For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.). The Wall Street Journal has a new article entitled The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ with summary:
Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.
If you replaced “Streamers” by “Sabine Hossenfelder” this would be reasonably accurate, and a serious discussion of this would have been interesting and worthwhile. Instead, the article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.
I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.
Maybe some day our information environment will become healthy again, but for now I’m not sure what to do about this. Be aware that if you’re trying to understand the state of fundamental theoretical physics, watching Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan, Professor Dave, etc. podcasts is just going to fill your mind with crap. Reading articles about these podcasts is worse. If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts. In general, reading books is a good idea (I can also recommend this one).
Update: John Baez comments here:
This quagmire is getting bigger. It’s another part of what William Gibson recently called the Singularity of Stupid.
Update: If you want more drama, Sabine Hossenfelder here explains how, after she described someone’s research as “bullshit”, that person went to one place where she has an official (but unpaid) affiliation (the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) and convinced them to fire her. Anyway, that’s her story, maybe there’s more to it, but it’s highly plausible. Knowing Sabine and the sort of work she criticizes, I have no doubt that the research really was bullshit. If there really was someone going to the Munich Center to do this, it would be interesting to know who it was.
I (unusually) watched the whole video, and everything she said seemed to me completely sensible. Those who have swallowed the story that she’s an unethical deranged conspiracy theorist might want to instead look into the ethics of those who disagree with her.
Einekleine I think you have misunderstood what I wrote-I never said other areas of science are not in need of reform; I said many other areas of science are thriving. Both can be true. If you look at what I wrote yesterday I mentioned that this is true in fact in biomedical research-where we have had great recent breakthroughs side by side with damaging fraud. There is definitely an incentives problem in the way funding works-and this is not new, Phil Anderson wrote about it 3 decades ago. The question is should that be left to YouTube consensus and the like. You can argue that that is better than the status quo. I’d argue there is a good chance what you will get via this avenue will be worse.
Overall I liked the WSJ article, but I agree with the criticisms from some here that it doesn’t represent well the scientific debates involved, and a reader would not come away understanding that there are reasonable (non-conspiracy) criticisms to make.
However I’m very confused by Peter’s defense of Weinstein here — I don’t understand at all why it should matter whether Weinstein really believes the lunatic conspiracies he talks about, or whether he brings them up in private conversations. (Weinstein is the one to blame for the ‘stupid irrelevant crap’ of connecting Epstein with theoretical physics, not Kagan-Kans.)
Rollil,
I’m not defending Weinstein’s stupid irrelevant crap about UFOs and Epstein. I am pointing out that it is completely irrelevant, no one takes it seriously. Kagan-Kans and the WSJ should not have published an article making some dumb internet crap the centerpiece of an argument about criticism of problems of fundamental theoretical physics being “conspiracy physics”.
If one really wanted to cover this stuff, one could write a very interesting article about Eric Weinstein, or an equally interesting but very different article about Sabine Hossenfelder. Trying to meld them together though with some dumb thing about Jeffrey Epstein is a kind of journalism I don’t think we need.
Peter,
I’d argue that one such “very interesting article about Eric Weinstein” is this recent blog post by Timothy Nguyen*, who has been fighting his own “Not Even Wrong” battle against Eric Weinstein’s Geometric Unity (GU) for a few years now.
“Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility”
https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-weinstein-sabine-hossenfelder-and-a-crisis-of-credibility/
It’s a fascinating story that involves a number of people mentioned in the WSJ article, including Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, Curt Jaimungal, and Scott Aaronson.
The “tl;dr” is that Nguyen and a co-author wrote a paper pointing out a number of flaws in GU, Weinstein refuses to address them in Mochizuki-like fashion**, and there is now a strange push to promote Weinstein’s GU via YouTube by the likes of Brian Keating, Curt Jaimungal, and Sabine Hossenfelder.
*Nguyen has a PhD in mathematics from MIT and did several years of post-doctoral research on mathematical problems underlying quantum field theory. So, I’d say, someone who has an appropriate technical background.
