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Short and pointed video from Sabine on the corruption of science
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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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.
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...)
Counter argument: it’s happening with or without her and it’d be better to rationally highlight the issues rather than allow the uneducated to hijack the issue.
IME, the biggest deflator of faith in science etc for laypeople are their friends who left academia telling their own stories aligned with Sabine’s general point.
Broadly, I’d wager the erosion of faith in research is a much bigger picture and getting to the bottom of the causes is more important than getting precious about maintaining the status quo.
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?