Comment on Sabine Hossenfelder Has Started Openly Defending Proven Grifters
AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world 1 day agoIn a weird way, I appreciate her. I’m a scientist who has been drifting ever closer to science communication. I enjoy situations where I’m able to be in the role of a scientist who is able to “translate” dense scientific ideas so that other people can share in my enthusiasm. I feel pretty capable at situating my perspective within the wider sciences and making it clear when I’m talking about cool science stuff outside of my field. However, the more that I find myself nerding out in this manner, the more nervous I feel about being opinionated on non-science things; being a scientist gives me a weird kind of epistemic privilege because of how science is disproportionately valued by society, and I don’t want to inappropriately exploit that (even unintentionally). However, it’s not reasonable to expect scientists to just not hold and/or share their opinions on stuff like politics or history.
I concluded that I just need to make sure I continue to do what I already do when I (a biochemist) talk about physics stuff adjacent to my stuff — just to a much greater degree. Sabine Hossenfelder is a great example of what not to do in this respect. I don’t believe that people should be forced to “stay in their lane”, but if you’re going to go wading into waters that are not your own, you gotta stay humble.
AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 20 hours ago
Yes. And I can even sympathise with that being hard. It’s genuinely hard to do so and takes work and emotional stress, people potentially dogpiling on you from both sides doesn’t help either. But it sadly is the only way to arrive at something approximating truth. Influencer culture, atomised society and increasing isolation and social media in the context of a “presenting the most interesting you” culture sadly make this even harder. And even without that, there is always, and will always be, the danger of getting caught up in defending a point that is just wrong, because our psyche as humans latched onto it for reasons of identity/ego preservation or otherwise emotional wellbeing. Discourse culture ideally has to account for that with respectful arguing in good faith, even when the other side is wrong. Of course, that is an ideal that cannot always be reached, especially with more fuzzy, non-empirically provable points, or discourse that has very direct and tangible effects on our lives (politics, mainly, which is one reason it can be so draining).
Your perspective is valid as your perspective in the discourse, as long as it can be viewed as authoritative where you can rightfully claim you have knowledge and expertise (and even then, of course, it can be contradicted with proper arguments or newly emerging facts), as well as an outsider estimate where you just have an educated guess. And the latter isn’t worthless, but should be distinguished from more confident takes for the sake of discourse. Even just vibes-based perspectives are valid as a part of a discourse, but they have to clearly be able to be put into context and qualified, and have to stomach being superseded.