**Weinstein refuses on the basis that Nguyen’s co-author uses a pseudonym.
I don’t think this article is about whether or not criticisms of theoretical physics are “conspiracy physics.” I think it’s about how the terrain of conspiracy theorizing has come to include theoretical physics. Eric Weinstein is an obvious part of that story, including his bizarre comments about Epstein. It’s hard to judge the impact of his commentary, but he’s by no means a marginal figure, being closely affiliated with guys like Joe Rogan and Peter Thiel.
If I were to view the article instead as being about criticisms of string theory and related physics, I would agree with you that it’s a total journalistic failure. As it stands, the worst I would say is that it could/should have been more tightly written to prevent the possibility of being misread like that.
GS,
Sure, that’s one part of the Eric Weinstein story. But, again, it’s just internet drama, with no relation to what’s actually going on in this scientific area. If he wanted to write about “grifters” who actually have had a significant impact on the field, there’s a long story about the string theory hype machine the author of the WSJ piece might have wanted to look into instead.
Rollil,
> If I were to view the article instead as being about criticisms of string theory and related physics, I would agree with you that it’s a total journalistic failure.
That seems to be the view that Peter and John Baez took, which I don’t think is an unreasonable view to take, because I had the same view initially.
> I don’t think this article is about whether or not criticisms of theoretical physics are “conspiracy physics.” I think it’s about how the terrain of conspiracy theorizing has come to include theoretical physics.
That’s a generous interpretation, because the only conspiracy theory being presented in the article is Weinstein’s, but the article also included, as examples of “conspiracy physics”, the following:
– Criticism of string theory: “‘String theory is not dead, it’s undead, and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,’ said Hossenfelder.”
– Criticism of the holographic principle: “Ironically, the holographic principle is a favorite target of online conspiracy physicists, who attack it as not real science—untestable, impractical and simply too out there.”
These are positions that I don’t think would be out of place here.
There is also the usual string hype, presumably inserted for “balance”, and I apologise for quoting the entire paragraph, but it seems some people missed this:
“Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn’t right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.”
> Eric Weinstein is an obvious part of that story, including his bizarre comments about Epstein.
I think both you and Peter are discounting the importance of the appearance of Epstein for Kagan-Kans. It’s like the equivalent of finding something that could be published in a top journal. Here’s what he said in his response to Peter (https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15206&cpage=1#comment-252402):
“Tens of millions of people in high and low places take everything about Epstein seriously. […] The entrance of Epstein into the subject is what clinched it for me.”
This was in reply to Peter’s comment, which included a description of a tweet by Kagan-Kans:
“If you want to understand why I’m being rather hostile, I note that at X you write “Last year I started noticing a stream of videos on YouTube proclaiming ‘the crisis in physics’ and so on. Crisis? What was that? The results are here” advertising your article arguing about ‘conspiracy physics’.”
What I gathered from this is that Kagan-Kans had stumbled on videos talking about the crisis in physics and figured that it might be an interesting story, but that it was only after the DOAC guy put out his Weinstein interview with the timely clickbaity headline mentioning Epstein that Kagan-Kans realised that he had something he could pitch to WSJ. Because the WSJ has been obsessed with Epstein these past few months, having run two stories about the topic in July (shortly after the DOAC podcast was released) and this month.
> As it stands, the worst I would say is that it could/should have been more tightly written to prevent the possibility of being misread like that.
Why would he? As it is, the Epstein angle is very slender, which is why the article wasn’t as tightly written as it could have. Furthermore, not only does he now have a shiny WSJ writing credit in his portfolio, but also more engagement than he’d expected: in his reply to Peter, he wryly noted that “I acknowledge that dealing with a very large audience is surely a difficult and distorting task that I have never had to deal with”. Being misread is a feature, not a bug, in the current media landscape.
Einekleine,
In terms of its intrinsic interest, I agree with Peter that what Weinstein is talking about is dumb internet drama, not worth spending a moment’s thought on. It is somewhat interesting, but by now not very novel, that somebody who babbles like Time Cube has the platform of some of the biggest podcasts and billionaires in the world. And it’s funny to me as a mathematician that theoretical physics and mathematics are central to this person’s babble. What I think makes it worth spending ink on is that such a person is being increasingly propped up by a high-profile internet culture of science popularizers/influencers/professionals like Hossenfelder, Curt Jaimungal, Brian Keating, and Avi Loeb.
