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by totallynothoney
490 days ago
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I'm a physicist much like a mineral is a geologist, so I have zero serious knowledge of the field and everything I say must be taken with a pinch of salt. That in mind, Hossenfelder seems to blow up regularly in HN with clickbait and catnip topics for laymen who self-identify as "pretty smart", so the whole email from an insider who "says what everyone is actually thinking" and aligns with Hossenfelder's ideas seems kinda suspect. She makes daily videos mostly of "current happenings" not related to physics. I feel that she wants to keep the image of a full time academic speaking authoritatively, while being a science communicator that simplifies the works of others for non-Physicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson. It doesn't even make sense for someone who's paranoid of their employer to the level that they use an alternate email when the exchange is supposedly gonna be confidential. They believe IT is manually reading their emails? An alert rule for outgoing mail to Hossenfelder? While at the same time have enough trust to use their full name and mention authorship in the email to a Youtuber with 1.6 million subscribers? One would expect that they would ask for their info to be redacted, which is exactly is what happened, but then you don't have an excellent clickbait title. Also, in the case that email is real, what she did is incredible shitty and only for clicks. |
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I'm not saying that you need need to accredited to make good critiques or understand a field, also I'm not saying that science communicators are "bad" or that academia doesn't have rot to critique.
My distrust comes from daily uploads with Mr. Beast tier thumbnails and titles like the one being discussed or 'What is “gravitic propulsion” and could the US government hide it?', jumping the bandwagon on AI news, etc. She's acts like a Youtuber, so I judge her like I would a Youtuber. The whole email is fishy, and is a perfect fit to make a clickbait video in no time for the daily schedule, so I don't trust the email. This isn't some academic making dry in-depth blogposts when they have free time and posting an anonymized email from a colleague. Her job is to make viral videos constantly, her income depends on this, so my skepticism is higher.