Decoding the Gurus - Sabine Hossenfelder: Science is a Liar ... Sometimes

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

In this highly non-topical episode, Matt and Chris dive into the entertainingly gruff world of Sabine Hossenfelder, the German theoretical physicist and popular YouTube science communicator. Known as a joyful science curmudgeon, Sabine excels at making complex science accessible to a wide audience. Yet, there's another side to her content: one that's increasingly steeped in the YouTube algorithm’s culture-war-fueled clickbait, complete with prolific both-sidesing and even hints of her own brand of science-denialist rhetoric.We can already imagine Sabine’s response: tone policing from establishment scolds who are trying to silence a fearless truth-teller for exposing academia’s dark underbelly. Perhaps that’s all it is—maybe Matt and Chris are aligned with BIG PHYSICS, out to quash any dissent about supersymmetry, string theory, or the academic publishing machine.Or… maybe it’s something else. Maybe Sabine has pivoted to pander to the (so-hot-right-now) anti-establishment YouTube crowd, declaring that modern science has achieved nothing of value in 50 years and claiming that scientists (especially climate scientists) are too scared to challenge ideological dogmas for fear of jeopardizing their careers or funding.It’s certainly one of those things.Whatever the case, join Matt and Chris as they tackle this perplexing case of rhetorical indeterminacy, unpack YouTube audience dynamics, and delve into Sabine's unexpected alignments with Eric Weinstein and her 'sharp' critiques of Tucker Carlson.LinksSabine Hossenfelder: The crisis in physics is real: Science is failingSabine Hossenfelder: Fossil Fuels Don’t Come From Fossils? Tucker Carlson Fact CheckSabine Hossenfelder: My dream died, and now I'm hereSabine Hossenfelder: Theories of Everything [Music Video]Professor Dave Explains: The Problem With Sabine HossenfelderProfessor Dave Explains: No, Sabine, Science is Not Failing

Hello and welcome to Dakote Daka Roots, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer. We try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown calling you from the US of A. With me is Chris Kavanagh joining us from Tokyo, wonder of the modern world. So big hello, Chris, from Arizona, a monument valley where it has just started snowing. You didn't know that it's started snowing here. It's a very blue blizzard out there.

Winter is coming, as they say in West Cross. And it's a big night. It's a big night, isn't it, Chris? They're counting votes as we record this. By the time this goes out, it'll all be old news. Everyone will either be celebrating or crying. It currently doesn't look like people are going to be celebrating. Oh, it's going to be happy.

No, no. I mean, obviously 50% of America will be happy with when I come, but I don't think the majority of our audience are going to be happy just looking at the way things are currently going. So that's fun. Yeah, that's fun. That's the same. But anyway, look, we're not going to let that bring us down. We've, you know, we all need to just focus on something else for our Saturday.

I'm already having to tip everybody 20% to get anything in America. I'm already suffering from that. There's no reason for the politics to make me suffer as well, Chris. So distract me, distract me with some guru stuff. Uh, yeah. So we were going to look at Curtis Sharvin and Peter Thiel, and we are going to look at them. going to look at Curtis Sharvin and Peter Thiel, and we are going to look at them.

Um, but we're just taking a little bit of a jaunt away from the polemical partisans, neo-fascist and the things just because, you know, it's, look, we get holidays every once in a while. Okay. This is a holiday in a sense, in that we're looking at a science communicator who is not a neo-fascist, at least as far as I'm aware. And is in many respects, not in the top echelons, I think of the secular guru pool, would you concur Matt? I agree with you that think, of the secular guru pull. Would you concur, Matt? I agree with you there, Chris.

This is a little holiday. The person we're covering today, Sabine Hossenfelder, is not in the deepest, darkest depths of, you know, culture war nonsense. So yeah, for us, that's a little holiday. Yeah. So yeah, for us, that's a little holiday. Um, yeah, there was a video done recently by Professor Dave, another YouTuber, science communicator. Um, and he put out a video called the problem with Sabine Hossenfelder,

which is very good, I recommend. And actually it brought up a lot of the points that we had noticed previously as well as some additional ones. And broadly speaking, just to summarize, I would say that his points were that Sabine is a good science communicator, but she seems to be leaning into the contrarian science denialist tropes on YouTube. And that this is leading her via like kind of clickbait titles and topics to make hyperbolic statements that appeal to a anti-science audience on YouTube. The video I think was actually very fair. It was very critical, but it also highlighted, I mean, it started off by showing

examples of her doing good science communication and made clear throughout that it didn't regard her as like an insubstantial crank, but rather regarded her as somebody has legitimate scientific expertise and can be a good communicator, expertise and can be a good communicator, but seems to be strained towards science denialism in her rhetoric and presentation at times. Yeah. And I might start off by just reiterating what was this guy's name again? I've forgotten. Professor Dave?

Yeah, Professor Dave. Because I'd listen to Sabine Hossenfelder occasionally for those little neat little science news, science explainer type stuff. It's a kind of fun little bit of YouTube content to have. I had noticed, like you said, many of the things more recently that didn't rub me the right way. But even then I continued to kind of click on some of her more straight down the line videos and I still enjoyed them.

Uh, so yeah. I'll also point out that like Sabine is now primarily a YouTuber. She has a channel called Science with Sabine. And it has 1.5 million subscribers. Recent videos, the most recent. Scientists discover a law of natural laws. The crisis in physics is real. Science is failing. That's one of the videos we're going to look at. Did the black hole information paradox just disappear? Is the USA a democracy or a republic? And so on and so forth. So you get a kind of mixture of scientific topics,

especially around physics-oriented topics, which is her specialty, as well as discussion about politics or culture war topics a little bit, or you know, controversial issues. And a lot of the thumbnails are, you know, Sabine's fierce looking, surprised or confused or disappointed, you know, saying, the beginning of the end looking pensive or bad science, with her, you know, saying, uh, the beginning of the end, looking pensive or bad science with her, you know, covering her eyes. So it's, uh, she's just, I've just pointed out that that is the oeuvre that she now operates in.

Like, uh, science communication and YouTube clickbait. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, Savin is very, I, upfront about where she's coming from in that she had a career as a working physicist. Doesn't sound like she was particularly happy in that career and has now left that work behind. And I think, so to say, well, according to her anyway,

you know, fairly negative views of how physics is done are expressed and it is connected to her personally, you know, having had bad experiences working in physics. Oh yeah, and she has a video from April of this year called my dream died and now I'm here, which is her outlining her personal story, some of her grievances with like her experiences in science, some of the issues that she seems around like, you know, publication industry and science and that kind of thing. So she is clear that she's now converted to, you know, somebody commenting on science

online and maybe she still has interest in doing science. But if so, it will probably come about being supported by the YouTube channel rather than the primary thing being science. Right. And then YouTube on the side. So that is what it is. But as you said, one other thing that Sabine came across my radar for was she made like a kind of humorous video mocking people offering alternative theories, like theories of everything, right? Eric Weinstein and Anne Ullors, she sometimes appears on panels with them and would make critical remarks.

And she made like a little tongue in cheek music video about asking like middle-aged men to stop telling her their theories of everything. So she's kind of like a sardonic character as well and critical of some of the physics contrarians online. Yeah, well certainly critical in the sense, or rather critical when they are offering vague, mathsy theories of everything, but not critical so much when they are criticizing the state of science and the state of physics. Sabine has been very clear that she and Eric Weinstein share a fair bit of common ground in terms of feeling that physics has very much lost its way and has been

corrupted by nefarious incentives. They have their different spins on it, but there's also a lot of agreement there as well. Yeah, we'll get into that. So let's start with Clep. So as I said, there's a video that was recently put out called Science's Feeling. In the thumbnail, Savita is looking very cross and kind of haggard. She doesn't like it that science is failing. No, she doesn't.

Doesn't approve of this. She likes science and doesn't want to see it fail. This is something of a response video to the Professor Dave criticism, right? Because she doesn't directly reference it, but she references, you know, receiving critiques for lacking nuance and that kind of thing. So, in the Professor Dave video, he was very clear that he is offering specific critiques and that he thinks that Sabine's content could be more valuable if she was just avoiding some of the tropes that she's leaning into. And so she could have responded to this in different ways, but we'll see how she did.

Respond. Here's her initial framing. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Sabina has something to complain about. In this case, I have a complaint about myself. I've been alerted that I lack nuance and I think it's a fair criticism. So today I want to offer you lots of nuance. You can even take two if you want. I've been worried about the problem with academic research ever since I became part of it about 20 years ago. I didn't accidentally say that I became part of the problem because that's exactly what happened. Then about 10 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. My book is called Lost in Math. Unfortunately, people who haven't read the book sometimes think I'm saying that physicists use too much mathematics, an argument which is also used by some pseudoscientists who want you to buy their self-printed pamphlets about eclectic universes or whatnot. That's right. She does not refer to the critique specifically. I suppose that's good practice,

right? You don't want to breathe air into criticism, but rather refer to it obliquely. And one of the criticisms that was made is it centers around this pretty strong language around, you know, science is failing, science is, I don't trust science or scientists, essentially claiming the system is corrupt. And Sabine's defense begins with, I think, pointing to the fact that she raised a lot of concerns that she has with the fundamental physics, uh, in her book Lost in Math Math, some time ago.

