petermarkley
Active member
- Joined
- 7 Sep 2024
- Messages
- 42 (0.34/day)
I had never heard of Sabine Hossenfelder, but since I’ve been into debunking flat earth I saw her mentioned by another science communicator named Dave Farina (YouTube channel “Professor Dave Explains”). There seems to be some disagreement going on, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
I watched two videos, one from Sabine about flat earthers and one from Dave about Sabine. To get the context of my thoughts here, I recommend watching the one by Dave:
So, is Dave right or wrong to criticize Sabine? I genuinely don’t know.
In a way, it feels like a “Mom and Dad fighting” kind of moment
Dave is certainly right that critiquing academia in the wrong way can encourage science denial and indirectly lead to actual lives lost. We all definitely have to be careful of that.
Whether Sabine’s sense of alarm is over a real issue in science or not, and therefore whether it’s justified, I don’t know. And if it is real/justified, neither do I know if she is making a mistake in the way she communicates that sense of alarm.
Not sure if I’ll be “taking sides” about Sabine any time soon. For me, it seems the safe course of action is to avoid echoing Sabine’s idea that science is “failing” until/unless I have some better confirmation of that myself. That doesn’t mean she’s wrong, that just means I don’t know and want to play it safe.
In the meantime, I’ll make sure I’m subscribed to both channels because they both seem like solid people AND solid content creators
Elsewhere I wrote some more detailed thoughts exploring my reaction to this. I’ve pasted these thoughts below if anyone is curious to discuss in more depth.
I can say from experience that YouTube and many areas of the internet are somewhat atheist-dominant, and that many atheists have an authoritarian philosophical attitude. I feel like this has a little something to do with the issue Sabine is warning about.
A lot of people equate atheism with science. In fact just yesterday I had one explicitly refer to religion in general, all religion, as “pseudoscience.” They don’t want to leave room at the table for any other philosophical view, because their view is inherently self-aggrandized and requires that they subjugate the other views as “wrong.”
They are certainly not the only group that does this. It’s basic human nature to be bigoted and form tribes, and we see it in religious groups at least as often as anti-religious groups. (I would even argue there’s no inherent difference between the two—a statement which would no doubt trigger the bigoted atheists.) In fact I wouldn’t even use the term “bigotry” for all views that presume themselves superior to others—my own view does that (because Jesus claimed exclusivity for example in John 14:6). Imho, it turns to bigotry more in the execution, or how you deal toward views you believe are wrong or “inferior.” How kind, thoughtful, and respectful are you toward them, and how gracefully do you cede majority status when tides turn against you? That sort of thing.
And to Sabine’s point, the bigoted atheists on the Internet are certainly not the origin of these ideas. It started during the Scientific Enlightenment in the 1700s, and has gradually trickled down to popular masses through academia and entertainment. Presumably it still has a vice grip on academia, and I am confident that fuels the fire of science denial. People sense this problem on an instinctual level and merely fail to synthesize that into a productive response, turning to brutish rebellion instead.
I don’t know what Sabine’s views are on religion or philosophy. For all I know she would vehemently disagree with what I’m saying. But that’s the lens through which I find her rhetoric to be sympathetic, and I can only imagine that a bigoted philosophy (such as I see in academia) would surely manifest in the practical issues of incentive structure and stagnation that Sabine talks about. How could it not? Treating science as your god, your source of all goodness and truth and your sole hope of deliverance from the troubles of mankind … well, it obviously would tend toward overconfidence in the current form of science we have today. On the cutting edge, of course: dark matter, cosmological history, the origin of biological life, the Fermi Paradox, what’s inside black holes, how to interpret quantum uncertainty, etc. etc. …
I’ve long made observations like this of my own, although lacking Sabine’s credentials I obviously express them differently. Rather than a specific critique of current science or the inner workings of its institutions, my take is more of a metanarrative on the broad scale of history that questions the popular forecast of what amount and type of results to expect in our immediate (and distant) future from those institutions. Are we going to be colonizing Mars soon? Maybe. Are we going to be terraforming it or building Dyson spheres? Personally, I highly doubt that. Are we going to cure cancer? Well some types we already have. Are we going to cure all cancer, or solve poverty and world hunger? Those would certainly be nice, but I am a Christian, not a Secular Humanist. It’s the Secular Humanist who has dogmatic optimism about those bigger things. I am skeptical.
Is there a connection between what I’ve been saying and what Sabine is saying? Maybe. Is there some type of correction we could apply to our scientific institutions that could produce “better” results, or is the issue more in society’s fundamental expectations of them? It’s hard to say for sure. Those are bigger questions than I can answer.
