Mini Decoding: Sabine's Contrarian Outrage- How Dare You Criticise Eric!
In this mini-decoding, Matt and Chris examine Sabine Hossenfelder's recent fervent defence of Eric Weinstein and her sharp rebuke of his critics, including Sean Carroll. Sabine suggests that Eric poses a genuine threat to the physics establishment and that he is terrifying them by exposing their weak points. Moreover, according to Sabine, Geometric Unity, Eric's homegrown Theory of Everything, is on par with String Theory, if not better, since it wastes less money! This episode takes a critical look at those claims and Sabine's own heated rhetoric and performative outrage, examining how her defence of Eric aligns with a broader online anti-science contrarian ecosystem.So join us as we ponder whether Sabine is a brave, truth-telling rebel challenging a stagnant scientific orthodoxy and defending an honest man who is under attack for simply daring to question the powers that be... or whether she is just another contrarian YouTuber pandering to anti-science sentiment, defending fellow influencers, and playing the game of algorithm-driven clickbait outrage.Links- Sabine Hossenfelder: Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein -- and they should be- Sabine Hossenfelder: Do we need a Theory of Everything?- Decoding the Gurus: Sabine Hossenfelder: Science is a Liar ... Sometimes- Professor Dave Explains: Sabine Hossenfelder Joins the Eric Weinstein Damage Control Parade- Sabine cheers on Bryan Johnson on Twitter- Tim Nguyen discusses Sabine's response on Twitter- Dr. Brian Keating: What Is A Theory of Everything? Featuring Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, & Eric Weinstein
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds that the online gurus here has to offer and we try to work out what the F they're talking about.
With you today, you have the anthropologist of sorts, of sorts, me, Chris Gavner, the psychologist, yeah, he is a psychologist, Matthew Brown over there.
He's in Australia, I'm in Japan.
It's an international podcast.
That's the way it goes.
Matt is very much the emperor of mankind to my chaos god.
That's the roles that we occupy there.
For those of you who are well-versed in 40k Warhammer.
I thought it'd throw a bone to the Warhammer audience, Matt.
Yeah.
That one's a going out to all the geeks up there.
All the sad sacks who live in their mother's basements.
Don't talk about me and Bright like that.
I dare you.
Okay.
I don't really like that because I know enough about Fortiker to know that the Emperor, I think, is basically a decrepit husk.
Oh, yeah.
But he's the most powerful psychic in the universe.
Oh, the most powerful psychic in the universe.
That does sound like me now.
That does sound like me.
Yeah.
So there's that.
Whereas the Chaos Gods are just like monsters that live and feed on human negative emotions.
So that's actually unfortunately accurate.
It is accurate.
Well, thanks for joining us from the Void Christs.
That's all right.
What have you dredged up from those bottomless depths for us today?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So this is a mini decoding episode.
It just slots in, you know, sometimes we have super long decodings.
Sometimes we never have short decodings, but we sometimes have ones that are shorter.
And this one should be in that wheelhouse because we're back to look at a video that was just around 12 minutes and it was released from Sabine Hossenfelder.
Yeah, I think we pronounced Sabine wrong.
I remember being told that, but I, do you have any, do you know the correct pronunciation?
Sabine.
Sabine Hossenfelder.
Sabine.
Sabine.
Yeah, well, whichever.
We're sorry.
We apologize.
That's neither here nor there.
She is a disgruntled physicist of sorts, somebody that has a lot of issues with mainstream physics.
And she released a video that the thumbnail says, Stunning Hypocrisy.
And the title is, Physicists Are Afraid of Eric Weinstein, and they should be.
So quite dramatic framing there.
And this is Sabine's tick on the interaction that Eric had with Sean Carroll on Pierce Morgan.
Yeah, yeah.
You just reminded me with her title there that Sabine does title some of her videos very provocatively.
I don't know.
Maybe she's keen to get more clicks, but aren't we all?
Aren't we all?
No.
I mean, we're not all doing the thing that Sabine is doing.
She's very much captured in the YouTube algorithm.
And we have previous episodes, Should People Want to Go Back, covering Sabine, which like document some of these tendencies.
And also there is the YouTube channel, Professor Diev, who has, actually, if you go and look at his earlier videos, you know, the earliest video, he was actually relatively charitable to Sabine, but no longer.
He's been radicalized.
Yeah, that's not the case.
So he points out, and we agree with him, that she is like pandering to the anti-science audience on YouTube.
She does make videos, which are kind of just science commentary.
She releases at a rate of a video a day, right?
So there's quite a lot.
There's a mix, but her videos that do best tend to be the ones that are commenting on the failure of mainstream physics or this kind of thing.
Now, why don't we get started with that?
So we've got a couple of clips from this.
And so here's the first clip talking about Sabine's general framing.
I watched this recent episode of Eric and Sean Carroll on Piers Morgan and read the comments from all those who piled on afterwards.
And boy, was this ugly.
I can't believe the fucking hypocrisy of these people.
So that's why I finally want to talk about Eric.
I've known Eric for almost 20 years.
He's a good guy.
If you take away one thing from this video, let it be that Sabina said Eric's a good and fairly normal person.
In contrast to a lot of others who think it's okay to shit on people they know nothing about.
I've seen an enormous amount of hate thrown at Eric that he doesn't deserve.
Yeah, so the important message that she wants to communicate there is that Eric's a great guy.
And also that he's extremely normal.
Which is just like, that's, I think the lady dove protests too much because Eric is not normal.
And I don't know.
Did you notice the weird editing there?