So it's not like it's a recent thing that she sort of swerved to this on YouTube, to sort of tap into the crank anti-establishment, conspiratorial element, but rather it's a long-held view of hers. But Sabine herself acknowledges that her recent videos are appealing to that element, but that's not really her fault. Now, so it's a tongue in cheek apology for lacking nuance because she wants to say,

actually, I have lots of nuance. If you'd read my book, you would see that I've gone into this in some depth and this is nothing new. I've been voicing these criticisms for a long time, but I, I'd be curious, Matt, if her book on the issues with maths and physics or lack of maths in physics is similar or features paragraphs that sound like this. Actually, what I say in the book is pretty much the opposite, namely that physicists don't take math seriously enough, but it's of course entirely my own fault that people make claims about my book without having read it. I therefore want to acknowledge my privilege and accept full responsibility for the centuries of oppression,

culture, erasure and systemic inequality. Ah, wrong script, sorry. Okay, forget Nuals, I'm not good at it. 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. We haven't made progress in theory development for 50 years. We still use the quantum field theory of the standard model,

which dates to the 1970s. And we still use general relativity, which is more than a century old. So I wonder if her book on lost in mapss includes a paragraph pandering to the anti-woke style, you know, oh, you want me to acknowledge my privilege and inequity and all that? No, that's all bullshit. Like I feel that that might be the kind of thing that Professor Deiv was talking about, right? That there's a presentation there that links it in to the kind of common trope in the anti-woke science denial thing about, oh, this is all about political correctness and, you know,

science not allowing you to say what needs to be said. And then, well, the other point, just to highlight this, she's emphasizing that in theoretical physics, there hasn't been inferior development for the past 50 years. So in this case, it sounds like her issue, and I think the main topic of her book is her experience in physics and theoretical physics in particular. But as we just heard in the last clip, she says science, right? She will often switch, as we'll see, between describing this frustration about the state of theoretical physics and then applying it much more broadly than in that specific field.

And the complaint about that they're still using theories from the 1970s, like evolution, Matt, ever heard of that theory? That's from the 19th century. It's still floating around. How can we haven't thrown that away and found a much better one? Surely we're due for a trade-in by now. The wheels must be falling off. I know. 1800s, Jesus Christ.

No, I mean, okay. So that's right. So there's a lot to unpack there. First of all, yes, that lost in math book, you and I have not read it. Probably you, like me, Chris, have read a few detailed reviews of it. But like I didn't see it, like I saw a lot of people reacting to what seems to be the main theme in it, which is something that Sabine talks about. She has a problem with stuff like string theory, and basically these very beautiful, elegant theories, which are attempting to take these next steps beyond quantum mechanics and general relativity,

but basically untestable. And I think that's a fair opinion. I'm not qualified to have a strong opinion about fundamental physics. Sabine is, and anyone is welcome to. But I don't think in that book there are these broad scale claims about like all of science, let alone all of physics, let alone just the specific subfield of fundamental physics, which is just the theoretical grand theory stuff. I don't think there are those claims that it's all corrupt and that, you know, they're just like deliberately, knowingly,

not attempting to further theoretical advancement, but rather just taking the money for the nice grants and hiring more people and, you know, feathering their, their, their nests with grant money, which is the kinds of stuff she's been kind of claiming recently. I mean, if the defense says I was always offering hyperbolic dismissals of all of science and that's, that's in my book from 20 years ago, that's one defense, but I would kind of assume more credit that like she, she isn't doing that. And if she is talking about how this applies more broadly

that she would still be referring to, with relevant caveats. Well, no, no, Chris. I think the part of her defense, which is fair and valid, is that one of the critiques that Professor Dave made is that he noticed that the videos in which Sabin Husserfelder is making these very sweeping claims about physics and science generally, which do appeal to the conspiratorial anti-institutional bunch, tend to get like an awful lot of views. And as you said at the beginning, Sabin's income

does come from that. So I think Sabine's defense, which is no, no, I always had a problem with the way they're doing things in fundamental physics. That part of it seems fair to me. Well, yeah, but I don't think the argument that I see in that Professor Di video or the argument that we're making here is, is that you cannot critique the argument that we're making here is, is that you cannot critique modern physics or that you cannot have like an outlier view on the value of some of the modern theories or maybe not even an outlier view, right? Maybe a fairly widely held view, you know, that the field is focusing on the wrong issues or whatnot. But the issue that Professor Deeb was highlighting, and what we have both observed in her content is that she is doing some of the very strong anti-science rhetoric. It's

not talking specifically just about theoretical physics. It's using that and kind of jumping much wider to say all of academia, all of science is doing nothing. We'll see examples of that, but just to give some more illustrations, here's her talking a bit more about specifically the issues in physics. Yes, some measurements that confirm these theories are more recent. The heavy quarks were only measured in the 1990s and the Higgs in 2012. The cosmological constant made a comeback, neutrino masses were confirmed and gravitational waves were eventually directly detected.

But the theories for all that are from the 1970s or earlier. And the problems we're trying to solve today are even older than that. What is dark matter? How do we quantise gravity? What's the measurement? These are from the 1930s, when American students were studying how many live goldfish they could swallow and no one asked for an ethics approval.

That's how old these problems are. The problem is not that 50 years is a long time, not just because I was born in the 1970s and find that offensive, but also because it's plausible that progress slows down as a discipline becomes more mature. Problems become more difficult. The easy things have been done. Experiments take longer to build and become more expensive. No, the problem is not that it's taking so long. The problem is that physicists have tried to make progress with methods that have failed over and over again for 50 years, and they're still doing it.

They're still using methods that don't work and they're still not learning from their mistakes. They're still using methods that don't work and they're still not learning from their mistakes. So, Matt, maybe you can answer this for me, because she's saying they're using methods that don't work. After the start of that is her talking about various observations that they've made, right? That have been proven correct. She talks about the heavy quarks being measured in the 90s, the Higgs boson in 2012, and I presume you could talk about gravitational waves, right, as well. But then she's saying they're not actually successfully

progressing or demonstrating things. But am I getting sides wrong? Like if your model predicts things and they've never been observed and you develop these like very complex, huge budget projects, which then demonstrate that the predictions are correct. Like how is that them feeling to achieve anything? Maybe they're not finding things which completely destroy the previous models and make everything that we've previously known shatter into a million pieces. But like, I genuinely was confused by this argument because you lay out predictions being

proven correct and then say, well, but that doesn't matter. Yeah. Look, I'm just an amateur physics appreciator as well, Chris, but I think there's a few things going on. One is, as Sabine said, physics is maturing as a science where things do get exponentially more difficult to improve upon the better that you do. Another example of this is chemistry. I mean, there are developments, I think, in materials, and there are interesting mechanical things I think that can happen with chemistry. But in terms of fundamental chemistry, I don't think there's much left to do. That's at least my naive impression of it. Yet nobody thinks that chemistry is broken or that research chemists are doing anything wrong. It's just the

state of things. Now, with physics, clearly there is still things that we would like to know and like to do. Sabine lists some of them. I think there's a broad feeling of frustration in the physics community. It would have been great to have some grand unified theory that explained all the previous... Yeah, that would be great. But I don't think it follows, right? That the fact that there hasn't been a great big sweeping breakthrough, which she points out, there hasn't been a major development in 50 years. Let's just accept that on the face of it.

I don't think that implies that physicists as a community are necessarily doing anything wrong. And you have to use your sociological common sense here, which is that it's a big community, it's a diverse community, it covers all the nations of the world. And you can bet any given research lab or group of physicists would love to be the ones. It's pretty hard for me to accept that they're deliberately... and theoretical physicists are not known for being stupid people as a group, right?

It does seem a bit implausible to me. I'd need much stronger arguments to be convinced that as a group, they are kind of obtusely, deliberately just treading water or running in circles when there is a clear and obvious approach, at least in Sabine Hostenfelder's mind, of the things that they should be doing in order to get these breakthroughs, which she feels should have probably already happened already. I'm not quite sure what the prescription is. Like I know her view, it would be don't do stuff like string theory, make sure that you're making theoretical predictions that can be tested, but maybe

she's explained it in some video I haven't seen yet. I'm just going to point out to you, Matt, that she does say in this video that her complete is not primarily about string theory, it's like multiverse and supersymmetry and whatnot. She says string theory is Eric's thing multiverse and supersymmetry and whatnot. Yes. String theory is Eric's thing. So you'll just, I suspect that would be a point that you would be corrected.

Yeah. Um, but it doesn't matter. I remember that point too. Yeah. String theory just looms larger. My brain is my go-to for, for the theory that doesn't yield testable predictions. But yeah, that's right. There, there are a lot of them.

And as Sabine said, they've been around since before string theory. Well, let's hear her position of it and see if she can convince you. They aren't taking into account the evidence, which clearly shows that their methods are not working. And that's a failure of science to self-correct. This is why this worries me so much. It shouldn't happen. It's a community of tens of thousands of physicists, intelligent people, mostly, who have for half a century used methods that evidently do not work and they continue to do it. What are those methods?

