I just don’t trust Dr. Hossenfelder after her horrendous trans critical and pro capitalism videos.
She’s not an energy expert, nor a biologist, medical doctor, or economist. Like all science communicators, she needs to stick to her expertise and not water down her credibility with these videos.
Let the experts in their field talk about their own fields. She is just as much of an expert as Joe Rogan when it comes to this stuff.
I don’t know who this is, but good journalists don’t really need to be experts in the field they are covering. This is a very rare thing, but it happens.
For instance, the people at the podcast ScienceVs cover many things very well. I don’t think the host even has an advanced degree. There is at least one PhD on staff.
She is not a journalist, she is a physicist. Even in physics her takes are not that impressive. What she has been pushing for years is something like “the mainstream theoretical physics is wrong because I want it to be, so we should stop encouraging it by not making their experiments and start doing small less costly experiments”. The problem being there are rarely any ideas for any such things.
I used to be subscribed to her until that came out. It was disappointing how she refused to engage or acknowledge the excellent rebuttal videos made in response. I expected more from someone who claims to value objective science.
Ironically, she released a video only a few hours ago describing how she was unable to get a job at a research institution because she wouldn’t participate in enriching the headmaster who made everyone write text books for him to sell to other students, where she then realized that the research institution was not interested in discovering knowledge, but in making money.
It was corrupted by capitalism and the profit motive, yet cannot see how that is the root cause that resulted in her having to turn to becoming a science youtuber to make ends meet.
Whenever she makes a video about something I know about it’s chock a block with misunderstandings on her part. Now my field is much different, so that’s not really too surprising.
What I find detestable though is that she will look into the camera, say something fucking stupid, and say it with a straight face and a degree of confidence that misleads other.
I’m struggling to get a grasp on the numbers she’s citing for efficiency, almost to the point that I began questioning if there was an agenda here.
And she is doing the same thing most influencers are around this tech, being one-dimensional. Take hydrogen, the optimum scale is neither national energy storage, nor single person vehicles. But if you look at more of a city block level, where the excess heat can be used for hot water instead of fossils/electricity, efficiency ramps up!
