{"id":32311,"date":"2025-02-16T05:00:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T10:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=32311"},"modified":"2025-02-15T17:15:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T22:15:29","slug":"fake-science-exposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/16\/fake-science-exposed\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake Science Exposed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.\u00a0 She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.\u00a0 For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.\u00a0 Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.\u00a0 I don\u2019t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I was asked to keep this confidential\" width=\"783\" height=\"440\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/shFUDPqVmTg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).\u00a0 In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of \u201cresearch\u201d done by academic physicists is worthless.\u00a0 But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, because they are \u201cscientists\u201d they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.\u00a0 Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.<\/p>\n<p>In my opinion she\u2019s absolutely correct.\u00a0 And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.\u00a0 And why is this?\u00a0 Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.\u00a0 Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.\u00a0 But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.\u00a0 A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.\u00a0 Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.\u00a0 If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.<\/p>\n<p>And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.\u00a0 Well, if Musk\u2019s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.\u00a0 I think they\u2019ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.<\/p>\n<p>During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to \u201cwin\u201d the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.\u00a0 Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.\u00a0 Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who\u2019ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.\u00a0 Likewise, the United States government shouldn\u2019t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don\u2019t provide value to some worthwhile project.\u00a0 Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.<\/p>\n<p>Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.\u00a0 But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.\u00a0 Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.\u00a0 I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.\u00a0 That will be a good start.\u00a0 It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.\u00a0 She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.\u00a0 For the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,712,3545],"tags":[4805,2517,713,3876,165],"class_list":["post-32311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-fake-science","category-science","tag-doge","tag-elon-musk","tag-fake-science","tag-sabine-hossenfelder","tag-science"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO 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