Well, I explain that in my book with great nuance, but to make a long story short, they basically guess maths, which they like for one reason or another. And to the extent that these maths made forcifiable predictions, they've been forcified, like grand unified theories and supersymmetric models and so on. So what's left now are the un-forcifiable ideas, like multiverses and string theory and inflation and so on. And there is always new maths they can guess. This method of theory development isn't scientific. 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 off the periodic table. Neurologists arguing it'd be pretty if synaptic connections followed the E8 route diagram and then putting people into MRI machines to search for it. Sounds insane? Well that's what it is! So again Matt, can I just point out a contradiction? So if you're arguing, other scientists wouldn't make these elementary mistakes and apply the scientific model incorrectly. That suggests that other disciplines in science are doing better, right?

But later we'll see that the rhetoric is aiming at all of science. So she says that biologists and chemists and neurologists wouldn't be doing science like this. Well, then her criticism is directed at physicists, but that's not what she limits it to. And again, just to give that she says that they are basically making these pretty maths and they're constantly being refuted and then they're just like moving on. But didn't she just in the previous clip outline that the old models, old theories, made predictions

about various things that should be there that are now being observed? So like, I get that there are things that are unfalsifiable or not, but there certainly seems to be some elements of physics where predictions are being made and validated by things like particle accelerators or colliders. Am I wrong? No, I think there has been empirical validation of the standard model. In the last 50 years, you're quite right. And yeah, I think Sabine's issue is primarily with that theoretical side of things in this sub-discipline of theoretical physics.

I think she would acknowledge that there has been an awful lot of development in applied physics over the last 50 years. And you're just right about that contradiction. You can't have it both ways. You can't say, look, I'm very unhappy about this lack of progress in fundamental physics. It's probably due to this huge problem in our culture, and we're doing everything wrong,

and probably due to corrupting influences. And this has led me to believe that all of science is corrupt or subject to all of the same problems. You can't hold up the rest of science as an example of doing things correctly when having a go, you have to pick one or the other. Yeah, so look, I mean, I'm sympathetic with the frustration with like, it sounds like S Sabin didn't have a very pleasant

time working in physics. And I get the impression that it is, that especially the theoretical side of things is a very rarefied field. I've worked with a number of physicists who with PhD physicists, who essentially dropped out and basically made a career in teaching, but often working in engineering or some sort of related field because they're extremely smart and in teaching, but often working in engineering or some sort of related field because they're extremely smart and talented people, but they just didn't quite cut it in the theoretical physics land. Like it's almost like wanting a career

as a virtuoso pianist, right? You could be a bloody amazing pianist, but still struggle with that career path. And at the same time, they've got an incredibly challenging task in front of them. The standard model works too well. Its predictions are too good. It's being confirmed by things like the Higgs boson. Yet, at the same time, they know that something isn't right because there are

these inconsistencies. You can't reconcile gravity and general relativity with quantum mechanics, all the rest. Sabine could explain it better than me. So they know that there is some further advancement yet to make, which is different from, say, chemistry. But the way forward is not clear. And Sabine thinks she has the answer to this, I think, which is that it's being confirmed by things

like the Higgs boson. Yet, at the same time, they know that it's being confirmed by things like the Higgs boson, yet at the same time, they know that something isn't right because there are these inconsistencies. You can't reconcile gravity and general relativity with quantum mechanics, all the rest. Sabine could explain it better than me. So they know that there is some further advancement yet to make, which is different from, say, chemistry, but the way forward is not clear. And Sabine thinks she has the answer to this, I think, which is that, you know, it's corrupt incentives that become, their minds are addled with the idea of making beautiful theories, and they're just going about it the wrong way. She can see this, Eric Weinstein can see this,

but, you know, virtually no one in the working physics community is able to see this. And they hint at dark forces as being responsible for this. And I guess this is what attracts your and my attention. Yeah. Well, one thing I will say in a positive note is I do like Sabine snarky asides, right? That she occasionally, this isn't an issue I have, like she says, you know, theoretical physicists or physicists in general are like smart people. Well, most of them, right? Like I enjoy that, but Katynas. And I also, in her other video, she talks about her own experiences with sexism

in the physics community, wherever she was based, but also with like the issues about short-term positions, you know, research contracts that are insecure and all these kinds of well-known problems with academia, which are there, publishing incentives leading to not creative incentives for like accurate science. And all of that is true, right? But I think that those critiques are like bundled on top of a much stronger science denialist style, almost Brett Weinsteinian claim, because there she's saying, you know, strip out physicists and put in virologists. All of these virologists, tens of thousands of them, they are in the field claiming that the evidence for COVID coming from a lab is not particularly strong,

but this is because of the incentives, Matt, that are there. And they're not, biologists are not willing to acknowledge the power of ivermectin. The arguments are the same. And when anytime someone is positing that tens of thousands of experts are missing these obvious thing that they have spotted and that they are the brief renegade that is able to speak the truth, you should just note that that's a very

self-serving presentation. And like I feel like that that should be obvious, including this being the positioning yourself in that way is rhetorically very useful and rhetorically very appealing for people that want to describe that science is completely corrupt, the experts are liars and so on. And so you might think that you would want to take steps to avoid contributing to that misconception by being clearer about what our target is and, you know, where the limitations of the argument is.

But counter that, it seems that she does the opposite. Yeah. I just, just one thing I like to that, Chris, you may have a clip for this, but the, the claim that scientists working in research and institutions are being forced to conform, that they're too afraid to go against the orthodoxy or they'll be punished is another thing that we see there. And again, forms part of that very convenient narrative,

which isn't really falsifiable and really does, it is used by people like Eric or Brett Weinstein to claim anything they want. Anyway. Or Graham Hancock, for that matter. Yeah, Graham Hancock with pseudo-archaeology. That's right. And, you know, it feels a bit mean to be comparing Sabine to these characters because in contrast to them, she is in many respects quite great. She does excellent work and, you know, I think she's got a lot to contribute.

But I think from what you've played so far and what we've listened to, we've seen this veering, this pandering, I guess, to that certain mindset and it may have been accidental. I don't know. Well, yeah, maybe though, but you know, there's plenty of Nobel Prize winners, which have also went down various anti-science roads. Right. So I don't think being a good scientist is necessarily a protection against that. But so listen to this, this is some of the more of the rhetoric that I'm talking

about or complaining about if you want. Well, I think these past 50 years will go down as one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of science. I can't stop physicists from continuing this insanity, but I can distance myself from it and I can draw attention to the problem and that's what I'm doing. The reason this worries me so much is that I think this is a systemic problem caused by the way we organise academic research. This means it can happen in other disciplines and probably does happen.

This is why I don't trust scientists. I can't. Because I've seen in my own field that thousands of them might pursue for decades what's obviously pseudoscience, like arguments from naturalness or the so-called WIMP miracle. Hell, just the names tell you that this isn't science. It's numerology, like you know the diameter of the pyramids in inches is 660 times the square root of my little finger. And again, you don't have to take my word for this. It's all in the published literature. Do you remember how

physicists were arguing that the LHC would see evidence for supersymmetry before it turned on? Didn't happen. Did you hear any of them explaining why they were wrong? No, I haven't either and I really think they should find out what went wrong there before asking for money to build an even larger collider to look for more stuff that doesn't exist. So Matt, can I just point out this most embarrassing period of science, the past 50 years, would include stuff like the development of CRISPR, the development of mRNA vaccines, AI progress in recent years, quantum computing, so many significant scientific developments.

But she here does that thing of saying the theoretical physics community, it's stuck, it's embarrassing itself, but then says, I don't trust scientists because that applies across the field. So is really the past 50 years going to be the most embarrassing for scientific developments? I don't see it when I look at the field of science. And this is a common talking point of Peter Thiel as well. But in the same way, he tends to dismiss all those things as like, oh, that's engineering or applied science or this kind of thing. But there obviously has been a whole bunch of scientific developments in my lifetime alone. And yeah, Sabine's characterization of it just rings very hyperbolic to me.

And if you restrict it to theoretical physics, maybe she has more of an argument, but she doesn't restrict it to that. Or she's constantly blurring the line between scientists and string theory advocates or supersymmetry particle physics. Yeah, yeah. It's a long boat of draw for me too. Like I don't see the link between, I say, supersymmetry advocate making a prediction that wasn't born out by the Large Hadron Cypical letter. I mean, that seems normal, right?