Yeah.
She's like, she just suddenly.
Yeah, I was going to ask you then.
Oh, I wasn't even sure it was.
Hold on.
I thought maybe she was quoting people.
But yeah, I mean, this is something I've noticed with Sabine that she sort of blows button cold.
There'll be often like a title to a YouTube video, which is very provocative with a scientist are lying to you, whatever.
And then like half the episode will be leaning into, I guess, a very strong anti-institutional, healing and spiritual face.
And then she'll flip, or vice versa.
And she's kind of said it both ways.
Yeah, but here, she's, you know, she has a grumpy personality, which is, which I quite like as far as it goes.
But it does seem to lead towards a performative sometimes, right?
Like the real anger, like the real venom or not venom, she's strong, but the real power in her language tends to come when she's talking in a certain direction.
Yeah, well, I think it is venom, but I felt that that was like sort of performative, this bit that was, I can't believe the fucking hypocrisy of these people.
And then it suddenly goes down in the next sentence.
So I imagine she went on for a bit and then cut it out.
Whatever.
The main thing is she's known Eric for 20 years.
He's a good guy.
And she wants to emphasize the takeaway message from this is that I said Eric is a good and fairly normal person, right?
That's what she wants the takeaway message from this to be.
As per usual, Matt, this thing of I met someone, they're nice to me, that's Uber alls in the guru sphere.
That's usually the heuristic that people operate by, right?
I got on well with them.
Sean Carroll is not arguing or criticizing Eric for anything about that, like that he's a, you know, a big meanie.
You know, he's not saying he's a bad person, that he's a flap smelly pants.
I can't think of anyone more polite and reserved than Sean Carroll.
Sean Carroll made a strong case against Eric.
Eric makes an incredibly strong case, as does Sabine, against basically everyone, all of the scientists, except for influencers, people on YouTube.
But I guess it's the scientists who are wrong, right?
Yeah.
We should be ashamed of themselves.
Now, Sabine goes through, you know, an explainer of sorts, a very brief explainer outlining, you know, the kind of like the general claims being made by Eric's theory of everything and explains it, you know, to the best of her ability.
She does some self-deprecating comments about her as a stupid girl, as she understands it and whatever.
And it's fine, as far as it goes, right?
Like this is Eric's model.
And then this is how that section ends.
So Eric postulates that these two tens are somehow related.
Basically, he doubles the gravitational part of Einstein's theory and takes the one version to be the generator of this group that gives you something like SO10.
Devils in the details.
By this, I mean that, in all fairness, Eric's idea is a bit sketchy.
But honestly, I don't doubt that with some effort you can somehow make the maths work out.
So this is roughly what Eric's working on, I believe.
It's all fairly unremarkable, really.
The mathematics is pretty close to what physicists are using already, and it's totally in line with all the other nonsense that physicists in the foundations now work on.
But for reasons I don't quite understand, a lot of people find this all very interesting, which is how Eric ended up on Pierce Morgan with Sean Carroll, and this happened.
Yeah, so I don't like that framing, right?
Because Eric's theory is not just like a normal theoretical physics model.
It's lacking the core components that would make it useful.
And you can make criticisms of other theories and models that, you know, lack empirical validation and whatnot, but it's just not the case that it's exactly comparable.
I get that Sabine wants to argue this, right?
And she has a very critical view of that.
And that is also not why Eric is on Piers Morgan, right?
Eric is on Piers Morgan because he is a online gadfly slash pundit who often like reels against science and stuff, right?
He's an anti-science contrarian that worked for Teal.
So it's not like Wolfram or someone being invited on to be at Sean Carroll.
It is somebody who was a big figure in the IDW.
So Sabine's framing that I don't know why people find this interesting, but that's not why Eric gets invited on Rogan or Pierre.
And her framing is also one as to people have a problem with Eric.
He's just got a physics theory.
He's just a guy with a physics theory.
Aren't you allowed to have a physics theory?
And of course, no.
That's not why Eric gets into hot water.
He has theories about UFOs.
He makes grand claims about faster than light space travel and that his ideas are too dangerous, too powerful to be revealed to the rest of the world.
He claims to, we've covered him in detail.
I'm not going to enumerate that.
But there's a lot more to him than just this sketchy theory.
But the other thing, Chris, is that, did you notice, like, what she's saying there can be read in two ways.
And I know that Eric responded badly to her defense online.
And I kind of see why, because she's kind of, what's the word?
She's naking him a little bit.
Like, she's saying, oh, you know, he's got a theory.
And I'm sure with, you know, it's just kind of nonsense, but so are all the physics theories at the moment.
The maps is, you know, it's a bit sketchy, but I'm sure with some work, it could be turned into something.
I mean, that's kind of a weak praise, especially to someone like Eric, who, you know, makes such strong claims about his theory.
Well, yes, you're going to hear a bit more because she does basically endorse Sean Carroll's critiques.
And even though the takeaway message from this, as you'll hear, is like a strong defense of Eric.
Eric online, you know, he posted his Lagrangian and he, when Sabine responded saying, not sure how to say this, but this is not what physicists expect when they say Lagrangian.
And Eric responded, you know, saying he's bewildered and providing like a, you know, a long equation.
So for Eric, that just shows the fragile ego, right?
And that's an illustration of what people are criticizing.
But Eric, like, you know, we've covered Eric in depth.
And Sabine says, you know, people don't really know Eric.
We know Eric.
We know his conspiracy theories.
We've spent our time in the Eric content mind.
That's right.
No one can accuse us.
