My dream died, and now I'm here
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN users cite it in threads about academia, grant incentives, fraud and women-only programs, often as an eye-opening personal take.
What it is
Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she left academia, criticizing its incentives, funding and career structure. She gives a personal account of the social problems in science.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2024 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends biomcgary · 2024-06 · on “The growing pains of science”
I love Sabine Hossenfelder's personal take on the social problems in science ( [this video] ), which reminded me a lot of my own experience in academic science. She also has some critiques of particle physics that I find compelling - but outside my knowledge domain - where the sociological dynamics sound similar to things I've bumped into in biology.
Recommends wg0 · 2024-09 · on “Fraud, so much fraud”
On a tangent, this video[0] from Sabine Hossenfelder about academics in general is eye opening. In comments, veritasium[1] agrees: >After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realised that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here. EDIT: Typos [0]. [this video] [1]. [LINK]
Cites nonrandomstring · 2024-04 · on “Changes in conspiracy beliefs are rare, but possible”
> There are numerous of cases of financiers, academics, etc. who have been expelled because they have corrected their beliefs in contrary to the groups. The best thing to do is leave. Once you cross that Rubicon, never think "I can change this system/institution from within". You will die on that hill. I wish people had better psychological education and preparation to understand what institutions are. Realistic preparation before joining the police, army, government, or academia would help many people avoid so much suffering - and make those institutions "better" by making it easier for differently-thinking individuals to get out and start new movements or institutions. It's really hard, be
Cites cratermoon · 2024-04 · on “”
“When you go into the medical field, the law field, every single field, everything is based on merit.” I'd probably reject her just for believing that. She'll learn, sadly too soon, that all the merit in the world doesn't overcome hate. [this video]
Cites MrBuddyCasino · 2024-06 · on “New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel”
Note how you have no trouble enumerating famous academics from pre-1960s. Shouldn’t we have much more such famous people, if your theory is true that institutional obstacles kept a lot of geniuses out? What are the „luminaries like e.g. Bertrand Russell or Tolkien or Wittgenstein or Gödel or Whitehead or Heidegger“ of today? There should be many more! The progress of science should speed up, the number of groundbreaking papers should grow. Yet the opposite is true [0]. Could it instead be that progress in science is driven by a few geniuses, and 95% of academia nowadays is just a mechanism of turning grants into (often fraudulent) papers [1], suffocating the institution of university as a by
Cites em-bee · 2024-06 · on “Taboos and self-censorship among U.S. psychology professors”
as one female academic said it: scholarships specifically for women are reinforcing the idea that women are inferior because they would not be accepted without that scholarship. [this video] [LINK]
Cites em-bee · 2024-07 · on “Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years”
[this video] in this video here sabine hossenfelder explains the problem. the statement could be applied to any other marginalized group "I am against programs or positions that are exclusively for women.I think that treating women differently just reinforces the prejudice that women are less capable than men"
Cites cb321 · 2024-07 · on “Physicist, 98, honoured with doctorate 75 years after groundbreaking discovery”
A perhaps relevant Sabine Hossenfelder video: [this video] Although Sabine's video is more about today's academia money/paper mill incentives, she mentions the more eternal work/family-life balance for women that also seems to have been determinative for Rosemary Fowler (the subject of the article).