And actually in physics where they do have, like, they're almost desperate to find an alternative model to the standard model. So it actually would make sense to be proposing perhaps some way out theories just to see if they're confirmed. So that's a shame that that wasn't supported. But it doesn't seem to me to prove that they were completely wrong to suggest this theory in the first place. They should have been doing something else that I'm not quite clear about. And it's definitely a long boat of draw to say that this implies that there's something terrible going on in physics more generally and in science more

generally. And the language she uses there, as you said, Chris, you could say all of those things. You could express your disappointment and how annoyed you are with supersymmetry or string theory advocates, and propose an alternative methodology for doing science. I'm not quite sure what it is. Does it involve something else apart from proposing theories, collecting data, and testing them? But you could do it without using that pretty evocative, emotive language, right? Like I don't trust scientists. Science is failing. She compares it to numerology and looking at the entrails of animals or something. Like that is the kind of extreme language and that is why those videos of hers is very appealing to people who are actual bona fide science deniers. They are the

ones that are clicking on those YouTube videos and providing revenue to Sabine. I don't remember numerologists theories predicting things like gravitational waves for example, just the name one, but you mentioned matter overlapping with Eric Weinstein in some ways and this is interesting because in all of NU, she's been very critical of Eric, even while agreeing with him on some limited points. But it seems to me that she's become more sympathetic, or at least presenting it with a stronger emphasis

on the things that Eric gets right in her view. Right. So listen to this. I don't blame individual physicists or research directions that this happened. And this is where I disagree with Eric Weinstein. I believe that the problem is caused by community reinforcement and the way that academia is funded. I don't want to go into this now, but let me know in the comments if you want to hear details. Eric is one of the few people who sees the problem in the foundations of physics for what it is. He's drawn attention to

it and he understands how serious the situation is. However, he seems to think the problem was caused by string theorists. I don't find this very convincing because string theory hype was a very American phenomenon and at least from my admittedly European perspective, particle phenomenology, supersymmetry in particular, were far worse. Anybody saying that Eric is identifying the fundamental issues in like academia correctly is wrong. I'm sorry, because like I've looked at a lot of Eric's output and he not only makes almost all of those issues focused about himself and how he discovered things that were then like, you know, hidden away and proposes, you know, a grand theory of everything

that has been silenced because of the superstring theories dominance. But also, it's clear when you look at Eric's content that he doesn't know about things like the open science movement. He doesn't talk about pre-registration. He doesn't talk about registered reports or various reform movements. So he is the paradigmatic physics crank. He lights up all of those indicators and all of those cranks are making arguments about genuine limitations within science, right? Issues with publication bias, issues with funding bodies, pushing particular agendas or

this kind of thing. But Sabin here is overlooking all of the surrounding significant crankiness of Eric to say, yeah, he's drawing attention to this very important thing. And, you know, I basically agree with him. He's just focused on the wrong people, the critique. And yeah, if that is your stance and the primary takeaway you have from Eric's comments on, you know, science and physics and academia. Well, then you are in like science denialism territory, because Eric is not a nuanced advocate for science. He's a conspiracy theorist primarily, and somebody with his own alternative theory of everything,

something that's a being is supposed to be opposed to. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed she's very light on those criticisms. I think she's kind of hinted or expressed a fair bit of skepticism towards his bespoke rough sketch of a grand theory. Because she should be. In the past. In the past. Yeah.

Because it's very much the kind of thing that she shouldn't like. If you don't like vague nebulous, untestable, half-thought-out theories that sort of sounds nice on the surface. I think it's wrong to characterize Eric as someone who blames it on string theorists because he doesn't. His theory of what's wrong with physics goes much deeper, as you well know, Chris. And it is very dark, right? There is shadowy cabals, you know, utter corruption. It's aimed at basically preventing, you know, research that could so easily be achieved to be sending us to the stars overnight.

Like it's really out there. Yeah, the strength theorists are a symptom. Not the cause. Yeah, but of course, as we've experienced at our little tour around content creator land, it's usually not good for business if you are very critical of other content creators, other people out there at the discourse. It's generally not good for your brand, I think, to have those sorts of dramas. We have people reach out to us when we're critical of them,

looking to smooth things over and make us play nice. But you do get lots of kudos for sticking the boot in really hard to those shadowy institutions. Establishment. Establishments, that's right. That's what does get clicks. Well, so I'd offer one caveat there, which is I think Sabine by temperament and reputation is, you know, a contrarian that is willing to stick the boot in and likes to present herself

as being capable of doing that, right? She's not going to pull her punches. She's going to be the harsh truth teller. That's the way she likes to present it. And there is evidence that she has done that, you know, directly to Eric in various past conversations, but you are also correct, Matt, that the more that you lean into anti-establishment tropes, the more sympathy I think is generated for anti-establishment tropes, the more sympathy I think is generated for anti-establishment figures. And that's what I see going on here.

It's not that I think that Sabine is now like a fan of Eric's theory and would give it a pass, but more that she's just focusing on the anti-establishment bit, and maybe doesn't even realize where those incentives are pushing her. And I have a good clip that highlights this. This is a really, really common motif of presenting yourself as the rebel, the renegade fighting back against the corrupt establishment and the people trying to silence you.

And when you engage in this rhetoric, I feel that if you are not aware that this holds huge appeal online, that you really are lacking in important elements of self-awareness. So listen to this. It's a fact that we haven't made progress with theory development for 50 years. People who work in the field will often try to tell you that, oh, we've learned this or that obscure mathematical fact. And it's also very exciting.

And soon, soon there'll be a breakthrough and you'll have no idea what they're talking about. You'll think it's just over your head. So better not ask. I want to strongly encourage you. Please do ask. Ask them what it's good for. Ask them what we've learned from it. Ask them what we can do with it. Ask them why your taxes should pay for them producing papers. I think they owe you an answer. I get hate mail every time I talk about this. Some scientists don't want me to mention this because, they say, it fuels the fires of science deniers. It does. But that's because science deniers are right when they say that

academia has a big problem. Ignoring this problem won't make it go away. We need to talk about it. And we need need to talk about it. And we need to do something about it. And it should give you a pause that scientists and certain YouTubers don't want me to talk about this, because they're causing a lot of pressure on other scientists to toe the party line. I don't give a shit what others want me to say, or not say as it were, but then again I also eat instant coffee powder with a spoon. So maybe I'm not a good sample group. Well, yeah, yeah, Chris, that's that's a good illustration of that stance. The brave truth sayer. Don't give a damn. You all want me to be quiet because I'm making life difficult for you,

but I'm going to stand up and tell the truth because I don't want to see your tax dollars wasted and the system is entirely corrupt. The incentives are all bad and revolution has to happen. The science deniers are ripe in that sense. And I just have to come back to that previous point. I understand the frustration that there hasn't been exciting new developments in this extremely specific subfield of theoretical physics. But Sabine jumps from that to the entire system

is broken so much so that the science denies that the same people who will tell us that the vaccines are all a hoax and you should listen to Eric Weinstein's crackpot theories about things because, you know, the real scientists are just trying to cover it all up because they don't want us to know about these dangerous and exciting new technologies. I mean, Sabine should know the degree to which that kind of sentiment is popular out there. And I think it's a bad idea to say that they're right on such flimsy evidence. It doesn't follow that because there hasn't been exciting new developments

in theoretical physics, that science in general is broken, that scientists can't be trusted. And can I just also point out, Matt, that, you know, we see this rhetoric all the time from gurus where they say the fact that I'm receiving criticism shows that they don't want me to talk about this issue. Right. They're trying to censor me. They're trying to shut me up because I'm too close to the target. This shows that I'm getting close to the bone. And again, super self-serving rhetoric that Sabine doesn't notice that that's what she's leading into. that Sabine doesn't notice that that's what she's leading into.

Like I, you know, the other aspect Chris, to reiterate the point you made before, that the fact that you only see people like Sabine or Eric standing up and taking a principled stand on this, and you don't see any of the hundreds of thousands of other scientists doing it. Why? It's cause they're not brave enough, right? That they've had pressure put on them. They're being told they have to conform. Yeah, that's right.

And tow the line by people like us or that, or that YouTuber guy. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch. I don't buy it. On top of that, Matt, I just want to say that if you present yourself as somebody that, you know, is there to give people the tough medicine, right? You know, you're, you're not somebody that's going to hold back on the criticism about bad incentives and whatnot. I haven't seen Sabine make a whole bunch of videos about the bad incentives on YouTube and the science, the nihilism environment that it inculcates because that is a tough medicine for

YouTubers to swallow, right? That doing straight up science communication is usually not that appealing. And instead applying like a anti-woke or leaning into cultural issues is a more financially and audience growing rhetoric. So like if you're going to talk about the issues in science and the incentives that distort things there, you should be able to also do it in your new chosen discipline as a YouTuber. And there's plenty to criticize there. And yeah, so I just have not noticed that many critiques aimed at that particular issue. Yeah, well the thing is in any field of science, but let's take

physics, the incentives for doing really good work and using the right methodologies are incredibly obvious, aren't they? They involve Nobel Pri, they involve, you know, respected professorships at the best universities in the world, world-speaking tours, universal regard from your peers, being famous like Einstein, right? That's the incentives on one end. And I've heard a lot of Sabine's videos and I haven't heard a clear explanation of the level of incentive that would make it worthwhile for a physicist to say, well, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to twiddle my fingers and just write useless papers.

I'm not even going to try to do that because these incentives are so great. I'm not quite sure what these incentives are because I've gotten grants and I've employed research assistants and it's really not that good. It would be much better to be like Albert Einstein and to actually succeed. So it's kind of implausible that claim about the perverse incentives for scientists that is actually preventing progress. To me it seems far more likely that progress is slow or when progress is slow, it's because the problems are genuinely hard. And on the other hand, as you said, with these things like YouTube or podcasting, what we do, the incentives are incredibly obvious.

Yeah, people like just look at those thumbnails on Sabine Hostenfelder's videos or on our videos or on any videos. They are designed to capture attention. They are designed to provoke strong emotions. You get rewarded for making conspiratorial anti-institutional takes, and you get rewarded for bending in, leaning into these paranoid conspiratorial worldviews. So yeah, I don't think we're in a strong position to cast aspersions on science in general from the vantage point of YouTube. Sorry, not when it comes to incentives.

