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18 points dboreham | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.503s | source
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jplusequalt ◴[] No.45581261[source]
Sabine Hossenfelder these days is a YouTube personality, who likes to discuss subjects she's not an expert in. I don't know if that's the metric for "crank", but anything I hear from her is taken with a massive grain of salt.
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AndrewOMartin ◴[] No.45581474[source]
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.

I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.

(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)

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1. krastanov ◴[] No.45581750[source]
The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.

The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.

The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.

(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)

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2. tokyolights2 ◴[] No.45582834[source]
Its the curse of engagement. If she read the literature and came to a "boring" opinion it would be much harder to gain a following online. It isn't impossible to gain a following without getting conspiratorial, but it is much harder.