Yeah, not paying enough attention to what he's saying.
But yeah, so that critique falls, but it's an illustration of his fragile ego that even though this is a defense of him, that it's not enough, right?
Like he still has to complain that he's not being given enough credit.
So accidentally, she illustrated the issue.
But anyway, let's hear her go on.
So she's going to talk about Sean Carroll directly now and the criticisms he raises.
I think one has to give credits to Sean that he agreed to do this because the vast majority of physicists would have chickened out.
And honestly, Sean did a pretty good job.
Yes, Eric's work is far from complete.
Yes, he doesn't have a Lagrangian and he hasn't actually solved any problem and he hasn't explained how anomaly cancellation works and other than some hand-wavy there ought to be new particles somewhere.
He doesn't have tangible predictions.
But then, Eric's only one person who wrote up some notes.
If he had wasted some millions of tax money on hiring postdocs and writing papers about it, then he could have easily papered over these shortcomings, just like everyone else in that area.
This is what I read about Sabine blowing hot and cold.
It's quite interesting.
She's defending Eric, but only on the grounds that he hasn't wasted as much resources with his nonsense as other theoretical physicists.
I mean, she's well known for having, she doesn't like basically the state of theoretical physics.
She thinks everything's a waste of time and all of these particle co-events is a big waste of money.
I'm never quite clear what she thinks physicists ought to be doing.
I'm sure she's explained at some point.
But it is a weak defense.
And it is, you know, she said a lot of it.
She conceded most of the points that Sean Carroll made in criticism of Eric.
And yet the conclusion is, fuck you, Sean Carroll.
Eric's fantastic.
Yeah.
So you heard her gearing up there.
Like, so, you know, she's saying, yes, he does this.
Yes, you know, it's like that.
And also that point about like, but he hasn't wasted money or time of postdocs, not because Eric doesn't want to.
Like, Eric constantly talks about how everybody should be focusing on his theory and we'd be traveling faster in life.
He's wearing a suit and waiting for the call so he can be put in charge of the department somewhere.
So yeah, her point there only stands because people have expressed no interest in like a half-formulated theory.
But so, you know, you heard her kind of acknowledging the criticism and the tone of voice.
But as she moved into like attacking mainstream physics, she gets more animated, right?
And so it continues.
And this is why this pisses me off so much.
Sean totally knows that most of his colleagues work on similarly flaky stuff.
It's just been covered up by more working hours.
The literature's full of papers without proper predictions, without Lagrangians, ill-defined operators or problems that will be solved in some future work that never comes.
Sean knows that.
Everyone in the damn field knows that.
But normally, no one's saying anything about it because they're all tied up in the same scam.
Unless the person who comes up with the idea is Eric Weinstein, in which case it's suddenly hugely offensive and everyone starts yelling.
Well, Sean, why don't you talk for a little bit about all the supposed ADS-CFD predictions for condensed matter, this or that, which were supposed to revolutionize superconductivity?
Whatever happened to that?
And just exactly how is string theory defined anyway?
Did they actually ever solve the problem of quantum gravity?
Like, did they ever prove it's finite?
What collabiao manifold are we talking about again?
Or how about loop quantum gravity?
Do they have a well-defined Hamiltonian?
Where is the classical limit?
And these are areas in which thousands of people have spent decades and billions of dollars.
Why aren't you talking about this rather than crapping on Eric, who's one single person, and at least trying to do something new?
Yeah.
Interesting defense there, Chris.
Yeah.
So that's a highlight that like Sabine thinks, you know, she's kind of in the frame of Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein about there's been no progress.
It's all like stalled for 20 or 30 years.
Everybody's spinning their wheels, like wasting their time.
So she's like, Sean Carroll knows this, right?
He agrees that there's all, and like, yes, there will be in any field.
There's going to be low quality papers.
There's going to be theoretical claims which outpace the level of evidence and people with pet theories.
And that is true.
She's right that those kind of things exist and that there are still long-term problems with established theories and things which people are working on.
But it's that false equivalence where she's kind of arguing that, well, it's just the same.
Like this is, it's all as hand-wavy and silly.
And that's Sabine's assessment.
That's not Sean Carroll's assessment, right?
She's acting like he knows that.
He's refusing to acknowledge everybody's in on this scam.
And scientists keep telling them, keep saying to Sabine, whenever this kind of, you know, debate comes up or they're responding.
That's not their understanding of their field.
That's not the way they think of string theorists.
Sean talked about, you know, string theory in the conversation with Eric.
So Sabine's presentation of it is everybody understands that there's a scam at the heart of physics and they're all ignoring it because it's how they get money and whatnot.
And that's just a very conspiratorial, anti-science, contrarian point of view.
So yeah.
Exactly.
And look, it may well be way above Euro My Pay Grade to assess the degree to which various physics theories have been pledged out.
And we all know that they haven't, you know, got a grand unified theory of everything.
Bad physicists.
You haven't figured it out yet.
Hurry up.
Get it done.
Why don't you?
But there has been a lot of progress.
There has been a lot of progress, but just to be clear, Matt, she is arguing that, like, in other content and in this and whatever, that the focus on the unified theory is a waste of time.
That's one of her points.
Why should you even bother attempting to do that?
Yeah, well, there's a lot of physicists doing other things too, right?
But there's a heap of topics.
Yeah.
And also keep in mind that Sabine has extended this critique from physics to the rest of science.
That's right.
I forgot about that.
But yes, it's not just theoretical physics.
It's all of physics and it's all of science.
That's right.
