I was asked to keep this confidential
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in threads about science funding and trust in research as an angry insider critique of academic incentives, though some commenters doubt it.
What it is
Sabine Hossenfelder reads a confidential email and uses it to explain her worries about academia and incentives in theoretical physics research. She ties it to her earlier Nature Physics comment on research quality.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2025 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec howmayiannoyyou · 2025-05 · on “Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation”
[this video] Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
Cites tim333 · 2025-02 · on “Alzheimer's biomarkers now visible up to a decade ahead of symptoms”
It surprises me that some obvious clues to treatment are passed over as I guess they don't fit the politics? Like >A team of researchers in Jerusalem, he says, decided to look at patients who survived bladder cancer and compare dementia prevalence among patients treated with BCG and those who weren’t. “Do they differ in the rate at which they get Alzheimer’s disease?” The answer is yes – the BCG group appeared to get 75% protection against Alzheimer’s. A number of studies have now found varying levels of protection from BCG, with an average, according to one meta‑analysis, of 45%. There's a lot of evidence a lot of it is set off by infectious microbes which can be treated in the usual way. (
Cites waonderer · 2025-02 · on “Science needs reason to be trusted (2017)”
Sabine Hossenfelder: We now live in the grip of post-factualism would seem naturally repellent to most physicists. But in championing theory without demanding empirical evidence, we're guilty of ignoring the facts ourselves. Original paper URL: [LINK] Accessible URL: [LINK] YouTube Video by the Author: [this video]
Cites bakuninsbart · 2025-02 · on “How Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State”
Just yesterday I watched a video by a disgruntled former academic physicist about the state of modern physics research. [0] Not sure of its credence, I don't really understand physics. In the fields I do have a bit of understanding, there does seem to be an amazing amount of fluff and bloat, but also still a significant amount of good and useful knowledge creation. The bloat isn't really surprising: Largely inoculated from market forces, the way modern research is conducted has enormous amounts of inefficiencies, which in turn creates plenty of ways to game the system. Without university accreditation it is very hard to publish research, get grants or invites to conferences, so there is litt
Critical mollerhoj · 2025-03 · on “I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs”
It's weird that you'd guess (wrong) that I'm an "LLM bull", then start generalizing the actions of this supposed group. Hallucinations are a problem, no news value there. Sabine seems not to be able to get value out of LLMs, and concludes that they aren't useful. The logic is not exactly impressive. It's a tool. It can be useful, it doesn't always work. Some people claim it's better than it is, some people claim it's worse. This isn't exactly rocket science. Regardless of the tweet in question, Sabine is a grifter. Her novel takes on academia being some kind of conspiracy of people milking the system, and of physicists not being interested in making new discoveries are nonsensical and only s