Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.

But nothing you said invalidates what they said.

If you do research it becomes pretty apparent that a high number papers are not great. There's varying issues, but a big one is that the funding model incentivises pumping out papers which are often of low quality, researching whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment

Literally everyone I've ever talked to in research as a frank conversation knows that this is a massive problem, but nobody wants to talk about it publicly. Research funding is already completely screwed as it is, and researchers are incredibly aware of how fragile their livelihoods are

Its clearly leading to a big reduction in the quality of the literature. I went on a replication spree recently and found that a pretty decent chunk of the field I was working in was completely unreplicable by me, with a few papers that I strongly suspect 'massaged' their results for various reasons

I wish someone would talk about this who wasn't also in bed with right wing grifters, and was actually credible. We need someone more like ben goldacre for physics

Sabine's most interesting content is the paper reviews, and where she sticks to actually examining the evidence - but it makes up a tiny fraction of what she produces these days, and her support for some truly grim figures is just gross

I don't think you're describing "the" problem with Sabine. She's not what you want her to be but that's a you problem. You're describing your particular problem with Sabine.

I appreciate that she's doing a lot to bring attention to the real issue despite your claim that she is supporting grim figures. I know about the problem because of her work, but I have no idea who Ben goldacre is.

Also no idea what you mean by supporting grim figures. I checked to see if she has come out in support of Jeffrey Epstein or something crazy like that, but no.

Bro she blurbed "The War on Science," a book stuffed with racists and sex pests complaining that they lost their jobs for falling in love with their graduate students, writing them love poetry on tumblr, and then kicking them out of their research group because they could stand to be near them. Or for saying that they "don't shy away from the word superior" when discussing white people being better at running societies and lying about the GPAs of black students. Or for taking joking photographs with human remains.

And yes, the authors of the book include people who provided support in the legal defense of jeffrey epstein.

And its not something that's just a 'you' problem - if you want the actual underlying issues in physics to be fixed, its a massive issue that the spokesperson for fixing those problem currently may be a bigot, or at the very least endorses bigots and sex pests. Beyond just being generally completely unacceptable, it allows everyone to completely dismiss whatever is being said very easily

For the other poster, ben goldacre is someone that's become very well known for making effectively the same points as sabine, but within the pharmaceutical industry. They sat down and basically wrote for decades about how the testing was absolutely broken, multiple books, a column, and producing lots of work on how broken studies were in medicine and talking to anyone that would listen - and as a result, they were actual able to enact effective change. It was a huge win for evidence based science!

Sabine is not someone who can achieve that in physics - her videos would be much more effective if they contained actionable content and concrete analyses of the issues. I'd have a tonne of respect for her if what she did was publish papers or videos showing the degree to which the literature was broken, analysing funding, conducting interviews (even if anonymous) with researchers, looking through examples of bad papers and explaining the problems to a lay audience. Producing a mixture of for-scientist and for-lay person material to break the figures down, in a way that produces a compelling argument

Instead we at best get specific examples plucked out of the air. I know she isn't massively overgeneralising the issue from my own personal experience, but she presents a terribly uncompelling argument as to why there are problems. Where's the data? Why are you writing book blurbs for sex offenders instead of writing papers?

That's why I've come around increasingly to the idea that she's a grifter, even though I used to enjoy her content (before it went out of the window) and think that she does likely genuinely care about the underlying problem to some degree. Its closer to ragebait than anything that feels productive now unfortunately. I don't think its even necessarily on purpose on her end - the right wing has a way of sucking in anyone on the fringes and giving them a home even without them knowing, but also why give her the benefit of the doubt?

This is not very persuasive.

To a large degree if you're trying to successfully trying to push for change, it really matters that the person pushing for it is credible. Someone like ben goldacre is able to credibly make a strong push for change within medicine because they've maintained credibility, someone like sabine makes the situation worse because they've chucked it away

Sabine's has a day job as a Youtuber, and she makes her videos from that perspective. She speaks her mind, makes a decent living, and educates some science nerds on the way. Seems pretty nice.

From the perspective of accomplishing institutional change in the academic physics world, this is does nothing. The institutional powers don't react at all to a complaining influencer with an Einstein doll.

And I suspect she's perfectly fine with that. Overturning the Physics establishment is a near impossible task. I would leave that for those mad enough to try.

I failed to catch the clue, btw.

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run says the Confederate name was "First Manassas" (I might be misremembering exactly what this book I read as a child said). Also I'm pretty sure it was specifically "Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All" that this mystery appeared in. If someone has a copy of the book or cares to dig it up, they could confirm my memory.

I don't understand why not. People pay for quality all the time, and often they're begging to pay for quality, it's just not an option. Of course, it depends on how much more quality is being offered, but it sounds like a significant amount here.

Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.

Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.

I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.

Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.

It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.

Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.

Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.