"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research
as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote
it myself."
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late.
Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.
I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical.
Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.
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.
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)
Cold reading papers from outside your field isn't 'doing science'. As far as medicine or economics is concerned, she's identical to a layman (or worse, modulo arrogance).
Science is a collaborative social endeavor that exists under a shared set of norms and rules that have the goal of producing new knowledge. She's skipping the social part. She could email these people and ask for input! Many of her weird mistakes and misunderstandings could all be caught by cursory review from a middling grad student.
None of these papers were written for her, she is not the audience, you are not the audience. One of the points of graduate education is to get people to the point where they and meaningfully engage with the state of the art. This process takes years!
Compare her output to people like the math/comedy youtuber matt parker or the numberphile channels, which invite collaboration from the authors directly. They aren't experts themselves, but they do the work to make it interesting and present things as accurately as possible.
Every field has a shared language and culture that needs to be internalised to some degree before you can usefully engage with their contents. Some terms you think you are familiar with will have slightly different meanings within a domain, and just assuming you understand it during even a well-intentioned and careful read can still lead you astray.
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)
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.
It often seems to me that a person's opinion on a subject is judged particularly harsh and derisively the more they are deemed an expert on some other unrelated subject. I find this a little unfair.
Fairness doesn't come into play here, this is just about predicting which of the overwhelmingly many sources of information are worth paying attention to.
Feel free to come up with your own predictive model of whether someone is worth listening to. It's hard to compare such models fairly, but if you feel yours is better, it might be worth sharing.
“We know from Bell’s theorem [7, 8] that any locally causal
model that correctly describes observations needs to violate
measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes
called ‘superdeterministic’ [9, 10]. It is therefore clear that
to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.”
I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”
"deterministic", "superdeterministic", "measurement independence", "local", "causal" and more are well defined terms (with potentially poorly chosen names) in quantum information science and "quantum foundations". She is a crank, but a paragraph like that can be found in essays by well-respected mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.
Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. I know that all those terms have definitions. But in my opinion superdeterminism is not really falsifiable, and in fact very much more problematic than nonlocality as it actually appears in QM contexts.
In the most plain terms, the author is claiming that the collapse of the wave function can be explained deterministically if you just accept that it was preordained.
Superdeterminism is an interpretation, not a theory. It's only falsifiable by falsifying the theory -- which would also falsify any other interpretation.
Which means that "we must use a superdeterministic approach" is incorrect. It means that you may use a superdeterministic approach. If that approach is productive, that may cause people to favor your interpretation. But it does not rule out other interpretations. At most, it can make them sufficiently inconvenient as to dismiss them.
I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.
"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself."
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late. Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.
I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical. Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.