No. So on the topic of parasocial relationships and common tropes that you find in the YouTube and influencer sphere. Indeed, if I record videos, I like to imagine I'm talking to my brother, relationships and common tropes that you find in the YouTube and influencer sphere. Indeed, if I record videos, I like to imagine I'm talking to my brother. My brother's an engineer and a big nerd, and he's usually interested in what I say, or at least he's good at pretending he is. So basically, I think of all of you as my brothers and sisters.

Of course, I rationally knew that you aren't actually all my siblings, unless there's something my parents didn't tell me, but this is why in videos on my own channel I often don't repeat what I've already said a dozen times before. I find it boring and I'm afraid you'll find it boring too. It doesn't help that I try to ignore how much this channel has grown because I find it psychologically difficult to sit in front of a camera knowing that some hundred thousand people might watch it. I don't want to excuse this, I just want to explain what's happening. I'm trying to

balance novelty with repetition and I strongly rely on your feedback for this, so please do let me know if I err into one direction or the other because it's not intentional. That said, I think the two issues that some people have with me is not my lack of nuance. The two issues they have is that I'm not a cheerleader for science. If you're looking for, whoa, science is great, Charlotte, you're in the wrong place. Some of science is great, some of it isn't. And I talk about both as simple as possible, but not any simpler. Basically come for the science, stay for the complaints.

So I would correct Sabine, at least from my perspective of listening to Professor Diev and my own criticism, Matt, it is not that you have to be the science cheerleader pumping up science all the time and not expressing any criticism. It's that when you express your criticism, you should be clear about the specifics and the limitations of your criticism. And that doesn't undercut your argument or mean that you have to pull your punches. It just means that you have to be less hyperbolic and less leaning into the YouTube algorithm and the anti-science audience. So yeah, I don't think there's any issue with being the curmudgeonly scientist who has an issue with what theoretical physicists are doing. But

marginally scientist who has an issue with what theoretical physicists are doing. But doing that does not mean agreeing with Eric Weinstein's presentation of science. It does not mean applying the parasocial thing about imagining all your listeners as your siblings and talking about how important they are to you. Now, this is something that happens a lot just naturally from when people have their own channels, right? That they express more details about their life and the vulnerabilities. But again, you have to be aware

that you're cultivating parasocial bonds. And when you're telling people that essentially you see your listeners as your family and you're being attacked by these establishment shills who want you to shut up about the problems in science. That creates like the kind of familiar wounded bird pose. Although in this case at least Sabine is you know more feisty than people like Lex Friedman and that kind of thing. But I just think, yeah, that her summary of the criticism is not particularly accurate for what Professor Deiv or what we are raising.

No problem to criticize supersymmetry as like not having testable predictions. That's not the thing that people are complaining about. It's when you say all of science is corrupt and that you think scientists are liars. And just one other point that I forgot to mention, Matt, that thing about encouraging people to demand from scientists what they're doing and to give details about, you know, how what they're studying is actually applicable to people's daily life and beneficial for it and whatnot. In many cases, that actually does require expertise, but she's presenting it as if somebody can't justify their

research to you one-to-one, you are a non-expert. That basically shows that it's fundamentally empty. But I'm sure there are tons of people that are, you know, mRNA vaccine developmental researchers who couldn't have explained to me or, you know, random people are asking them online why what they're doing is really important, but it doesn't mean it wasn't important just because you lack charisma and good science communication skills. Yeah, that's right. Definitely Professor Dave was not implying that you have to be this, I fucking love science, cheerleader type person.

And that anyone who says that, you know, whatever, string theory is stupid or supersymmetry is a waste of time, whatever. Oh, you're banned now because you criticize, you criticize like that stuff is all fine. And I think the irony is like, you and I have spoken for hours too, about a lot of the things that we don't like in terms of how academia is run. It's a sociological phenomena as well as a scientific one. And obviously there's always incentives to play. Like we talked about the problems with

publication, you know, and the way the journals work and replication crisis. Like, my God, there is no end to issues we can talk about. There is, there is no scientist I know who gets funding, who doesn't grumble about the funding system. You know, how much time are we wasting writing these stupid grant applications? And they're only funding stuff that, you know, it looks like a slam dunk. And I'm actually using that money to do some extra thing that I... Anyway, if Sabine restricted her criticisms to those things, then you and I, I'm sure,

would be agreeing 100% to all of them. But I think the problem is when you're talking publicly to a YouTube audience is that those are kind of boring. If you stick to the concrete, real issues academia and science, like unless you're actually in the biz, you know, the general persons could be forgiven for their eyes just glazing over. Oh, okay. Um, but if you do it in the language that Sabine does, then clearly you have people's interest, right?

The problem is though, is that now you are applying a really broad brush The problem is though, is that now you are applying a really broad brush and making some very sweeping claims and based on kind of weak evidence, like what we've seen here, which is this extrapolating from theoretical physics to all of science. Completely true, Matt. No, the next thing I want to look at, just as a practical example of this, which is not from three months ago, a video called fossil fuels don't come from fossils, question mark, Tucker Carlson fact check. Right? So this should be a counter argument to us, because if you're a science communicator critiquing Tucker Carlson, right, that would

be not leaning into the anti-establishment style rhetoric. But this video, I think is a good illustration of the tendency to kind of lean into both sizing in presentation or ambiguous points, right? So that at once you can pander to the science denialists and to the pro-science crowd in a kind of quantum indeterminate state, right, of your video. So just to illustrate, for example, the thumbnail is Tucker Carlson for example, the thumbnail is Tucker Carlson saying something and so being scratching her head. And it says, it's a quotation saying, it's incredible. And then the response underneath it saying, well, actually, now, if you take that as someone critiquing Tucker, right, fact checking him, it's Tucker making some extravagant claim and then a hard-nosed physicist saying,

well, you know, is your claim like that? But as we'll see, you can also read it, I think, as Tucker making a claim and then the claim being, well, actually, he's not entirely wrong. It's just that some of the details are not that. So you can read it one of two ways. Now I think Sabine would argue like, no, no, it's obvious, like critical one. But if you look at the comment section under the video, you can see that there's plenty of people that don't read this as a searing critique of Tucker Carlson. But let me play some clips so we can see what I'm talking about. So this is her introducing the episode. Tucker is a conservative American commentator who used to work for Fox News until, well,

until one day he didn't work for Fox News anymore. You see, even Fox News now admits that climate change is real sometimes. So Tucker is now distributing his wisdom on his own, for example on YouTube. In this video he interviews Dr Willie Soone, an astrophysicist who doesn't think that climate change is caused by humans. Why is it always physicists? The interview starts out with Dr Soone explaining to Tucker that not all hydrocarbons come from fossils. Tucker thinks this is a big deal and is very surprised, or at least he's very good at pretending he's surprised.

It's kind of incredible because all of us, including myself until very recently, assumed that all of our main energy sources are these so-called fossil fuels. And of course, their existence is going to be limited by the amount of fossils, by the amount of decaying organic material. Not so. So if that's not so, then we need to rethink a lot of things. If we haven't been told the truth

about where hydrocarbons come from, and we haven't, I mean, I've never met a single person in my life who said, wait a second, if they're not all fossil fuels, then we keep hearing there's a scientific consensus on climate change. Every scientist believes the same thing about it. Believes Al Gore and John Kerry. Maybe that's not true either.

So what's this all about? You got that filming, Matt? This is going to be Tucker Carlson interviewing a scientist, Dr. Soon, who is arguing that fossil fuels are not the only source for hydrocarbons. Right? So maybe all these claims about them being limited and whatnot may be inaccurate because we're not acknowledging other important sources of the relevant hydrocarbons. Yeah, yeah. It's all a big lie from zero growth environmentalists who'd like to

convince us that fossil fuels are limited. Actually, there could be an infinite amount of it down there in the Earth's mantle being created by geological processes. And Sabine goes on to, well, if not debug, put the brakes on that theory. Well, so first, I think this is an example of Sabine doing like good science communication around that topic, like describing the relevant processes involved. So this is what that sounds like. Hydrocarbons are molecules that contain both hydrogen and carbon. It's the stuff that we burn to generate energy, methane, propane, oil, coal and so on. We usually refer to those as fossil fuels because they come from fossils, dead plants mostly, that have been buried under sediments for a long time

and created these molecules over millions of years. That said, hydrocarbons can of course be created in other ways. It isn't all that difficult, for example, to synthetically produce propane or kerosene, though that of course requires energy. Hydrocarbons are basically chemical energy storage, which is what makes them so useful. What Dr. Soon is going on about in the interview is that some hydrocarbons on Earth are produced by geological processes and not biological processes. These hydrocarbons are then called abiogenic. The abiogenic petroleum theory has it that the mantle of Earth actually

has a lot of methane and oil that didn't come from fossils, but it's buried much deeper underground than that coming from fossils. Someone rediscovers this theory every couple of years and every time that happens people are surprised about it. Scientists are not particularly convinced by this idea. Yes, it is indeed possible to create hydrocarbons from some chemical reactions of water with rocks under sufficient pressure. The simpler the molecule is, the easier this can happen. The simplest abiogenic hydrocarbon is methane. But that said, there are various ways that we know the hydrocarbons that we've dug out of the ground are almost exclusively from fossils. that we've dug out of the ground are almost exclusively from fossils.

