of these papers in the description should you want to give them a skim.
Essentially this is about identifying narratives that are prevalent in the media and disarming the faulty ones. Most importantly, we must avoid fueling this “science is broken” or “in crisis” narrative, not first and foremost because of its negative impact on public perception of science, but again, because it’s wrong. An analysis of popular narratives ensues, like the quest analogy, which does not accurately represent scientific progress.
This also digs into some specific talking points used to promote the “science in crisis” narrative, like a survey in Nature that claims scientists agree that there is a reproducibility crisis, except that the participants of the survey were not at all what was claimed. Then there is the projection of trends in the field of psychology to the entirety of science, and so on. In the light of all this, it becomes clear that so many people are missing the point when they idolize someone like Sabine simply because she offers the anti-establishment narrative they want to hear.
She is heavily biased by her experiences and baselessly extrapolates them over the entire academic world. And yes, she absolutely does do that. She does not say just Germany.
She does not say just particle physics. She says all academic research. She says science.
This is not an honest critique of academia. It’s a tasteless caricature. And also a stunning example of hypocrisy, since she endlessly laments how economic pressures drive the distribution of grant money in research while also making substandard videos blindly promoting capitalism.
Now Sabine herself made a comment on my video almost immediately, like within half an hour of me posting the video, so I really don’t think she watched the whole thing either, but her comment was rather respectful and professional, even if misleading, so I didn’t initially make this video to respond to her. I felt I needed to address the parade of sycophants who clearly didn’t get my message. But then, earlier this week, she published a formal video response, and I am genuinely shocked as to how unprofessional it is.
Just take a look at the title. Science is failing. Are you shitting me?
My entire criticism can be boiled down to suggesting that she stop using clickbait titles like “science is dying”, and she comes back to the table immediately with “science is failing”, perfectly exemplifying the ridiculous behavior that I was pointing out. It’s almost like a comedy sketch. The other classics are in here too, like projecting her half-baked criticisms of physics onto the entirety of the scientific community with absolutely zero basis.
Let’s take a look. Then about ten years ago I wrote a book about what’s going wrong in my own research area, the foundations of physics. But I’m afraid that the problem also befalls other disciplines.
It’s a failure of science to self-correct. Science is failing. It’s failing right in front of our eyes and no one’s doing anything about it.
Way to double down on exactly what you consistently pretend you aren’t doing, Sabine. You have no basis whatsoever to criticize the entire scientific community in this way. You have no clue what you’re talking about.
You know nothing whatsoever about what’s happening in chemistry, biology, or any other field apart from physics, as you have never worked in those fields and you do not understand them. And when I pointed this out, all of your fans proclaimed that I was way off base, that you were talking about theoretical physics only. And yet here you are proving me right in the first 30 seconds.
You are attacking the entire scientific community with this bullshit rhetoric, as a response to being called out for attacking the entire scientific community with bullshit rhetoric. Unreal. Looks like you push.
Oh no, it does both. Why the fuck is it my fault that cranks think I’m their best friend because I’m pointing out that there’s no progress in the foundations of physics? It’s a fact!
Because that’s not what you say, Sabine. You are not talking about progress in physics. You are talking about science as a whole, and you pretend that all of it is broken and that no scientists should be trusted.
Like the thing you just said literally one minute ago. Are you losing your mind? Then it’s the obligatory rant about how we haven’t seen a huge breakthrough like relativity or quantum mechanics in a century.
Who cares? More importantly, if this was all you ever said, I wouldn’t have made a video about you, but it’s not all you say, not even in this video where you are pretending that’s all you say. And then the strawmen begin.
Please imagine scientists in any other discipline worked like that. Biologists inventing new species and then making expeditions to find them. Chemists inventing a hidden dark sector of the periodic table.
Neurologists arguing it’d be pretty if synaptic connections followed the ? ? ?
diagram and then putting people into MRI machines to search for it. Sounds insane? Well that’s what it is!
I already addressed this. Physicists theorizing new particles on the basis of predictions the standard model makes is nothing like biologists inventing new species as a flight of fancy. You’re being dishonest.
Chemists inventing dark sectors of whatever the hell you said is not like physicists proposing dark matter, something which is very well substantiated even if we don’t yet know what it is. There is tremendous evidence for its existence. You’re being dishonest.
Even your criticism of physics is barely more than a nugget of truth wrapped up in seven layers of sensationalism. At best you could call it stagnation, which is not “failing”. But again, if this was all you ever said, I wouldn’t have said anything.
It’s about the rest of what you say that is not specific to physics, over and over again, both before and after this rant about physics in the middle, to distract the audience from the anti-science rhetoric you push. The reason this worries me so much is that I think this is a systemic problem caused by the way we organize academic research. This means it can happen in other disciplines and probably does happen.
This is why I don’t trust scientists. Probably does happen in other fields? That’s it?