Well, look, if the whole thing's a scam, then I guess, you know, it makes sense from her point of view, right?
Yes, Eric Weinstein's got nothing, but neither does anyone else.
But that's, as you said, her framing, her understanding, not one that the vast majority of scientists and physicists have.
Yeah, and this is also like when people like Professor Dave and others point out that she appeals to an anti-science contrarian audience, it's because of stuff like this, where she basically presents it that scientists are all involved in a conspiracy to do nothing for, you know, their entire careers because they just want to get grant money and do things like that.
And Christina, the other thing wrong with her framing is that her framing is that this nice man, Eric Weinstein, has very politely and on his own wicket been putting together his own little theory and has very politely, humbly submitted it for people's consideration.
And then Sean Carol and everyone else is thrown into a rage.
And she was making out that they're yelling, you know.
Sure, Carol wasn't yelling.
He was not yelling in that interview.
His tone was completely relaxed in contrast to the tone of Eric Weinstein and Sabine herself right there.
Yeah, and Eric, you know, made personal attacks and so on.
And this wasn't lost to the majority of people who watched that video.
Like, if you look at the comments under it, Sabine's takeaway that poor Eric was, you know, unfairly treated by Sean Carroll, that is not the take in the majority, even of Piers Gordon's.
Poor Eric has been smeared, Chris.
But in fact, you'll recall, people will recall from that interview, quite the opposite.
Sean did not smear Eric.
Eric smeared Sean.
Eric came prepared with a list of quite infantile personal digs on Sean's career.
Sean, first of all, how dare you?
Second of all, if you're going to be able to read your picture of the no, Sean, how dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now.
I'm not seeking your favor, nor do I need to seek your approval.
As you know, you failed to gain tenure at the University of Chicago.
You're not highly regarded in the field.
And again, I'm only returning the shade in which you just yourself cast.
I wouldn't have done this otherwise.
You then spent time as a non-tenured faculty at Caltech, and you only gained tenure in a non-standard professorship.
You're not a leading person in the field.
My belief structure about this is that you imagine that I'm coming to you saying, oh, Sean Carroll, tell me which graph I should do so that I can please you.
As you know, because you've read the paper, what you said about Lagrangians is false.
What you said about predictions is false.
My concern is what you did, is that you seized upon something where people have built on my ideas since 1994.
The equations that Natty Seiberg and Ed Witten introduced that took over the world were called the insufficiently non-linear equations when I was at Harvard in 1987 and introduced them.
Absolutely absurd stuff, but none of that bridge supervision.
Yeah.
And Sean kept it to the paper.
Look, I mean, I didn't say anything about Eric as a person, his history, or anything like that.
I said things about the paper.
Everything he says about me is like 90% true, as many things he says.
The paper is not giving us any reason to think that this approach is promising.
There is no quantum mechanics in the paper.
There is no attempt at showing that this solves any of the known problems of quantum gravity.
Again, it's not just about Eric, it's about anyone.
If you want to make an impact on the physics research community, you have to give them a reason to think that what you do is promising.
But in any case, so let's hear more of Sabine's framing.
They say that they want people to think outside the box.
But if someone actually does it, they're like, nah, not this way.
You don't talk like us.
You don't walk like us.
We don't like the people you play with.
Therefore, we'll not look at your ideas.
This is the sorry state of theoretical physics now.
And then you get all these people piling onto each hate parade.
The groupthink is so thick.
Like, they all think it's fine to hate on Eric because they expect their colleagues to cheer on them for doing so.
And those who think that maybe Eric's idea isn't so bad keep their mouth shut.
The groupthink, Matt.
Groupthink is a big problem.
Also the Guildby Association.
They've condemned Eric because he's hanging around the wrong people.
Oh, yeah.
They're actually probably secretly quite interested in these exciting ideas in Eric's paper, although she kind of undermined that at the beginning.
I mean, I don't think it's like that meme from Mad Men, like that I don't think about you at all meme.
I mean, like, I don't think the vast majority of physicists, like a couple who have some interest in public discourse-y type stuff, have looked into his theory, but the vast majority of them have not.
Yet they're to blame for that as well, too, I think.
Like, they're sort of damned if they do, damned if they doubt.
If they point out that there's nothing here, which is what Sabine said, then they're evil because they're just hating on him.
A poor guy is just doing his best.
And if they ignore it, it's because they're too close-minded and they're afraid of new ideas.
So, I don't know.
I see Sabine shoehorning this silly little episode into her general anti-science worldview.
Worth point denied that Tim Noon and Theopolia, right?
The pseudonym for Tim's co-author, they wrote a technical rebuttal to Eric's geometric unity theory, such as it existed at the time.
Sabine hosted that on her blog at the time.
She promoted it and she pointed out that Eric wasn't engaging with this technical treatment of his paper.
She was critical of Eric for that.
But suddenly now it's the physics community who are to blame.
And worth noting that after this episode came out, Tim Nguyen on Twitter made some posts at Sabine, like kind of pointing out the rather hypocritical nature of her strong switching stance.
She went on to block him and she removed the article from her blog.
So I think that's worth noting.
I mean, she can put on her blog or whatever she wants, but she shouldn't be acting like, I mean, I'll just play another clip to highlight it.
So this is a little bit later.
She's talking about people that have treated Eric's very reasonably and whatnot.
And listen to this.
Then there's Brian Keating, who deserves credit for not chickening out and for standing with Eric, even though that made people crap on Brian too.
Then there's Kurt Jaimungo, who courageously published a very long video about Eric's theory and also interviewed Eric, which led to this following exchange.