So that to me is all good, right? Like it's a nice little explainer of the issue and the relevant science involved and what the scientific consensus is, right? No issues from my side. No, no issues for me either. That's very similar to the other content of Sabine's that I listen to and enjoy. You know, it's nice to be reminded about, okay, that's right, these are fossil fuels,

these are the hydrocarbons, these are the simplest forms of propane and so on that all involve hydrogen and carbon. You know, stuff you kind of vaguely remember from school or from various sources getting brought together. And she's introducing this interesting theory that I hadn't heard of about, you know, geological sources, non-biological sources being a major source for it. But, you know, emphasizing that there is, you know, really little evidence that there are major source of them in the

Earth's crust. Yeah. And she sounds relatively dismissive of it, noting that people come up with this idea fairly frequently, but scientists aren't convinced of it because most of the hydrocarbons that we've dug up are all from the biological sources right now. A little bit more, and she talks about why this idea is appealing to Tucker. that we've dug up are all from the biological sources right now. A little bit more and she talks about like why this idea is appealing to Tucker. This is, I think, why this idea appeals to a lot of people because it would mean that peak oil is way off

and also there's a lot of money to be made. But the fact is that no one has found the supposed abiogenic petroleum deposits and if finding them takes a lot of deep drilling then why not just use geothermal energy instead of oil? Dr. Soon seems to have forgotten to mention these additional details in his explanation to Tucker Carlson. The interview then continues as follows. So why don't most people know this? Why do most people think that the gasoline in their The interview then continues as follows. So after feeding Tucker Carlson a lot of half-truths about abiogenic hydrocarbons, he complains about half-truths and concludes that climate change is a hoax.

What's that, brother? So there she's calling out Dr. Sun for not explaining the issue, like not identifying the problems with this approach and giving Tucker Carlson half-trips after complaining about people providing half-trips, right? So potentially saying that Dr. Soon is misleading Tucker here. Well, in Dr. Soon's defense, Tucker most certainly wants to be misled about this particular topic, right? Yes. So she did say at the start that maybe he's appearing surprised, but here, at least the emphasis has moved to Dr. Sun being disingenuous, right? But still, you know, so, so far there's a fringe guy on with Tucker. He's a physicist. why are they always physicists, you know, kind

of self-deprecating that a lot of cranky people come from the physics discipline. And then saying, well, but look, the evidence is that actually, this isn't a rich alternative source because it seems that while this does happen, there isn't the same amount of deposits as like what we have found with like the biological sources, right? So it's just inaccurate and he's leaving out details. And she also correctly pegs Dr. Soon as a climate change denialist. Dr. Soon then dishes up some old school denial arguments like the it's all natural variability idea. But that other factors, the orbits, plus the changes of the sun by itself, between how

bright, how dim it is, these two factors can explain just about everything that we know. All the data that I have. No, we know that the current temperature increase does not come from changes in solar energy, because that'd warm up both the surface of our planet as well as the upper atmosphere. Whereas warming caused by an increase in carbon dioxide warms the surface but cools the upper atmosphere. And the upper atmosphere has indeed been cooling. I'm pretty sure that Dr. Soon knows that. He probably just expects that Carson doesn't know it. It's another classical denial move. Soon then goes on to complain about how climate scientists reacted to the opening statement from Al-Jaba at the COP meeting earlier this year.

Yeah, so just a point to note again there at the end, Matt, that she's talking about Dr. Soon tricking Tucker, right? Like he's leaving out important details. It's a classic denier move, kind of ignoring that Tucker Carlson is absolutely receptive at a denier who utilizes all the same moves himself. So in her portrayal, like she is correctly highlighting that he's making denialist arguments, but then she's kind of absolving Tucker of any responsibility for that, as if he would

know better, as opposed to he is a climate change denialist himself, who is happy to use that rhetoric, you know, as it serves. Yes. And of course, you know, leaving out the fact that Tucker Carlson had this science denying guest on to say precisely those points. This is exactly what Tucker wants to hear. Tucker wants to be able to slap his hand to his cheek and go, they've been lying to us all this time. I knew it again. Yeah. So yeah, Tucker doesn't actually

get criticized in this, if you listen carefully. And so there you heard as well, Matt, the reference at the end to this COP 28 meeting, right? This is the conference of the parties of the United Nations framework convention on climate change. Okay. So this is relevant conference of the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Okay, so this is relevant because, well, let's just hear the clip. I mean, in the beginning of this COP28 meeting, the chairman, this guy from UAE, United Arab Emirates, the chairman, I don't know his name, Sultan Al-Jabe' Al-Jabe' or something, he was saying that there's no scientific reasoning to say that we should phase out fossil fuels. He's right.

But then he back off because of all this. Everybody's got mentality. Everybody's doing the mad thing. Unfortunately on this, Dr. Sun is entirely right. There's no science behind a fossil fuel phase out because the problem isn't fossil fuel. The problem is climate change caused primarily by carbon dioxide and to a lesser extent methane in the atmosphere. Of course the primary source of that is currently fossil fuels. But if the fossil fuel industry can find a way to avoid carbon dioxide emissions, which is a pretty big if, then that'd solve the problem.

Now, as I've said previously, I don't believe that this is actually going to happen for various reasons, but that's another story. The story here is that Al-Jabr's statement was entirely correct. The problem isn't fossil fuels per se, the problem is climate change and we shouldn't lose the goal out of sight. What's happened, however, is that a lot of climate scientists have declared the fossil fuel industry an enemy. This isn't about science anymore. It's a political movement that's conflating science with politics.

Did you follow the logic there, Chris? Because it's a bit slippery. Like on one hand, so we had this speaker at COP who said that fossil fuels are the problem. Aren't the problem. Aren't the problem. Yeah, that's right. It's the carbon dioxide and stuff in the air. That is the problem, which is technically correct. But I mean, like from this, she says that, you know, that the science behind preventing climate change is completely broken, because it's around, you know, finding replacements for fossil fuels, not on trying to sequester or capture the carbon that's emitted from fossil fuels. But she also says that that's probably not going to work. And I know for myself that there are huge problems with the idea of carbon capture and storage, right? We don't need to get into them. But if you think there's problems with renewable energy,

that's nothing compared to the problems with carbon capture and storage. So just as a simple heuristic, isn't it okay to say that fossil fuels are the problem, given that there isn't a practical way to just magically make the carbon dioxide emissions go away? Yeah, so she, if I follow it, she's saying it's wrong to say we need the fossil fuel fiascide because it's possible that the fossil fuel industry can find a way to avoid carbon dioxide emissions or there might be alternative technologies that can sequester carbon. But then it says, but that's unlikely and I've got another video on it, right? But then we, so hold on.

So your main thing is that that is an and you say like that people focusing on fossil fuel is wrong because the real problem is carbon dioxide in the environment and methane, right, which is leading to global warming. But then you say in the next sentence, of course, the primary source of carbon dioxide of methane is fossil fuels. So there actually is a connection there, right? A very obvious connection. Like, yeah, it doesn't seem a really slippery way to frame it because, okay, so you can say that it would be unrealistic to completely remove all fossil fuels, but like a reduction on the reliance of fossil fuels wouldn't hurt. Right.

And it is in fact, one of the main things that people are arguing for. Now, maybe environmentalists don't accept viable alternative technologies like nuclear energy production, right. And there are, you can be an issue in terms of like coal power plants versus nuclear power plants. But that's not what she has this, she's saying, oh, what a silly argument, but the disconnect seems like weird. So what do you want people to say to acknowledge the clear connection that fossil fuels are the primary contributor

of carbon dioxide currently? Currently, we don't have the technologies that would allow that to be produced super cleanly. So you shouldn't say that it is fundamentally the problem because there might be technologies that you don't think are going to be developed. Right? Like, it's tortured logic. I know. And from that tortured logic, she says the climate science is totally broken based on what seems like arduous pedantry.

So really, it's not very convincing. I mean, like you said, if you want to make the argument that environmental activists are ideologically against stuff like nuclear energy when it's a very viable alternative, then I think you're on stronger ground. But to say that, oh, well, the climate science is completely broken because we sort of take the linguistic shortcut and are focusing on reducing fossil fuels, instead of just saying the whole thing out in full, we're trying to reduce fossil fuels because fossil fuels are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that's what's causing

the climate change. And also, we can't get rid of the carbon dioxide easily another way. I mean, come on, it's just being, it's just pedantry. And so how does climate change science, climate science become broken simply by having a focus on fossil fuels. It obviously should have a focus on fossil fuels by Sabine's own arguments. Logic. Yeah. It's own arguments. Logic. Yeah.

It's the primary contributing source. Well, anyway, let's hear, maybe this will give some more context. This is Sabine talking about her previous video on climate change, which caused some controversy and something that she noticed happened on the Science Media Center website, which she regards as quite telling. I made a video about this earlier this year. And of course my comments were full of people claiming I get paid by the fossil fuel industry. It's the classical ad hominem attack directed at me, not the substance of what I say.

