This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he is in the business of debunking science deniers. To investigate, I overcame my aversion to the medium and watched Dave in action.
Both Simon and Dave admit that Hossenfelder does some good, straightforward science communication. But Dave's main concern is that some of Sabine's output gives ammunition to science deniers. This is a really worrying argument. Good science requires constant challenging of theories and approaches - it's not just there's nothing wrong in doing this: it is essential to improve science. And it's incredibly patronising to implicitly suggest that this should be done in secret and not revealed to the unwashed public in case someone misuses it. Good science communication should tell us what real science is like, not provide a sanitised stereotype. Inevitably, when this happens, science deniers will pick up on it as 'scientists don't agree' or 'this shows we can't trust science' - but that is no reason to treat scientific theories with kid gloves.
Dave starts by giving us a clip of Sabine saying she didn't get a job because she was a woman. This seems highly likely: there is no doubt that there has been plenty of sexism in science. Things have got better, but it's still not perfect - and the continuing problems are highlighted by widely respected figures such as Athene Donald. There is, though, a big gap between identifying flaws and dismissing all of academia - which Dave seems to suggest is Sabine's standpoint. I'm not sure this is the case, though I admit she can go over the top in her presentation, as we will see later.
Dave suggests that being anti-academic is a good indicator of science denial, and it is certainly true if this is a blanket stance. However, we need to be careful about having too much respect for academic authority. As the replication crisis in psychology has demonstrated, not all academic science is good science. Bear in mind a 2015 article in that bastion of the science establishment Nature said ‘Don’t trust everything you read in psychology literature. In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.’
Part of the problem here is the media’s lazy replication of university press releases. These often exaggerate the implications of a discovery or skate over marginal scientific significance. In my book Brainjacking I use the example of a 2013 press release which gave us the headline ‘Star Wars lightsabers finally invented.’ This was from Fox News, but in case you blame the messenger, the Guardian said ‘Scientists finally invent real working lightsabers.’ (Incidentally, I love the ‘finally’ in those headlines - it suggests we should ask ‘What have those slow scientists been doing all this time?’)
The basis for these wild headlines was a genuinely interesting discovery. A study in which two photons had briefly been made to interact with each other in the near-absolute zero conditions of a Bose Einstein condensate. But the lightsabers nonsense was misinformation at best and quite possibly disinformation, as surely no one at the university really thought this was the basis of a 'real working lightsaber'. This is academia shooting itself in the foot.
Where I totally depart from Dave is that I agree with Sabine that far too much physics research is ascientific, working on mathematical challenges or dreaming up hypothetical particles that have little chance of ever being experimentally verified. Yes, she may go too far in saying that most research in the foundations of physics is not based on sound scientific principles, but it’s certainly true that a fair amount is. Dave confuses the issue by arguing against this with a graphic based on physics from the first half of the 20th century - things are very different now. She wasn't questioning E=mc2.
Of course, there’s plenty of great physics happening still. But everything from the esoterics of string theory to the bizarrely dogmatic search for dark matter particles well reflects what Sabine is saying. Dave says ‘[Science communicators] should not be writing entire books like Lost in Math’. This is Sabine’s first book, highlighting the dangers of driving a field of science purely from mathematics, rather than experiment and observation. This is an excellent book and is absolutely what science communicators should be writing. It does an important job of identifying how science can go wrong. To pretend that science never does so is simply sticking your head in the sand and shows a lack of understanding of what it really involves.
It would have helped, perhaps, if Dave had read (and included) Sabine's 2017 article in Nature Physics, titled Science needs reason to be trusted. This opens 'I’m a theoretical particle physicist and I doubt the value of theoretical particle physics. That’s awkward already, I know, but it gets even worse. I’m afraid the public has good reasons to mistrust scientists and — sad but true — I myself find it increasingly hard to trust them too.' In it, Sabine makes a very logical and realistic assessment that in certain parts of physics 'we produce a huge amount of new theories and yet none of them is ever empirically confirmed.' Dave, I suspect, would argue that science will eventually grind its way through and eliminate the useless theories. But, as Sabine says, 'in the foundations of physics it has become extremely rare for any model to be ruled out. The accepted practice is instead to adjust the model so that it continues to agree with the lack of empirical support.' It will be interesting to see if this happens with the latest discoveries from the James Webb telescope, which show that modified gravity theories correctly predict observations, where dark matter particle theories don't. Watch for an adjustment to the dark matter particle theories.
Dave also accuses Sabine of obfustication by going off on a technical rant in one of her videos. Admittedly it’s not what these videos are for, but I'm inclined to forgive it as, in my experience of asking physicists about technical matters, they find it really difficult not to be over-technical occasionally. You should see some of the awful answers I got when asking physicists why a stationary object starts to fall in a gravitational field when released, given the ‘bowling ball on a rubber sheet’ analogy doesn’t work in this example. Dave says churning out technical jargon is bad science communication - that’s true, but it’s not atypical of the field in general, and most of Sabine’s videos (according to Dave) do the job well. I wouldn't expect Dave or me, as science writers who weren't really scientists in the first place, to do so, but it doesn't surprise me from Sabine.
While I think mostly that Dave is wrong, it is true that Sabine can go over the top. She tells her viewers that most of the academic research we pay for ‘is almost certainly bullshit.’ Dave is right that this kind of language is not helpful. Sabine is correct about some research, particularly if we go beyond the hard sciences into the rest of academia - but it’s not helpful to generalise about something like this. Admittedly, I think she doesn't mean what it sounds like and is drawing a parallel with Dave Graeber's 'bullshit jobs' terminology - it sounds as if Sabine is saying the science is wrong, but in reality I think she means that much of it is of little use. One downside of being part of the video science world is that to keep your YouTube audience (and revenue) up, you need to keep feeding them something attention-grabbing. I do wish she'd stuck with the blog... but she has to earn a living, just as Dave does.
[Added 29 November - After talking this through with another science writer, who has seen more of Sabine's videos than I have, I would also say that when Sabine is covering a topic outside of her own discipline, which seems to have proved necessary to keep up the flow of video topics, she can sometimes get things wrong. There is a long tradition of scientists proving naive outside their field, going back to those who failed to spot the trickery of nineteenth century mediums. So, I do take Dave's point that we need to treat some of her output with care - but when she is talking physics I very much back her.]
If we really want the public to understand science, we can't cover up its flaws. We need to be transparent about them, but make it clear that science is still the only way to get to an understanding of what's happening. It's science that gives us vaccines or electronics, not science denial. But we shouldn't be treating the public as if they were young children who need everything to be rendered in black and white.
Incidentally, given I know Sabine (though we've never met), but don’t know Dave, I ought to stress there is no personal bias here - in fact I’ve ordered a copy of Dave’s book to review on www.popularscience.co.uk - I’ll link here when it’s published. But I think he is mostly wrong in this video.
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