I don’t think it says anything about the state of theoretical physics or about criticism of string theory, and I fully agree that Kagan-Kans’ article could have made that clearer. But, as said above, I think it’s very interesting, and I was glad to read this article, since I wasn’t previously fully aware of the extent of it, such as Weinstein’s invocations of Epstein. In fact I wish it was even more detailed — it’s clear that there’s much more that could be said.
By the way — for many years I only knew Weinstein as an ordinary occasional commenter on this very blog, and in the last ten years or so I’d also seen that he’d made an unsuccessful attempt to do physics research. For anyone else in that position, I’d really encourage you to go and watch Weinstein’s recent interviews on youtube since becoming a known public figure, like on the podcasts Chris Williamson and Diary of a CEO. The content and style of what he says are deeply abnormal; it would be hard to be aware of it without having seen it.
Hi Kevin Driscoll,
Actually, in my view 2D conformal field theory is precisely an example of (mostly) physicists’ intuition without proper mathematical underpinnings that produced an astonishing framework with many applications: (e.g.)
(1) fusion and braiding rules and a big part of the intellectual framework that lead to Moore and Read’s description of the candidate non-abelian anyon 5/2 FQHE state, as well as much of Kitaev’s work.
(2) 2D CFT gives a “holographic” encoding of topological field theory
(3) Non-abelian bosonization, which gives exact solutions to the low-energy physics of the two-channel Kondo problem, critical spin chains, the statistics of certain topologically protected 2D surface states in the presence of disorder, etc.
The postulated OPE is the workhorse, and allows the exact calculation of e.g. the crossing formula for percolation (Cardy). Cardy’s work with Calabrese also allowed explicit calculations of entanglement entropy, both in the ground state of the CFT, at finite temperature, and following a quantum quench.
It’s also an example (which Peter touches on in his book iirc) of a physicists’ technology that was a direct offshoot of string theory. Polyakov wanted to solve the 4D string in the original strong-force context, and he showed that this appeared equivalent to solving Liouville CFT. Instead of doing that, BPZ invented their framework fusing the representation theory of the Virasoro algebra with the OPE.
I’d still love to understand how BPZ learned/understood the representation theory of the Virasoro algebra. I know the algebra itself was known since the early days of dual models, but I don’t know when Kac worked out the Kac formula that was crucial to the discovery of the minimal models.
If anything, from my (cond-mat) perspective, high-energy theory lost much of its sheen when the field moved on to holography. Not because strings has proven a viable theory of our universe, but because the mathematical offshoots were deep and surprisingly useful.
I find the “coincidence” of the poorly researched and incorrectly stated WSJ’s remarks about Sabine, followed by someone having her dismissed from Munich University, extremely disturbing. Wasn’t the WSJ meant to be a bastion of liberal and rational thinking? Isn’t it, in the current “Germany 1933-like” global climate, irresponsible to accuse a well-known scientist of being a conspiracy theorist, when she is simply highlighting a recognised and serious issue in certain areas of contemporary research?
Hi Peter, anything you can give us about how your Wick rotation is going? We all loved your Nov 2023 paper but could you maybe ‘throw us a bone’?
Thanks!
tripitaka,
Working on that right now, hopefully next blog posting, soon….
Luca Signorelli,
The WSJ has never been a bastion of liberal/rational thinking. The editorials/opinion pieces have always been very right wing, definitely not liberal and often not rational, traditionally of a conventional Republican business-oriented sort. It has been owned by Rupert Murdoch for a long time now. At some point long ago he decided that he was going to use his power to support Trump, and since then the WSJ and Fox News have been very much tools used to bring us the Fascism we live with today.
What’s more interesting about the WSJ is that it has had a firm policy of keeping separate the editorial page propaganda/lies and the reporting in the rest of the paper, which generally has been of high quality. Serious business people who have a lot of money riding on understanding accurately what is happening in the world want the propaganda and the reporting kept separate.
