Comment by tombert
2 days ago
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that
There's a term for that: Engineer's Disease.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
Probably, kind of funny that the irony is completely lost on her.
I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD.
A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
> PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
It depends, many fields intersect, and there are interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. The generalist approach is to be T-shaped, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. The T might be shallow on some ends, but deeper on others, so you may even have a prong, trident, or comb. Truly, it depends.
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Exactly she used to say this all the time and now she's weighing in on topics ranging from EVs to nuclear power to 5G causing cancer (yes she did a show on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs and she was peddling to the "sceptic" crowd by saying that "she doesn't have any reason to believe that it's is unsafe, but ..." and pointing to doctors saying smoking was save in the 50s).
Yeah, I remember the 5G one and it kind of upset me.
Obviously people can have opinions on anything, and of course you can't be an expert on everything, but I feel like what Sabine does goes beyond "having an opinion"; she seems to have pivoted into fear-mongering about academia. I don't love academia either, and I have my criticisms of how it is run in the US, but I think a lot of my complaints can largely be explained by incompetence at the administrative level, not a grand conspiracy to control narratives or suppress questions or anything like that.
Granted, the research I've worked on has been pretty apolitical [1], mostly mathy computer science stuff, so maybe I was never at a risk of my research being suppressed, but I certainly don't think that Eric Weinstein is being censored by no one taking his attempt at Unified Field Theory seriously.
[1] Yes I know everything can be political. You don't need to explain this to me.