I haven't seen such a such novel ideas from a single theory, from a single person, sorry, ever.
And I don't know if anyone else will tell you this, but what you've done is remarkable, man.
Thank you.
I don't even know how to be with that, to be honest.
Look.
Thank you.
And again, you know, I saw people jump on Kurt and criticizing him just for talking to Eric.
But, you know, Kurt is right.
It's remarkable.
Eric's ideas as remarkable as the ideas of thousands of other people, each of whom has spent years and years of their life on it and whom you've never heard anything about.
So the group think point, praising Brian Keating, cheering on Kurt Jaimungel, and this is a video in defense of Eric Weinstein.
That seems to be playing a particular crowd.
And normally, given her roller, critical, grumpy attitude, this kind of phoning praise directed at someone, it wouldn't normally be highlighted as like a positive feature, right?
I've never seen her elsewhere praise people for saying you're such a great, insightful person.
So this feels very much like playing to a particular in-group that you want to cultivate connections with, perhaps.
And it's particularly surreal given that Sabine Russellfeld knows what proper scientific rigor is and collegial criticism looks like and how theories, you know, proposals, ideas get handled.
And they get handled roughly because that is the culture of robust inquiry.
Contrast that with Kurt Cho Mungel's response there, which she basically endorses.
So this is a group that just pats each other on the back, supports each other.
And these are all influences.
YouTube influencers and Kerchai Mungo.
Remember this is the guy who Chris Langen.
He made a long video talking about how remarkable Chris Langen, the 200 IQ guy that believes that like his mathematical stuff proves God exists, the afterlife exists, the UFOs are controlling the US government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I guess Sabine should find that also extremely appealing and praiseworthy, right?
Because he did a deep dive on that.
But I just again noticed Sabine's double phrasing there, which is, oh, and T's right.
Eric's theory is remarkable.
It's as remarkable as all the other theories, which she says are absolute nonsense.
So you can read, and again, this is a pattern I've noticed a bit with Sabine.
You can read what she says two ways.
And I think I just suspect that's deliberate.
That's all.
Well, I just noticed, Matt, when I looked, I was looking for Sabine's reply to Eric on Twitter.
And I saw that just two days ago, Brian Johnson was writing this big thing about his blueprint, the company where he sells his supplements.
And he was talking about he's being criticized for grifting, but it's not about that.
He wants to give up the company, but he's instead he's decided to create like a new company where he combines supplements and planning don't die activities and whatever.
So he's, he wrote this big long indulgent thing about, you know, how he's been attacked, how he's been accused of being a grifter and it's not fair.
And he was going to step back from selling blueprint because he doesn't need to sell it anyway.
But no, he's decided this.
Anyway, it's like a rebranding thing.
But this is the Brian Johnson, the, you know, pseudo-scientific don't die guy.
Sabine responded to that saying, I'm sorry to hear about the haters.
I think you're doing the right thing.
Don't let it get to you.
So Sabine is constantly online cheering on these contrarian figures in the influencer, Andrew Huberman, Eric Weinstein, Kurt Jai Mungel, Speus.
And there's a lot of pseudo-science there.
There's a lot of pseudoscience in Brian Johnson.
Just for example, Brian Johnson said that he regretted getting the vaccines because he didn't know about the dangers that they posed.
So yeah, she is condemning people for like groupthink and playing to particular In-groups and stuff, but she never addresses her own in-group online and the incentives there.
You know, we've talked about it before.
She complains about all the incentives in science, and she doesn't discuss the incentives on YouTube, which reward her for taking these kinds of stances.
And at this point, it's totally clear to me that these incentives are absolutely at play.
When we first covered Sabine, I really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt because even though there was some troubling signs there, she absolutely can and has done very decent, very good, entertaining explainers on scientific topics.
But unfortunately, the algorithm rewards this other stuff that Kurt John Mungol and Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein does much, much more than that kind of boring stuff.
And I see a lot of other science popularizers, science educational channels out there, including physics ones, that are very, very good, very, very worthy, in my opinion.
Some of them are over my head because they're hard to understand.
Some of them are.
Like at all different levels, they're doing great work, but they don't lean into this conspiratorial, anti-institutional, contrarian influencer thing.
They're nowhere near as successful.
And we've seen this pattern with the anti-vax nurse doctor person.
What was his name again, Chris?
John Campbell.
John Campbell, thank you.
He was making very laudable, but yet boring, YouTube explainers about nursing and basic biological, physiological stuff.
Then COVID came along.
He noticed that the incentives are there and they can create a massive change in people's behavior because when the clicks and the revenue stream is rolling in there and this is their job, you know, like this is their main source of income.
I'm sympathetic even to that.
But the negative effects are also really obvious.
Well, yeah, though, I do think there's also something about the vulnerability of people that go down that rabbit hole.
Because like, for example, John Campbell, he was producing useful information at the start of the pandemic, but he also had various comments which suggested that he was quite sympathetic to creationism.
So there often are these signs when you go back and look that the people have these issues and they aren't things that just suddenly emerge from nowhere.
There are bad habits in the way that people are responding to things.
And then in particular, if you happen to be somebody that responds well or likes attention too much, I think it's a particular vulnerability.
Now, there's a part, Matt, where Sabine references Professor Div, but doesn't mention him by Neim.
And I think it's worth listening to.
Like with this recent episode about Perimeter Institute.
In his Morgan appearance, Eric said vaguely he's been visiting some physics institute and giving a talk.
Someone leaked later that this was Perrometer Institute and spread a rumor that they didn't want to be associated with him and that they made a deal that Eric would donate money in return.
