Comment by cauch

I am also a former CERN scientist, and while I agree with the fact that recent papers are more and more a box-checking exercise with low value, I'm concerned on how Hossenfelder misrepresent the causes of that and the situation.

You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis.

What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she jumps to another conclusion, without any good observation for it or without scientific approach. These conclusions seem to be fed by the easy trap of "it's a conspiracy". We know how easy it is for people to give credit to these theses and to totally overlook that some claims are, in practice, totally unrealistic (so we have thousands of new PhD students and postdocs exploring how it works every year, the majority of them leaving the field, and strangely, the very very big majority choose, for absolutely no good reason, to keep hidden the secret they saw).

I agree with some of Hossenfelder's observations, but I find her conclusions often unsubstantiated, overstating elements that are more realistically way rarer than what she described and overlooking plenty of valid hypotheses. The fact that these "great revelations" brings her viewership also fit with a slow crank-ification. The fact that she also released videos on subjects outside of her domain and that these videos contained a lot of approximation also does not give a good image of how reliable is her approach (not that it is a crime to not know something outside of your field of expertise, but it should be something that a good scientist should be fully aware of, and they should simply not do such video in the first place).

I'm not sure if there is a real "taboo" to openly agree with her, I think it is more about the fact that she destroyed herself her own reputation with bad calls and bad conclusions, and people don't really want to tarnish themselves by association.