I watched two videos, one from Sabine about flat earthers and one from Dave about Sabine. To get the context of my thoughts here, I recommend watching the one by Dave:
So, is Dave right or wrong to criticize Sabine? I genuinely don’t know.
In a way, it feels like a “Mom and Dad fighting” kind of moment
Dave is certainly right that critiquing academia in the wrong way can encourage science denial and indirectly lead to actual lives lost. We all definitely have to be careful of that.
Whether Sabine’s sense of alarm is over a real issue in science or not, and therefore whether it’s justified, I don’t know. And if it is real/justified, neither do I know if she is making a mistake in the way she communicates that sense of alarm.
Not sure if I’ll be “taking sides” about Sabine any time soon. For me, it seems the safe course of action is to avoid echoing Sabine’s idea that science is “failing” until/unless I have some better confirmation of that myself. That doesn’t mean she’s wrong, that just means I don’t know and want to play it safe.
In the meantime, I’ll make sure I’m subscribed to both channels because they both seem like solid people AND solid content creators
Elsewhere I wrote some more detailed thoughts exploring my reaction to this. I’ve pasted these thoughts below if anyone is curious to discuss in more depth.
I can say from experience that YouTube and many areas of the internet are somewhat atheist-dominant, and that many atheists have an authoritarian philosophical attitude. I feel like this has a little something to do with the issue Sabine is warning about.
A lot of people equate atheism with science. In fact just yesterday I had one explicitly refer to religion in general, all religion, as “pseudoscience.” They don’t want to leave room at the table for any other philosophical view, because their view is inherently self-aggrandized and requires that they subjugate the other views as “wrong.”
They are certainly not the only group that does this. It’s basic human nature to be bigoted and form tribes, and we see it in religious groups at least as often as anti-religious groups. (I would even argue there’s no inherent difference between the two—a statement which would no doubt trigger the bigoted atheists.) In fact I wouldn’t even use the term “bigotry” for all views that presume themselves superior to others—my own view does that (because Jesus claimed exclusivity for example in John 14:6). Imho, it turns to bigotry more in the execution, or how you deal toward views you believe are wrong or “inferior.” How kind, thoughtful, and respectful are you toward them, and how gracefully do you cede majority status when tides turn against you? That sort of thing.
And to Sabine’s point, the bigoted atheists on the Internet are certainly not the origin of these ideas. It started during the Scientific Enlightenment in the 1700s, and has gradually trickled down to popular masses through academia and entertainment. Presumably it still has a vice grip on academia, and I am confident that fuels the fire of science denial. People sense this problem on an instinctual level and merely fail to synthesize that into a productive response, turning to brutish rebellion instead.
I don’t know what Sabine’s views are on religion or philosophy. For all I know she would vehemently disagree with what I’m saying. But that’s the lens through which I find her rhetoric to be sympathetic, and I can only imagine that a bigoted philosophy (such as I see in academia) would surely manifest in the practical issues of incentive structure and stagnation that Sabine talks about. How could it not? Treating science as your god, your source of all goodness and truth and your sole hope of deliverance from the troubles of mankind … well, it obviously would tend toward overconfidence in the current form of science we have today. On the cutting edge, of course: dark matter, cosmological history, the origin of biological life, the Fermi Paradox, what’s inside black holes, how to interpret quantum uncertainty, etc. etc. …
I’ve long made observations like this of my own, although lacking Sabine’s credentials I obviously express them differently. Rather than a specific critique of current science or the inner workings of its institutions, my take is more of a metanarrative on the broad scale of history that questions the popular forecast of what amount and type of results to expect in our immediate (and distant) future from those institutions. Are we going to be colonizing Mars soon? Maybe. Are we going to be terraforming it or building Dyson spheres? Personally, I highly doubt that. Are we going to cure cancer? Well some types we already have. Are we going to cure all cancer, or solve poverty and world hunger? Those would certainly be nice, but I am a Christian, not a Secular Humanist. It’s the Secular Humanist who has dogmatic optimism about those bigger things. I am skeptical.
Is there a connection between what I’ve been saying and what Sabine is saying? Maybe. Is there some type of correction we could apply to our scientific institutions that could produce “better” results, or is the issue more in society’s fundamental expectations of them? It’s hard to say for sure. Those are bigger questions than I can answer.
Now, I don't really want to go down the rabbit hole with this, but you should know that I'm an atheist as there's no evidence of a god, simple as that. I saw you address this point in one of your videos and you're welcome to link to it here, or start your own thread based on it, if you like.