This is all bullshit and if they'd stopped and thought for a second they'd have known it's bullshit.
This just isn't how seminary invitations work.
Also let me tell you that when I give talks I frequently do not mention publicly where I'm going for reasons.
I also know that Eric's been giving a bunch of physics lectures in the past years about which you find nothing online, presumably also for reasons.
The story from Pyramid Institute is to my understanding that the person who invited him feared for their career.
This tells you how sick this entire community is, that people are afraid to do as much as express interest in a new theory.
So you got the ramp up of rhetoric there.
I doubt, Sabine, that the person who invited Eric is like in danger of losing their career over the invitation.
And I will say, Matt, that someone on our Patreon who has connections with the Prometheus Institute, I haven't independently validated it, but it sounds reasonable.
They mentioned that Eric was invited to the Prometheur Institute, but he wasn't invited to give a talk.
He was attending a conference that was part of a 25th year anniversary celebration of the Institute.
He did have a four to five hour informal talk with masters and some PhD students into the evening of the event.
So he was there, you know, was invited.
So the one bit that I think Sabine is right to call out here is Professor Dev implied that like, you know, the Primiter Institute, they were trying to attract funding from Eric.
And that's why they invited him to give this talk in secret, right?
They wanted him to, and that didn't ring true to me.
I didn't see good evidence for that.
And Sabine here is using that to say that's not how it works, right?
She has a legitimate critique there, but that was not the only criticism about the way that Eric presents things.
But this is a, so we said at the time, you know, if you make these kind of accusations, this is the stuff that people will jump onto.
Or Kurt Jaimungel being paid to make the video about Eric, which is something Professor Dave said as well, right?
Like, I would expect that either Kurt or Eric will raise that at some point in the future to undermine, you know, the other criticisms.
Yeah, I think the lesson here is to don't get ahead of your skis.
It's best not to speculate about things like that when you don't know that it's true.
Like you said, it's pretty implausible on the face of it that they were invited in because they were hoping to a gateway to some sort of funding.
Eric isn't worth that kind of money and it just seems unlikely, right?
And unless you know that's true, then don't claim it's true.
Has he ever done that?
No, he's never as far as I don't know.
So, so, and you know, when you get something wrong and get or get ahead of your skis like that, then of course you may make 10 different criticisms.
But if you make one that is wrong, demonstrably wrong, then the best way to defend yourself is to ignore the other nine and jump on that one and make as much out of it as you can, a little bit like Sabine was starting to do there at the end, herself getting a bit overhead of a skis so that they kept it a secret because they'd lose their jobs and people had found out.
Like everyone who attended would know.
So it's not like a big secret, right?
I know.
They probably just didn't want it to be a big deal for the center, right?
They didn't want to be involved in the culture war.
And just imagine, Matt, for example, there is a person associated with the Perimeter Institute, research faculty, Lee Smolin, who has appeared on various videos with Eric on Brian Kidding's channel.
So I, you know, I don't know, but it's perfectly plausible that that's the person that invited them.
I read a book by Lee Smolin once, I think.
Yeah, I did.
I read it's a very speculative kind of physics, right?
So yeah, I could quite well believe.
So this is contrary to the other thing too, right?
But like, of course, like, like, people, Yeah, like it's a massively broad church.
There are so many people doing good work, doing bad work, doing speculative work, doing conservative work.
There are people that are into crazy alternative theories.
There are people who aren't.
I think Lee Smolin is one of the ones that's more on the spectrum of quirky out there stuff.
And, you know, that's fine.
And again, there's nothing wrong with Eric Weinstein independently having a bit of an out there theory.
The reason why he comes flak is not because of that.
It's because of the extraordinary claims and how much he rests upon what is, as to being, says herself, a pretty weak, half-finished piece of work that is the only thing, as far as we can tell, he's really ever produced over the last 30 years or so.
So it's the grandiose claims that he makes about himself and about institutions and the state of science generally that is what attracts the attention.
Yes, yeah.
And, you know, lest we forget, Eric has consistently claimed that various people, you know, he strongly attacks people that are still alive in physics, presents them as evil gatekeepers, and regularly claims that he invented very influential theories before other people, like the Yang-Mills equation and so on, right?
And Sabine just ignores all those things.
She just treats it like he's just someone developing ideas.
Why are you all picking on him?
And it's like, if Eric wasn't constantly attacking physicists, constantly attacking scientists and alleging conspiracies, physicists wouldn't be talking about Eric.
In general, they're not, right?
They're not.
That's right.
They're talking about him very little.
A couple of them, Tim Nguyen and Sean Carroll, because they have some interest in the public discourse, have given him the credit of actually taking a look and having a go.
But the vast majority are not attacking Eric.
Quite the contrary.
Eric is spending his entire career attacking all of them, both collectively and individually.
So it's the opposite of Sabine's framing.
Also, the individual that she hosted, that we interviewed, Tim Nguyen, you do recall that Eric presented online, made some accusations that suggested that he was misogynistic, like potentially attacking his family.
He also named him Itty Bitty Balls Timmy online.
So like, just, as you say, it is absolutely the opposite in terms of who is the one bringing the heat and like making it about, you know, personal vendettas.
We know that's the Weinstein brothers modus operandum, but whatever.
So now, Matt, I do have two final clips here just to round things off.
And I think these are important.
So one is from an episode on Brian Kidine's channel where Sabine was with Eric and Lise Mullin, and it was about theories of everything and whatnot.
And there was this exchange, right?
