I know nothing about her but the video on her experience in academia is spot on. It's a pretty common experience among STEM academics. You will face the point where you have to compromise your academic "purity" and curiosity for trendy topics to survive. This also implies publishing "bullshit" papers and "bullshit" grants. Only certain types of people make it through that.

By all measures, I was "living the life" in academia. with both my parents being academics (both researchers and pretty published in their fields)

Yet, I left it after the project finished. The prospect of having to write papers just because. The amount of trash papers I had to review for free but then looking at the cost of proceeding books (I got them for free through my institution... but what a racket it is!!)

The prospect of the "academic path" ((abitur, lecturer, associate prof and then prof) praying the stupid game..

I left it all and turned to the startup world . Maybe it was my engineer mind, but I feel way more fulfilled after 12 years in industry.

It was depressing. I dropped out. I have love for academia, but there is a pretty overwhelming amount of gamesmanship in surviving that system. I found becoming a developer a much easier career to navigate.

Yes, her entire description about her experience (safe for that weirdness with the textbook sweatshop) is relatable. I am not sure what you are looking for but STEM PhD attrition rates speak for themselves. Those do not include PhDs that decide to leave academia after retrieving their PhD. Not to mention the frequently discussed mental health crisis that consistently gets Nature articles.

HN's negativity is comparable to the negativity I have seen with CS, Maths, and Physics PhDs and Postdocs in personal discussions. See also PhD comics: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd072011s.gif

If you are an idealist you will of course be worn down by the way many academic institutions are set up. There is a ton of writing on this, e.g., https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/decline.txt

She states in the first three minutes of the video linked above that she was excelling academically. How bizarre to observe a lack of research in a thread complaining about how the academy has drifted from the conduct of pure research. Three minutes. One hundred twenty seconds. That's all it would have taken.

Sorry for being pedantic. I just thought it was funny in the context of a thread about PHDs.

Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research.

Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on almost everything) has given knock-down commentary that I find impossible to ignore on how academia went to seed, and is now unfit for teaching, learning and honest research.

From a personal perspective; I worked in universities for over 30 years. What we have now is unrecognisable from the institutions I started teaching at in the early 1990s. Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. It is fake to the core. I no longer recognise these places as universities. I've seen brilliant colleagues go crazy, retire early, turn to alcohol and drugs, commit suicide, or just wander off to live in the mountains and grow vegetables. I refuse to believe all those smart and dedicated people are/were "weak". Academia is a very toxic place and I would not advise any "smart and sensitive" person to go into that life if you value your health.

When you consider how much it costs a nation to educate someone to PhD level and then look at the churn and attrition, it's a massive bonfire of wealth.

I've written numerous pieces in the Times Higher on specific failings of universities, but one cannot halt a juggernaut of change with words alone. Now I am left only with curiosity at how higher education will change and what will come after.

My response has been to conduct and publish my own research independently outside the "academic system" and to start my own companies for teaching. By my standards, both are successful.

edit: grammar

> Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators.

Not just academia.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’ve worked the past 15 years or so for several different F100 companies in various technical R&D functions. These companies manufacture real things and generally have labs, resources, and staff that rival but the very best academic institutions. The politics and worldviews with which the MBAs have infect the technical teams with the last 20 or so years is palpable.

I know there used to be real in-depth research done; talking to the old timers and looking through old technical reports showed that to me. Doing that now will quickly get you RIFed. Now quickly getting to revenue and moving onto the next project is all that matters. Nothing is retained in classic 20-30 page technical reports that help build true institutional knowledge or even allow us to repeat projects based on the learnings from 2 years ago. If you are smart you quickly learn how to test and validate things to make whomever the customer is happy (following the $) while providing the bare minimum to the lawyers to make a specific marketing claim. In practice this means I’ve become very good at not opening certain doors during research (ie the ones that I intuitively know have a high likelihood of derailing a project) even if they probably should have been. See no evil, hear no evil…

It’s sad.

It's interesting and worth watching, but it becomes apparent that Thiel is a financier, and science takes place on a different timescale. Better seek advice from someone who was active when US science was still functional, let's say Roy Vagelos.

My biggest criticism of hers is that she is cynical and spends too much time tearing down other ideas rather than promoting anything.

But overall she does great things with showcasing the more ridiculous side of academia. She is adept at taking published research and showing that it is quackery. She shows how they manipulate data and mislead the media, often for more research money. I also applaud her counterpoint in particle physics regarding the waste involved in building yet another gigantic particle accelerator. It's a POV I wouldn't have considered, but I agree that the money could be better spent in other areas.

Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians she presents a biased and exaggerated view of things in order to stoke engagement, and unless you are an expert it can be difficult/impossible to determine whether the view she is giving is balanced.

This is a classic issue with string theory critics, because string theory has many legitimate problems with it, but many of the critics are intellectually dishonest and you probably shouldn't listen to their criticisms on principle (but even I must admit it's quite hard to find good quality intellectually honest criticism of string theory which is digestible, so these contrarians tend to be the only loud voice).

In Sabine's case it is not so bad, because it is clear from some of her other positions that she is basically a crank. MOND and superdeterminism are basically crank physics at this point but she supports them purely because she is a contrarian. On this evidence alone you should not trust anything she says on any other subject, otherwise you're falling for a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia.

I would like to add that Sabine's video on her academic experience was quite a tragic thing to watch. If her allegations are true then the behavior of her PhD supervisor was completely outrageous.

She also did seem a bit too dreamy-eyed about academia. Sure you can criticize everything you want, but she never seemed to have understood that tone of voice still matters. Academics are busy people with emotions, and not likely to engage with someone whose claims appear to have more loudness than substance.

Unfortunately a chip (even a legitimately earned one) on ones shoulder about the bad parts of academia doesn't save you from being criticized for being crank-y.

It's bizarrely parochial to suppose that every single photon is magically correlated with the experimenter's future measurement choices in a way that will exactly violate Bell's Theorem.

Another way to put it:

> If such a theory did exist, it would require a grand conspiracy of causal relationships leading to results in precise agreement with quantum mechanics, even though the theory itself would bear no resemblance to quantum mechanics. Moreover, it is hard to imagine why it should only be in Bell experiments that free choices would be significantly influenced by causes relevant also to the observed outcomes; rather, every conclusion based upon observed correlations, scientific or casual, would be meaningless because the observers’s method would always be suspect. It seems to us that any such theory would be about as plausible, and appealing, as, belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control.

Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell, Wiseman & Cavalcanti, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.06413

On the latter, her beef is not that HEP has not made signficant discoveries in the past, rather that the costs going forward can no longer be justified and starve many, many other areas of physics of needed funding. Compounding her disdain for future projects are the increaingly lofty claims of what will be discovered since inception of LHC. Do you really think she is alone on this?

On the former, who is the crank here? The person with the advanced degree calling out the failure of a 50 year old theory to make one scientifically provable and confirmed prediction? (I could say 80 years if going back to the beginnings with S-matrix theory)

I'll grant that some maths have been developed that may be tangentally useful but other than enriching the publishing industry, what has string theory brought? Zilch. It seems that the more public this becomes, the louder the cries of those with deeply vested interests. I can think of no other large theory that has gone for so long with no experimental confirmations at all and is not likely to in mankinds future either.

As to MOND like theory, Sabine has had varying degrees of support over the past twenty years as data has come in and theory has changed. Very frankly, the reason to give a degree of trust to her on other subjects too is because she is willing to be objective and call people out on their BS.

This sounds awfully similar to the “do your own research” defense that is often used as a cop-out disclaimer for quackery topics.

When someone presents themselves as an expert on a topic and invests a lot of time into making convincing videos about their beliefs, defending them with a “do your own research” feels like a tacit admission that they’re not actually the expert they present themselves as.

This feels somewhat like the high-brow intellectual equivalent of Joe Rogan making confident statements about COVID and then defending himself with “I’m just a comedian, do your own research”. You can’t have it both ways.

It's easy to know whether to internalize what she says when you view it critically. Ask "does the presented research seem legit, complete, and impartial?" and "is her conclusion logical?". She gives you the receipts to check. This is not the same as deciding whether to put blind faith into a comedian's off-the-cuff anecdotes and opinions.

I often disagree with her conclusions, but at least she makes it very easy to validate her chain of though, find where our views diverge, and only absorb the information I trust.

Someone speaking provocatively and authoritatively on topics they don’t have credibility in is where you should think critically and turn it off.

I appreciate that she makes her videos so easily verifiable, by prominently showing her research, that it was easy to see the point when this started happening and tune out. A lot of opinion-faucets on the internet try to be irrefutable by hiding their sources.

I don't trust Sabine intrinsically, but I trust that I can notice when she under-researches a topic or makes a leap of logic. She conveys enough good information that I find it worth my time to watch.