All I can do is laugh at the hypocrisy of your fans telling me to stay in my lane when it’s blatantly evident that you don’t even know what a lane is. Your baseless speculation about fields you know nothing about is supposed to be a credible indictment that invalidates all of science? Sabine, this is pathetic.
What’s going wrong in chemistry? Say something concrete. What’s going wrong in biology?
Say something concrete. These are areas which I do indeed know more than you, and I could lecture you at great length as to the impressive breakthroughs that have been made in this century in these and other areas. The astounding advent of click chemistry, advanced materials design, personalized medicine, CRISPR gene editing technology, induced pluripotent stem cells, prosthetics controlled by neural signals, the list is long.
But you know this. You know that what you’re saying here is bullshit. You’re just desperately trying to validate your generalized rhetoric so that you don’t have to stop doing it.
Because it makes you money. You don’t want to correct your behavior. You don’t want to behave responsibly.
You want to say “science is dying” every chance you get, and then when you get called out for it, you pretend you were just talking about theoretical physics. It's like Trump using inflammatory dictatorial rhetoric to inspire the coup on January 6th, while including one sentence that he can call back to after the fact to pretend he didn’t call for violence. Saying the second thing doesn’t mean you didn’t say the first thing, over and over again.
This bit of unhinged damage control you’re enacting is exposing you for this tactic better than I ever could have. Some scientists don’t want me to mention this because they say it fuels the fire of science deniers. It does.
But that’s because science deniers are right when they say academia has a big problem. Ignoring this problem won’t make it go away. We need to talk about it.
Science deniers are not having discussions about the particulars of academia. They are pretending that all of science is wrong and that all scientists are corrupt establishment shills who are constantly deceiving us. When you say “science is dying” and “don’t trust scientists”, you are fueling that fire.
Stop hiding behind this façade of martyrdom and the pretense that you’re just criticizing academia, because I made it extremely clear in my previous video and this one that you’re avoiding the real issue. If you wanted to talk about theoretical physics, you’d say theoretical physics in the title. Not science.
Science and theoretical physics are not equivalent, now are they? The latter is a tiny subset of the former. I can make a diagram for you, but since you and your fans are so smart, you should be able to grasp this simple concept without any visual aids.
And I was quite generous in not calling you out for the hatchet jobs you did on trans issues, capitalism, and other topics that are way outside of your expertise. I avoided doing that because I was being charitable, and I didn’t want to just start listing errors you’ve made. The troublesome rhetoric was much more important to me, so that’s what I focused on.
But now I know you’ll say literally anything for clicks. The lack of integrity you just displayed with this response is so profound that I genuinely was not prepared for it. So by all means, Sabine, make a video about how we shouldn’t fund another particle accelerator.
I may even agree with you. Make a video about problems with scientific publishing. As you just saw, I agree with that too.
Make a pointed and informed criticism about whatever you want. Just stop pretending that’s all you’re doing. Because it isn’t.
And you know it. But do go ahead and make another response tripling down on your rhetoric, ignoring everything I said, just so you can drop another Brilliant ad. For everyone else, apart from reiterating all of these points for those who missed them the first time, as well as addressing Sabine’s ridiculous response, the point of this video is to say, once again, that science is not broken.
It’s not failing. It’s simply imperfect. Just like literally everything else in society.
That there is plenty of room for improvement in our various governments doesn’t mean we advocate for anarchy. That there is room for improvement in the scientific process and in academic institutions doesn’t mean that we shout from a mountaintop that science is dying, and that universities are indoctrination camps, and that scientists can’t be trusted. These are real things that pundits and demagogues say all the time, and it’s a narrative that needs to be neutralized in order to help steer humanity towards a fruitful future.
We don’t need cheerleaders for science. We need warriors for science. People who will do battle with bad faith actors who are poisoning society for political and financial gain.
Sabine doesn’t have to be one, but she should stop being a conduit for susceptible people to fall down the pipeline of science denial. That’s what she is doing with this particular type of content. Which again, is only a small portion of her output.
There is no problem with her content popularizing science. And there is plenty of room for informed and productive conversations about how to improve academia, better direct grant money, enhance the quality of the primary literature, and so forth, which she herself can offer once she learns how to do that. For the final time, anyone who is doing exclusively that would never get an ounce of criticism from me.
Despite the ridiculous accusations, neither my previous video nor this one is exclaiming “don’t tell the public the truth because it fuels science denial”. It’s about the false narrative that is pushed by so many about this topic being objectively wrong. I have no ability to influence the peer review process.
I am not in academia and can’t make meaningful changes there. I am concerned with public perception of science, which is why I make videos about public perception of science and influences that affect it negatively, like Sabine undoubtedly does. That’s what my video was about, and now this one too.
Hopefully a greater proportion of you now see and understand that. But as is always advised with the internet, I won’t hold my breath. So that’s it for today, I genuinely didn’t expect so much hostility simply for pointing out that saying “I don’t trust scientists” is a bad idea, but it’s the internet.
Nothing really should surprise me anymore. I hope this has been an informative addendum to my previous video, I’ll see you next time.