People clipped this online to show the hypocrisy in her recent position.
Well, first, maybe let me make a comment about what Eric just said.
He complains that there hasn't been any substantive discussion about geometric unity.
I think that's because no one has any idea what you're talking about in the first place.
I think you're severely underestimating the communication problem.
You have to work much, much harder on that.
And yeah, I watched your lecture, and I think that I'm among the half many people who watched your video.
I'm probably one of those who have a pretty good starting point in understanding what you're even talking about.
And even I only have a very vague idea what you're even up to.
So that's being basically, I think, expressing what is very similar to Tim Nguyen.
And the physicists have looked at it, saying, look, it doesn't do much here.
It's all very vague.
Don't really understand what you're trying to do here.
Yes, yes.
And, you know, a lot of a harsher tone there.
She sounds much more aggressive than Tron Carol, actually, in that exchange.
But the tone has somewhat changed.
Now, the thing that Sabine ends up suggesting, right, to finish this video is the following.
In any case, I think what's really happening here is that a lot of people who work in the foundations of physics are very afraid that Eric is exposing how rotten their entire field is.
This is why they're trying hard to discredit him.
But the truth is that Eric's idea isn't any better or worse than all the other crap they're working on.
The only difference is that he hasn't wasted as much of your tax money on it.
That's it for today.
No, there's no sponsor on this video because I don't want to be accused of monetizing a friendship.
But please check out my Patreon.
Thanks for watching.
So, Chris, the they, the they, they are afraid of Eric Weinstein.
They need to take him down.
His ideas are too threatening.
He's going to expose the whole corrupt structure of academia.
I mean, who's this they?
Is it Sean Wear?
I mean, from the title of the video.
But who are the physicists that are trying to take down Eric Weinstein?
It's Sean Carroll and Tim Nguyen?
Because I'm not aware of.
It's probably them or anybody that's made a disparaging.
But like you say, this is just her slotting in Eric into her grand Narrative, right?
She's just using him as a kind of totemic figure to say physics is doing nothing useful and Eric is calling it out, and that's why they're attacking him.
And you know, we're banging this dead horse like it's lying there.
But, like, no, that's not why physicists are critical of Eric Weinstein.
It's not that he's revealing their grift.
It's that, like she said, there's just nothing there, right?
Like, and she wants to draw an equivalence between Eric's theory and all the other stuff in physics, but that's really just like hand-waving kind of very subjective, shall we say, assessment of the quality,
because even I understand Eric has just put lots of question mark, question mark, question mark into his paper, such that other physicists who've commented on it, like the guy that was on Professor Dave Christian Ferko, that was talking about it, were astonished at how little there was there.
So is Christian Ferko also part of this, you know, secret command?
Because he seemed to me just to be like a, you know, a postdoc that has an interest.
And in the case of Tim Nguyen, he did his doctorate on a similar area.
So he's a geek and it's a topic he knows something about that.
He's better qualified to comment on it than even a lot of physicists.
So it could be that rather than these, you know, just like three people, rather than acting point for a grand institutional thing to take Eric down, maybe they just had the same reaction to Eric's little paper that Sabine herself had, right?
Because that's what it sounds like to me.
That's the more innocent explanation.
But of course, that's not exciting and does not fit into Sabine's positioning at the moment.
Now, the last thing, Matt, the last clip I'm going to play.
Now, it's tempting to highlight the clip of Sabine being argumentative and harsh to Eric and say, well, look how much has changed.
And I do think there is absolutely something to the fact that Sabine over time has become more hyperbolic and more clickbaity and more appealing to people like Brian Johnson and Kurt Jaimungo and all this kind of thing.
I don't think she would have done that before.
So I'm not saying she's in the exact same position she was.
But I will say, I went back because I knew Sabine had done other videos about Eric and stuff previously.
And I found a video from five years ago where she talked about Eric and Garrett Lisi and some other people with theories of everything.
And she did express rather similar sentiments.
And I think it's worth playing it just to make that point.
So listen to this.
This is a video from five years ago.
Having said that, what do you think, I think, about Lisi's and Weinstein's and Wolfram's attempts at the theory of everything?
Well, scientific history teaches us that their method of guessing some pretty piece of math and hoping it's useful for something is extremely unpromising.
It is not impossible it works, but it is almost certainly a waste of time.
And I have looked closely enough at Lisi's and Weinstein's and Wolfram's and many other people's theories of everything to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved any actual problem in the existing fundamental theories.
And I'm not interested enough to look any closer because I don't also want to waste my time.
But I don't like commenting on individual people's theories of everything.
I don't like it because it strikes me as deeply unfair.
These are mostly researchers working alone or in small groups.
They are very dedicated to their pursuit and they work incredibly hard on it.
They are mostly not paid by tax money, so it's really their private thing and who am I to judge them?
Also, many of you evidently find it entertaining to have geniuses with their theories of everything around.
That's all fine with me.
I get a problem if theories that, despite having turned out to be useless, grow to large tax-paid research programs that employ thousands of people, as it has happened with string theory and supersymmetry and grand unification.
That creates a problem because it eats up resources and can entirely stall progress, which is what has happened in the foundations of physics.
People like Lacey and Weinstein and Wolfram at least remind us that the big programs are not the only thing you can do with math.
So odd as it sounds, while I don't think their specific research avenue is any more promising than string theory, I'm glad they do it anyway.
Indeed, physics can need more people like them who have the courage to go their own way, no matter how difficult.
Yeah, so it's been a consistent view of hers for a long time.