A somewhat strange situation that Hossenfelder has gotten in trouble by being painted as a MAGA tool, then the WSJ (a partial MAGA tool) is joining in the attack. Odd.
Matthew Foster,
BPZ should have gotten their input from “Invariant skew-symmetric differential operators on the line and Verma modules over the Virasoro algebra” by Feigin and Fuks, published in 1982 in Funct. Anal. Appl. IIRC, they determined the parameters where the Verma module has a singular vector. There is a continuum of parameter values which admit one singular vector, but only a discrete set where those curves cross and there are two singular vectors at the same time. Friedan-Qiu-Shenker then determined for which of those values the factor module is unitary: the discrete unitary series.
I read the Feigin-Fuks paper a decade later, and could reproduce their result after recognizing their construction as a fermionic Fock space. But that is lost in the haze of history now.
>>”Knowing Sabine and the sort of work she criticizes, I have no doubt that the research really was bullshit.”
I think you should have at least some doubt. In her YouTube videos, she claims that all research is “bullshit” to some degree. She assigns every paper she discusses a rating on her “bullshit meter” and it is rare that she gives anything a rating below 5/10. Even pure experimental results get 1/10 or 2/10. Her reasoning in today’s YouTube video (This “Naked” Black Hole Shouldn’t Exist) is typical:
“I give this paper a 5 out of 10 on the bullshit meter because I suspect that this discovery will be questioned by other astrophysicists. Even if the data hold up, they will come up with some explanations that will fit with the dark matter story …”
The paper that she is giving 5 out of 10 on the bullshit meter is this astrophysics preprint involving 40 authors across 30 institutions that presents an observational result that appears to defy current leading models.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
Her reasoning for declaring it 5 out of 10 bullshit appears to be that she thinks that the data will either not hold up under future observations, or that other researchers will be able to explain the data with existing models. By this reasoning, most physics research, even when done entirely correctly and following the scientific method, could be labelled 5 out of 10 bullshit. Ultimately, I think that’s the message that her audience comes away with.
>>”Those who have swallowed the story that she’s an unethical deranged conspiracy theorist might want to instead look into the ethics of those who disagree with her.”
I don’t think that she is a deranged conspiracy theorist*, but someone who does think so is not going to be swayed by a video where she claims without evidence that people are conspiring against her.
*I think she is right about most things, wrong about some things, and often irresponsible in how she communicates (for financial gain) to an increasingly anti-science lay audience. And she seems to have a blind spot (intentional or not) for Eric Weinstein, who I believe to be a grifter.
GS,
She puts out a huge amount of material on a wide variety of topics. I’ve only looked at a small fraction of it, am sure anyone can find things to criticize. I can point to a couple things where I think she’s getting things wrong, but on the whole it seems to me that what you’re getting is an intelligent and well-informed view. It’s often being expressed in a very forceful and impolitic manner.
All,
I’m getting tired of general Sabine discussions. You can find something she said or did to make whatever point you want and it gets tiresome. I also am cutting off people who want to discuss very general issues in scientific research. Too big a topic, and nothing new.
The one thing I would be curious about is if people know what the specific “bullshit” paper was, and what really happened at Munich. Lots of people are unhappy with her for lots of different reasons. Instead of discussing all those, it’s a bit interesting to know which of the reasons is enough to get people at an institution to cut affiliation with you.
Rollil,
> it’s funny to me as a mathematician that theoretical physics and mathematics are central to this person’s babble.
> for many years I only knew Weinstein as an ordinary occasional commenter on this very blog, and in the last ten years or so I’d also seen that he’d made an unsuccessful attempt to do physics research.
Weinstein received a PhD in mathematical physics in 1992 with a thesis on the “Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills equations across the eighth dimension” (https://www.proquest.com/openview/85ed5ce100000a765c9b08155af598d7/1), written under the supervision of Raoul Bott.
Many people can be partial to their thesis topic and its adjacent fields, and would often want to indulge in thinking about it again, especially if they’ve spent some time away from academia.
> What I think makes it worth spending ink on is that such a person is being increasingly propped up by a high-profile internet culture of science popularizers/influencers/professionals like Hossenfelder, Curt Jaimungal, Brian Keating, and Avi Loeb.
