The contrarian physics podcast subculture

The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.

(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)

I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.

It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.

But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.

ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.

I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.

From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.

So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.

That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.

My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.

I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.

It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.