Very, very, very much dislikes that these paradigms like string theory have gotten so much attention.
Like, I think I basically agree with a large amount of that, Chris, right?
Because like, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Theoretical work, like a pencil and a paper and a computer, it's quite cheap.
So why on earth shouldn't people, I've tried to understand, oh, what's his name?
Wolfram, who created Mathematica.
I've tried to understand his thing, you know, on a basic kind of level.
It seems really out there and crazy, way above my pre-grade to understand.
I mean, all power to him.
Like, no one's got a problem with someone like him looking into this, just like no one's got a problem with Eric Weinstein as well.
Yeah, so it is that point that like she is correct that, you know, there's, there's not an issue with people pursuing their own theories of everything or whatever, you know, like, but there also is a very well-known issue that there are a lot of people who believe that they've developed new theories that would revolutionize physics or biology, that they are essentially Einsteins that are going unrecognized, right?
And that's the issue is that those people, it's not just that they think that.
It's often that they attack others, they attack scientists for not recognizing Their revolutionary theories and so on.
And she just ignores all of that aspect.
Like all of the stuff that Eric has done to attack institutions, to promote people that are attacking institutions, or just the personal self-aggrandizing victim narratives that he wallows in.
So if the criticism is, should Eric be allowed to develop his own theory and make big claims for it?
Like you can do whatever you want, right?
Nobody's saying, no, he can't do that.
The issue is like all the other stuff around it.
And she just doesn't address that.
But I do think it's notable that the position that she was presented as like having just developed is actually the same sentiment that she was saying, you know, many years ago.
So like, again, I don't think it's that she hasn't gone more down the rabbit hole towards anti-science pandering.
But I think that just like I said previously with other people, there are these positions that people have that make them somewhat vulnerable to, you know, going farther down that line.
And I think her view that essentially all of physics is corrupt, it's all moribund, nothing useful is happening there or has been happening for decades, she fundamentally agrees with Eric, right?
So she's very sympathetic.
And now she happens to be a lot more sympathetic to a whole bunch of fairly anti-scientific contrarians that are active on YouTube.
And they also happen to agree with her about, you know, the state of physics.
And yeah, I think it'll get worse.
It'll get worse like this because the positive reinforcement goes that way.
But it is still worth, I think, for people to go and do these kind of false positives.
Because when I saw the video of her being fairly hypocritical, I was then like, okay, you know, that's quite satisfying to play.
But I knew she talked about Eric.
So I was like, well, what did she say before?
And went and checked and then find his clip, which I think is less satisfying, but it's worth, you know, doing those kind of checks rather than just satisfying dung.
So you can do both.
You know, you can play both like we do.
But isn't there quite a bit of consistency with all of those takes over the years from Sabine about Eric?
Because in all of them, she makes it pretty clear that she doesn't think much of Eric.
No, she doesn't think about theories of everything.
No, she doesn't like theories.
She doesn't like Eric's theories.
That's right.
That was kind of said at every point.
But just like you said, at all points in time, too, she does have a big problem with mainstream science, especially physics.
And so that makes her sympathetic.
And I suppose also being an online influencer person, that is her job now.
She moves in the same waters as Brian Keating, Kircho Mungall, even Chris Langer.
Brian Johnson and Eric Weinstein.
So these are her people.
And the last thing I'll say, she says at various times in this, and she says it in other things, that she doesn't spend much time looking at people's content.
She doesn't watch things.
She doesn't, you know, like this is this very common thing where people are like, I haven't looked into Eric, you know, what he said or whatever, but he's been very nice to me.
And yeah, so there's just like this thing that people do online where they're, you know, they take a very defensive stance, but they actually don't know anything about the content or at least they can retreat to that if they're pressed.
So like if we were to show Sabine in some venue a whole bunch of stuff that Eric said, you know, that is promoting conspiracies or strongly attacking people, she would probably say, well, I, I don't know about any of that.
I haven't like looked into it.
And it's, it's just a very useful thing to be like, all I care about is the person was nice to me.
And that's the main thing I'm basing this on.
They're nice to me and I don't like mainstream physicists.
And that's quite convenient.
Yeah, it's also convetty to shift between those two positions where on one hand, someone like Sabine or Eric, for that matter, many of them, incredibly critical of mainstream physics, incredibly critical of stuff like string theory, multiverse theory, what you name it, right?
Really strong.
And Eric goes as far as to be like, really accusing individual people of rampant corruption and conspiracies and all of that stuff.
But criticize Eric, right?
He's just a guy doing his best.
He's working on his theory.
How dare you?
It doesn't matter how politely one criticizes him.
Tim Nguyen watched our show and Sean Carroll, very polite about it, very professional.
So it seems everything can be criticized except these guys.
Yeah.
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Well, anyway.
Yeah, so there we go, Matt.
That's been a little trip down Savine Lee and let's see where the road ends up in a couple more years.
But it's been a mini decoder, Matt.
It's been an honor.
That's all you get.
Yeah, anyway, I'm not liking this little kernel of sort of physics contrarians that is developing.
I don't think they produce good stuff.
Kurt Joe Munger's theories of everything is not something anyone who is serious should be holding up as a great forum of scientific inquiry and debate.
And on the other hand, there is heaps of physics content, educational, popular science content out there that is very worthwhile.
A whole bunch of just normal everyday people you've probably never heard of, right?
Who are not self-promoting, narcissistic, grievance-mongering people like this.
And, you know, Sabine, when she does good work, is like those people, but she plays in these waters too, sadly.
So anyway, go out and find the good content, people.
