Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.
No, I'm intentionally not taking a position or alleging anything. I'm pointing out the existence of some controversy. It's up to you to decide whether you want to look into it, and if yes, what sources to prefer.
There was an email she claimed to have received many years ago from another academic essentially saying "you're right that a lot of academic research is BS and just a jobs program for academics, but you shouldn't point that out because it's threatening a lot of people's livelihood." Some people are claiming she fabricated this alleged email etc., I haven't looked too much into it myself.
I end up playing father confessor often enough at work that I have had to launder things people have complained about.
When you are trying to make the right calls for a team, you need to know what the pushback is, but the bullies and masochists on the team don’t need to know who specifically brought forward a complaint as long as the leadership accept it as a valid concern.
So if everyone knows I had a private meeting with Mike yesterday it’s going to be pretty fucking obvious that I got this from Mike unless I fib a bit about the details.
Saying a conversation during a visit happened in email sounds like about the sort of thing I might lie about while not making up the conversation from whole cloth.
Not that Sabine is perfect. I’ve let the YouTube algorithm know I want to see less of her stuff. But just because there is no email doesn’t mean there was no conversation.
She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field and thinking you're an expert in all of them.
Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague comments like this about her, but very little in the way of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem rumor mongering.
Extreme specifics: her comments on work out of MIT on Color Center Qubits was basically "finally an example of actual progress in quantum computing because of reason A, B, C". That statement was in the class of "not even wrong" -- it was just complete non sequitur. People actually in the fields she comments on frequently laugh at her uninformed nonsense. In this particular case, the people that did the study she praised were also among the ones laughing at her.
This is still extreme vague without A,B,C and an explanation why there is no connection, i.e., specifics re why she was wrong. Just more vague reference to other people's reactions