There it's actually worse than that. So let me tell you something I only found out after I published the video in January. not the substance of what I say. There it's actually worse than that. So let me tell you something I only found out after I published the video in January. In that video I was quoting a climate scientist at the University of Oxford. His name is Miles Allen. I don't know him personally, but he's the guy who coined the term net zero and who launched the idea of extreme event attribution. So in my earlier video I had a quote from him that I took from a UK website called the

Science Media Centre. They collect quotes from scientists on topics of current interest and make them available to journalists. It's actually a really good idea. The quote from Alan that I found there was, It's depressing to see the climate establishment reacting so furiously to a perfectly accurate statement by the COP28 President. To limit warming even close to 1.5 degrees, we must both scale down the use of fossil fuels and scale up safe and permanent carbon dioxide disposal. It's simply not true that to stop global warming we have to stop using fossil fuels. What we have to

do is stop dumping the carbon dioxide they generate into the atmosphere. I use that quote because it's exactly what I was thinking, but he's a climate scientist and I'm not, so I thought it'd be good to have a quote from someone who's a little more suit and tie than pink shirt and fuzzy hair. Okay. So Sabine's here pointing to this purported ideological fixation on reducing fossil fuel use and a knee-jerk reaction against the idea of carbon sequestering, carbon capture, and storage, despite the fact that those large-scale methods don't really exist

and seem very impractical. I mean, just on the other side of the ledger, there might well be, Chris, a bit of a knee-jerk thing, where people go, no, no, we've decided we're really keen on this path of fossil fuel reductions. Maybe there is something, some practical approach to carbon sequestration that I'm not aware of that we could use, I don't know.

But I'll just point out, Chris, that in Australia, like this thing is a political football and it runs the other way. So the Australian mines an awful lot of fossil fuels in the form of coal primarily, but also some oil and LPG. And the Australian government is very keen to keep doing so. And as a result, is funding pie in the sky schemes around carbon capture and sequestration so that it can keep selling these fossil fuels. So it works the other way. I think she should maybe pay attention to this side of the equation too.

One reason I think that climate change activists are quite dismissive of those sorts of statements is that they are used as a kind of political statement to justify the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels, you know, with this sort of rationalization that these pie in the sky type schemes will somehow take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at some later date. Well, I mean, even the quote that she references says, it's simply not true that to stop global warming, we have to stop using fossil fuels. What we have to do is stop dumping the carbon dioxide

they generate into the atmosphere. We must both scale down the use of fossil fuels and scale up safe and permanent carbon dioxide disposal. That's what the quote said. We must scale down the use of fossil fuels and do the other thing, right? Like, so they are not saying that reducing fossil fuel usage is not necessary. Yeah, that was not it. And so she mentions this quote and finding it on a website. and then it was removed. But when I went back to the website to take a screenshot, the quote was gone.

This all happened while the COP meeting was still going on. I later learned from people who don't want to be quoted that several climate scientists gave Alan a hard time about that quote and he decided to withdraw it. I don't know whether this is true, but it sounds plausible enough, doesn't it? In hindsight, I feel somewhat sorry for drawing attention to the quote even after I saw that it had disappeared. So the quote being removed, this is a sign, right? About the kind of, you know, the establishment, the game pressurizing someone that expressed a- He's been gotten to, he's been gotten to Chris. Yeah, he's been gotten to.

Although I suspect personally, I would take that they noticed how the quote was being used and that he didn't agree with, you know, the way that it was being presented by climate contrarians or whatnot and so like wanted presented in another way. I suspect that's an alternative reading where it's not because of like shadowy cabal. Maybe people were criticizing him for the way that they expressed that, but like he or she does the conspiracy thing then says well I don't know

if that's true it's it's possible and actually I'm very sorry I even drew attention to that quote are you really so you're mentioning that in this video no I am talking about like the conspiracy to silence it but you're regretting that you drew any attention to it in the previous video. This is an odd way to express regret for highlighting that. To highlight it again. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Yeah, and it just, I mean, like, it doesn't pass the sniff test. I mean, things that take carbon out of the atmosphere, you know, forest plantations, for instance, assuming that the wood isn't burnt or whatever, regrowing vegetation and so on around the world.

That sort of stuff, I don't think it's beyond the pale. I don't think there's a cabal of climatologists out there that just go, no, no, you can't talk about that stuff. You can't acknowledge that it even happens. I think it's just that there's an awareness that carbon capture and storage is a thing that's very appealing politically and economically, because it holds the promise that just like Tucker Carlson loves the idea that there's infinite amounts of abiotic fossil fuels down in there under the earth somewhere, it holds out the promise that we can keep doing what we're doing and there'll be some sort of other fix coming down the line and we can keep burning fossil fuels.

And that's why there is politics around it. I mean, I understand this stuff, Chris, because working in politically charged fields myself, right, around nicotine and gambling, I see how like the raw scientific discussion what gets laid upon it because there's so much money at stake in the gambling industry in Australia, you know, it's not as big as fossil fuels, but it's still a lot of money It means that the stuff that you say publicly gets used in ways that you may not like so anyway, so I think it's just incredibly simplistic to Think that this is evidence of a climate cabal, people that don't want to acknowledge that there are any other options that you have to conform to the orthodoxy.

And there's a conspiracy of silence around these things around carbon capture. Yeah, and just to contextualize the narrative of this whole video. So it's went from presenting like what is Tucker Carlson talking about with denialism to focusing on the claims made by his guests and how he may have misled Tucker intentionally or, or riffed Tucker's acknowledgement, but that is kind of left unsaid and also nigh to, but also the climate scientists are lying and misrepresenting things too, right? And we need to focus on how they do that. I have to interject though. I mean, just compare the degree of enthusiasm Sabine applies to those two things because

yes, she does have the kind of dismissive eyebrow raising sort of sadonic, yeah, wry approach to Tucker. But that really doesn't rise to the same level of outrage and emotion that she brings to the table when she thinks about these climatologists and this stultifying orthodoxy and conspiracy of silence that's going on there. That's what seems to really get her excited in this video. Yes. And I'll play a clip to highlight that and we can hear then alternatively

how Sabine frames the video. But really this isn't about Eleanor El-Jaba. It's just a vivid example that illustrates that the community of climate scientists is trying to enforce a narrative that they want their members to play along with. I'm not a climate scientist. I don't give a shit what they want me to say. And this is why you see so many complaints in my comments. People who accuse me of being funded by the fossil fuel industry every time I say something that doesn't agree with their narrative. I'm still waiting for my office paper.

More seriously, this is a huge problem. That a group develops and enforces a narrative that they require loyal members to conform to is one of the most obvious symptoms of groupthink and the climate change community is very deep into this. It's bad for one thing because it discourages criticism and increases the risk of mistakes. It's also bad because people who are not in the group, like Dr. Soon and me, notice it, which creates a backlash. Why is it always physicists? So here's Sabina to climate scientists, stop censoring your own people. And the rest of you, please check out my Patreon so I can continue to complain about Tucker Carlson. That line at the end is very irritating to me because

as you just said, her message is to climate scientists and the insidious group think that they enforce rigidly on people who notice the problem. Notice now that Sabine and Dr. Soon are in a group together. They're in the same team now. Yeah. And stop censoring your own people. But then the last thing is, now if you want me to make more videos of like this calling out Tucker Carlson, there was nothing at the end there calling out Tucker Carlson.

And there's very little in this video, except for like some kind of sardonic asides that even come close to a strong critique of Tucker. So wouldn't this be more like I'd want to contribute to you, Pietro, and if I wanted to see you lay into climate scientists and their group think rather than condemnation for renegades like Tucker and Dr. Sohn? Yeah, and Sabine. Yeah, it's very ambiguous. And I think your choice of video here is representative of the sub genre of videos that Sabine makes. As you said at the beginning, she makes and has made a whole lot of just straight down the line, education, science communication stuff, which I like and enjoy.

I think I hardly recommend them. Then there is this sub genre of material, which often has this ambiguous nature to it. You know, it seems to be like playing both sides of the thing. There is, there is, I think, a desire for being a responsible science communicator. I think there is that motivation at play. But at the same time, like there is this leaning into this conspiratorial, anti-institutional tropes about, all climate science is broken now. That's what you've discovered at the end of this video,

because some climatologists took a, probably a pretty boring statement as you read down from their public quoted thing or something. And so now they're silencing their members, they're enforcing groupthink, you know, she doesn't trust scientists as we heard from before. I mean, that is the theme in this sub job video. And these videos get heaps and heaps of attention. And I fear that, like, as she says at the end, you know, subscribe to me if you want me to do more of this.

I'm afraid that there is a large segment of the audience out there that would very much like to keep going in this direction and make the language even stronger. A continual theme for me is I don't like it when people present themselves as doing something that they're not doing. That final line about like, if you want me to stick it to Tucker Carlson more, like criticize him more, you know, it's worth me. And it's just like, well, where was the strong criticism? Was it when you suggested that he's being fooled by Dr.

Soons, spooning them half-truths? It certainly seemed that climate scientists are more villainous from the way that they are presented. And yeah, and I guess my overall thought is that Sabine presents it that, you know, scientists enforce this rigid orthodoxy that if you dare to disagree with, you know, supersymmetry or have any criticisms of the comments that they make about the strategies for dealing with climate science that you'll be presented as like a hyperbolic anti-science denialist and whatnot.

But actually, I think if Sabine expressed her criticisms more accurately and with more clarity about you know, like what her issues are. Like, I actually don't think that scientists or the general public care that much. If you're making a video slamming supersymmetry theorists for not having testable models enough. It's whenever you add in the rhetoric that scientists are liars. Nobody's been doing anything.