Saying he’s being propped up by these people is funny to me, because Hossenfelder was very critical of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity in that video, lumping it together with all the stuff that she’s criticised, and Jaimungal is a newcomer to the podcast world, so it would seem more likely that Weinstein is the one propping him up.
> For anyone else in that position, I’d really encourage you to go and watch Weinstein’s recent interviews on youtube since becoming a known public figure […] The content and style of what he says are deeply abnormal; it would be hard to be aware of it without having seen it.
He has been a known public figure for quite some time. In 2018, Bari Weiss wrote a NYT article that featured Weinstein and many others from the “intellectual dark web”, a term that was coined by Weinstein: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html.
Peter,
> tripitaka,
> Working on that right now, hopefully next blog posting, soon….
Go, Peter, go!
Einekleine (and All),
Also getting tired of Eric Weinstein discussions. Enough, otherwise this blog just becomes part of the problem, encouraging endless discussion of internet drama and whether certain personalities are “good” or “bad”. The world doesn’t need more of this.
People here have said both “Interestingly John Baez is supporting the WSJ article” and also that I seem to have considered it a “total journalistic failure.” I’m glad people still care a bit about what I think, but I was merely pointing people to a free version of the WSJ article and giving them a little clue about what to expect from it: the quagmire is spreading. I didn’t want to say anything more definite, because I knew I would regret it. Like a black hole, the Singularity of Stupid has a tendency to swallow anyone who comes too close to it, no matter what they say or do.
Maybe 20 years ago, the popularization of high energy physics was dominated by big promises from string theorists. These days it is dominated by a new group of insiders (largely 70 year old guys), who rose up by pushing the old narrative down. But they’re still rehashing the same debates, while actual new progress gets ignored.
In the past two decades, LIGO went from being a distant dream to regularly detecting events from halfway across the universe. Cosmology became a precision science which gives us information about extremely high energy scales. We detected almost every way neutrinos can oscillate, and are well on our way to nailing down the last parameter in the neutrino mixing matrix. Every kind of precision measurement (including atomic clocks, g-2 experiments, EDM searches) got orders of magnitude better. Now many of them are hitting the limits imposed by quantum mechanics, and designing quantum metrology techniques to go even further. I’m a bit of a machine learning skeptic, but it’s certainly true that new algorithms have made some experiments significantly more powerful. Even if you restrict to collider physics, the Higgs went from conjecture to having numerous properties carefully measured; simultaneously, experimentalists got much better at controlling and accelerating beams, which could enable new kinds of colliders which do more with lower cost. How often does one hear about this progress from people like Weinstein or Wolfram?
There is even an entire tribe of theorists dedicated to figuring out what consequences these advances might have for fundamental physics. We are called “phenomenologists”, and we account for something like 1/3 of all high energy theorists, but most people don’t even know we exist. When I talk to a smart nonphysicist who follows Weinstein, Wolfram, or Woit, they always think I must be a string theorist who hates experiments. And after correcting them once, they always think I must be still looking for supersymmetry at the LHC, even though this accounts for less than 1% of phenomenology papers these days. The picture people get of the field is decades out of date, because our new popularizers only want to repeat old arguments.
(To her credit, Sabine does engage with newer work, but only superficially. She’s on the treadmill of putting out a video every day, which realistically means she quickly skims a paper from an unfamiliar field, comes up with some zingers to make fun of it, and assigns it a score from 0 to 10 on her “bullshit meter”, to the delight of her fans. Of course, it’s easy to do this to literally any paper in any field, healthy or not, so all Sabine is doing is conveying a negative vibe about science in general. When I run into her fans, they often believe all of science is a waste of time.)
When I was younger, I thought this was funny. Now I think it’s dangerous. Both the old insiders and the new make the public expect that we should have confirmed a theory of everything by now. The fact that we haven’t achieved this impossible goal makes the public think physics is impotent or fraudulent, and that it’s time to turn out the lights.
Kevin Zhou,
“a new group of insiders … who rose up by pushing the old narrative down”
I thought I was reasonably conversant with the fashions in high energy physics, and yet I can’t quite figure out who or what this might refer to.
