Re: A very personal video from Sabine Hossenfelder

On 4/7/2024 5:09 AM, LDagget wrote:

jillery wrote:
 

Some T.O. posters have expressed appreciation for Sabine Hossenfelder.
After watching the following video, and assuming she isn't just
pimping for Youtube likes, my appreciation of her has ratcheted up
several notches:

 

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8>

 

As a non-academic, all I can say is I had no idea it was that bad.  I
can only hope this video doesn't make things worse for her.

 

-- To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

  I watched it a couple of days ago. It's worth a watch but I have
some quibbles.
She makes multiple comments about what she saw in her colleagues
and what they were doing and how she wanted to be a scientist to.
 What's missing is a confession about how she ignored all the examples
of all of the other people who have been experiencing essentially
the same thing she complained about.
There is absolutely nothing new about the cycle of having to write
grants toward topical things as decided politically rather than scientifically. The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences is that he
who has the gold makes the rules. That describes the situation
since before the Age of Enlightenment began and hasn't changed.
 Why didn't she know this? As a wanna-be scientist you are supposed
to be training to objectively observe. Why not apply that to all
of those people from 10 to 20 years before her that suffered similar
fates. I saw and listened to those people when I was an undergrad,
and more when I worked as a research assistant at a university, and still more when I was a grad student. What she described has
been the essential pattern. Why did it come as a surprise to her?
 Not that she's unique in that. It too repeats.
The problem, as I see it, is the extent to which the academic system
markets itself as something different, and takes advantage of nerds
by telling them they're pretty (smart).
The other thing is, there are ways to succeed if you have your eyes
open. There's an oft repeated line about being able to do your own
research as long as you do it in the 20% of your time beyond the 60
hours a week you spend on the other stuff. That was the joke back
in the 70s. And it's often been discussed about how that's especially
unfair to women (and other potential parents).
When your eyes are open to it, then you can use some of your smarts
to work the system rather than have it work you. Now that can be
done cynically and abandon the good science to work the topical
science, or it can be done to squeeze in some good science while
paying the bills. But why is the latter so bad? Why should a
scientist think that they get to just do the good stuff when all
over the rest of the world people spend much of their day shoveling
shit for most of their day so that they can spend some time
doing the stuff they want to do, or that is at least satisfying?
 Now I am being a bit harsh in that I'm sure she was more aware
of these things than I seem to be suggesting, but her story in
her video avoided admitting it and focused on cursing the broken
system. Yes, he who has the gold makes the rules is not ideal.
If you really hate it, take some time to get a bunch of gold and make your own rules.
(I toyed with the idea of changing my nym to Elon for this
post because Sabina would probably laugh)
 

She admits that she had mental issues and even claims a nervous breakdown.  The fact is that there are far too many PhDs produced in Physics.  Phyisics, as a scientific discipline, has the lowest percentage of PhDs with a job in Physics.  The issue also is that theoretical physics is pretty much stalled out.  Like she indicates particle physics is hoping for more powerful supercolliders or more sensitive detectors, and there are very few people needed to use the very expensive technology required.  In order to accomplish anything you have to have short term research goals.  How long have people been working on string theory, and what have they accomplished?
I've known a very misogynistic academic, but you'd have to have bad luck in having to deal with them.  By the 1990's that kind of thing had been frowned upon for a couple decades, but some of the old farts managed to stay in positions where they would have influence over women.  The vast majority of academics that I have known are not like the ones she describes.
By comparison evolutionary biology has been given new tools to fill in the details of the evolution of life on earth.  You can go out and figure out how Starlings evolved from a very small initial population transported to the United States and managed to take over and become a pest.  They are even considered a migratory bird.  Someone should be working on how they managed to do what they have done without becoming as inbred as passenger pigeons.  Someone should be studying extinct passenger pigeons using DNA from museum specimens and the few remains we might find in limestone caves.  There were billions of them, and yet they had very little genetic variation.  Somehow their huge population and life history put their genomes under severe enough selection so that large sections of their genome were nearly fixed in the population. This likely led to their extinction because when the environment changed they didn't have the genetic variation to adapt.  They were obviously highly successful, but narrowly adapted to doing just what they did.
I am just pointing out that in other fields of science you can trip over interesting subjects that can give you interesting answers, but her chosen field has been short on new ideas for sometime.
Ron Okimoto