This is the most embarrassing 50 years of science. The climate change research literature is littered by this rigid group thing. Right. That is the thing that people are criticizing. And if you then retreat to, oh, so I just need to tow your line. And it's like, no, you can express your criticism. And then people can critique you as well for being hyperbolic and leaning into conspiratorial tropes.

And the tropes that I see are I am the brave renegade. All these tens of thousands of scientists are missing the things which I've noticed. And that there is a conspiracy to shut me up. Everybody's trying to target me and censor me and these, you know, pandering to anti-woke tropes and all that kind of thing. And just to be clear, just to guess, I mean, listen, I don't care about her also talking about different issues or culture war topics or whatever. The issue is you're responsible for what you say. And if you're pandering to all these anti-science tropes and whatnot, it's perfectly reasonable for people that deal with anti-science and gurus

all the time to note that's what you're doing. And that's what we're noting. We're not saying you're not allowed to criticize science or to have like outlier views, do that all you want. It's the rhetoric and the kind of free mean that is being criticized, at least by me and I think you as well, Matt. Yeah, that's true. I think if we went through those dimensions of the groundwork issue,

we wouldn't tick them all off. But, you know, there'd be a few like that, the power of social stuff that we looked at and the anti-institutional stuff that would be ticked off. I think the main thing I just can't get by is that from someone as smart as Sabine, like when she's in rhetorical mode, how just logical inconsistencies just really bother me. Like implied in what she was saying in the last thing there is that like carbon capture and storage, carbon sequestration is like verboten.

It's not allowed to be talked about, right? In science, right? I just did a Google Scholar search for carbon capture, which is just one of the keywords that would probably bring this up. There's 4,000 articles, Chris. There's 4,000 articles, right? And like it gelled with, cause I knew that,

but it is an active thing that people look at everything from microalgae that might take up more carbon to growing forests, to like actually capturing it from the exhaust vents of coal furnaces and so on. That then it becomes this horrible viscous goo and you don't know what to do with it. I mean, the thing is it's's not verbotan, you know,

it's okay, it is seriously considered. So like, I'm not quite sure what the narrative is there, but I know that it's anti-institutional. I know that it's conspiratorial. And I know that like you and I, in our focus on these gurus, like we know their audience, we know what they wanna hear.

And we can hear it when Sabine Hossentfel audience. We know what they want to hear. And we can hear it when Sabine Hosenfelder is giving them what they want, perhaps even better than she can. So yeah, I don't like it. I think it's a shame. It's a weird situation though, isn't it? Because I'm like with someone like Brett or Eric Weinstein, who I don't think has ever done anything useful in their entire lives. Sabine Hosenfelder does do useful things all the time and continues to do so, produces quality things, but just has like a, like a side gig in this stuff. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a tricky one. I can imagine a rejoinder coming, Matt, that, oh, these science pros want to

police my tone and you know, they're not experts in the fields that I'm talking about. Who are they to say what I can and can't say? And I just want to say, you can say whatever the hell you want. You can talk about your view on science. You can talk about vaccines, whether they're safe. You can talk about the problems with climate change, anything you want. But when you put it up on YouTube, people are allowed to critique the rhetoric and the arguments that

you make, right? And when you pander the anti-science denialist tropes, that's fine. It's fine for people to point that out. And that's us exercising our ability to speak without being censored and without being shut up. Sabine Grattwein is saying, you know, they can all still talk, Matt. I'm not shutting any of them up. I'm just saying, here's the things that deserve criticism about what they're saying and the kind of logical leaps and that stuff. So just to be clear, I'm not saying Sabine should shut down her channel or stop talking about other topics on physics. I'm just critiquing.

Yeah. The rhetoric and the tropes that are used, which are very obvious. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Eric and Sabine are free to talk about the bad incentives at play in science and academia. We're totally free to talk about the bad incentives at play in social media and content creators. And just like, uh, the fossil fuel industry is not sending, I presume, uh, checks to Sabine, we're not getting any checks from big science. Just, just like we do because we want to.

And, uh, and, you know, and, and, you know, know, just to underline your point, if we were talking about specifics, like, you know, like the way academic publications, for instance, are the primary metric for career advancement and even keeping your job, which is a bad incentive in that it conflates the function of science communication with that of getting these brownie points and this gamified career system. We agree 100%. We would probably have an even longer list of complaints about academia than she would. It's just that florid broad brush stuff, which is just not helpful because it's not really true. Like it's not true to extrapolate from a frustration with a lack of progress in theoretical physics, which I still think could be due to very genuine difficulties and not necessarily an indication

that the theoretical physics is totally corrupt and broken and they all can't be trusted. I think it could be for other reasons. And it's certainly wrong to extrapolate from that to all science as a result, because you're just on very weak ground. You just don't have the evidence to back up those sweeping claims. And you know, Sabine's a sharp thinker and a critical thinker. And I think she knows that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there we are, Matt. That's another decoding done for the day. And the last thing we need to do is massage our own parasocial bonds, shout out a couple of people who contribute to the good ship. We see them as brothers and sisters, Matt. Very much,

I see them as my own family. My own children. I'd die for them, Chris. You know, if I had to, you know. That's it. Well, so we have Matt in the conspiracy hypothesizer category. Hayden Settlick, B Bogado, Hayden Setlick B. Bogado Alex Blogu Mark O'Brien James Link Tyler Watkins Tobias Peter Daniel Jeffries Billy Beebe Matthew Melchonay Murray Shalom Jason

Nina Nervagina Anthony Martin Bevin Dwar, Eric Fast, Gabriel Dennis, Angie Sucharski, and I'm not reading this name. Sorry, is that their name? I'm not reading this name? Correct. Yeah, that's what they put in. So they are conspiracy Hypothesizers, thank you to them all I feel like there was a conference

That none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think man It's almost like someone is being paid like when when you hear these George Soros stories while he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Sadly I think most of those people are going to be celebrating I think most of those people are going to be celebrating. I don't want people hear this, but that is what it is, Matt. That's the world.

So let's move on to revolutionary theorists. There we have Gavin Boyd, Ross Solomon, Brian reclcluse Justin Kitchen Clay Hurlin Graham Codrington Pudi David Sheehy Peter Maines Tyler Wilson Rick Fetters ADS5XS5 Martin Burch James Avery Jeza Dobranski, Stuart Millner, and Maria Rammelton. All Revolutionary Fierce, all able, Matt, to hear the Decoding Academia series. That's the benefit

that they get for that tier. We thank them all. Yeah. Thank you. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And it is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of

evolutionary consumption. Now that's just a guess. it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. There we go. The fact that it is plausible is stunning, mate. It'll just make me so sad, more so than the effect on geopolitics and the effect of America and all of that thing. The thing that makes me really sad is the fact that the people that we cover

on this podcast would be celebrating. That really makes me upset. It is an upsetting thought. So very, very wrong. Well, Galaxy, Brian, Contributor Smart, they wouldn't be celebrating. No, they'd be crying with us, arms around our shoulders, lamenting the state of things. Well, and they include Anna T, Ann W, Abhulam, Adam Shear, David Jampiola, Desi, Kyle, Leslie, Margaret Richard,

Max Plan, Mike S, Mugwump, and Richard Dennehy. We thank them all. Thank you. Thank you very much. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.

I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah. Well, there we are, Matt. As we finished the podcast, we, we don't know the result, um, of the U S election, but whatever it was called. Good luck out there. Good luck out there. And, you know, in any case, it's worth noting that the growers will never stop.

Right? They, whatever the outcome was, they're still going to be peddling their stuff. And there will always be, you know, counter arguments to anti vaccine and right wing populists and whatnot. And these things don't last forever. So, you know, just RFK Junior says he's gonna be they're gonna put a moratorium on both vaccines. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck, America. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck, America.

Good luck with that. America, we'll see how this all pans out for you, but we're thinking about you. I'm almost certain that Trump was lying to RFK, June, when he promised any of that stuff. But we'll see. We'll see. But look, maybe we'll be too pessimistic. Hopefully this will age terribly and the next episode will be in a happier state of mind. Here's a quick question for you before we sign off. Do you think the gurus that we've covered, Chris, in the event of a Trump presidency

versus a Harris presidency, which would make the beehive buzz more. Which one, which one would get them going more, which one would generate more activity, like would they settle down at a Trump presidency or would that help them level up even further? No, I think they'll be very excited about a Trump presidency, but I think it's worth remembering how dysfunctional Trump's last presidency is and how much infighting there was and inability to get things done. Now, people are worried that Trump will be more effectively organized this time,

but you know, the nature of gurus and populists and whatnot is that they are a fragile coalition, so I suspect, you know, the celebrations will be potentially short-lived. That might be optimistic thinking on my part, but I definitely think that Trump victory is going to energize them more. If Kamala won, it would be infighting, recriminations and like descending into conspiracism. So they, you know, they're not going away in either way, but, um, I think this is going to be a shot in the arm for all of them, if it, if it goes the way it's currently trending.

Um, but like we say, you know, these things come and weaves or and yeah, if we're dealing with Trump on the Guru-leden presidency in the US, God bless you American listeners. You have our sympathy and yeah, you know, it's not going to be good for the world, but we'll keep on trucking. That's it. Keep on trucking. That's it. We'll keep on trucking. Alright, good night Chris. Good Flats. Bye bye. You