I’m not a scientist, just an interested lay person who has had a life long curiosity and desire to understand things. I fully understand that this is entirely different from the realities of being an actual scientist. But because I lack any direct experience of doing science or any connection with actual scientists, I’m very much reliant on popular accounts and even Youtubers. Many years ago I subscribed to Scientific American and New Scientist. As the years passed, I gradually began to get this nagging sense something was not right. Eventually I figured out what it was: every single edition appeared to feature the announcement of a paradigm breaking new theory of everything that tidied up all the loose ends – but none of these breakthroughs were ever heard of again despite the breathless prose of their announcements. It became too much and I unsubscribed. I know I’m talking about journalism and not real science, but I make the assumption that these stories are being fed in to the journos by actual scientists. There’s only so long that the community can cry wolf like this before you start to feel it’s a scam. The problem is that all that real science that is going on is not seen by people like me; what I get to see is the endless hype, the science fiction that leads nowhere. This can’t go on forever before the well is poisoned. Whatever the complaints about the likes of Peter, Lee and Sabine, whatever the flaws in their methods and perhaps their motivations, they are simply pointing out the obvious facts that that the community is very busy denying. You can’t continue making hyped unrealistic claims without something breaking. Trust.
Hi Kevin Zhou
To be fair, the strings program caught the public attention that it did because it is (or was) a grand-sweeping idea, promising not just unification but a completely different view of our universe. It would have been nice if back in the day the popularizers of the early 21st century made clear the already severe obstacles associated with the landscape, as well as the apparent difficulties of doing strings on de Sitter space. Emphasizing those rather technical caveats though would have been harder to articulate (and less lucrative).
In my field of condensed matter physics, the default is that the public doesn’t know/care/understand our work, despite the fact that it underlies all modern electronic technology. Only the most inspiring, but often speculative (with respect to experimental viability) ideas reach the public such as topological quantum computation.*
This too, though, is understandable. I don’t necessarily expect the public to care about progress in superconducting moire graphene at what are objectively quite low temperatures, no more so than I would expect them to get excited about the details of the neutrino mixing matrix. It’s always a tension between exciting ideas and the reality of slow, real progress in the lab.
* There was that weird summer of floating rocks in the wake of LK-99. In that case the hype should probably be filtered through the lens of the post-pandemic hangover…
As a meta comment on this thread, I would like to point out that despite their differences, Peter and the author of the WSJ article share a similar thinking style. Namely,
(i) The author ignores any problems that may exist in fundamental physics. Therefore, by reading his article, one gets the impression that the “conspiracy theorists of physics” cannot possibly think what they think, they must do it only to maximize audience.
(ii) Peter thinks along similar lines on the topic of Eric Weinstein and conspiracy theories: he is a provocateur, cannot really think any of this, only does it to maximize his audience.
I am not going to discuss here the factual basis (or lack thereof) of any particular conspiracy theory. For one thing, Peter has made it clear (for understandable reasons) that he doesn’t want this kind of discussion on his blog. Nevertheless, I hope it’s OK to point out that beyond the (very real) disagreements, there is this interesting parallel in your thinking styles.
Popular physics YouTuber Angela Collier just released a video on this article. Link: https://youtu.be/miJbW3i9qQc
David Millier wrote:
Good. It’s sad how these magazines went downhill – when I was kid, in the 1970s, you could get reliable news from them.
Yes, but there’s a lot of good science being done too, and while those scientists too are trying to communicate their work, the journalists seem to have decided – or perhaps the right word is “discovered” – that sensationalism verging on pseudoscience is more attention-grabbing than good science. And then of course a crop of people emerged who exploit that, by feeding the journalists sensationalistic stuff.
You have to look in the right places. There are lots of good magazines, books, blogs and YouTube channels explaining science clearly and accurately… and also, of course, a lot of bad ones that retail sensationalism. It sounds like you’ve developed a nose that can detect bullshit, which is good, but then you need to seek out stuff that smells better. There’s no shortage of it; a bunch of us here could start listing sources, if you want.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/opinion/manosphere-science-young-men.html
A relevant and disturbing article.