Sabine Hossenfelder cast herself out from academia and took a recent turn to monetizing laundering peoples vague understanding string theory is a waste of time (cannot be proven empirically) into academia is doing fake work and if they'd apologize and own up to it, maybe we would trust them again.
Most famously, through a bizarrely written letter from an anonymous whistleblower pleading that she not topple the academy, as it would ruin the lives of thousands of academics making up things to get grant money to survive.
Ran my comment + your reply through AI and asked it to respond to you, as I do want to help. Let me know if there's other instructions I can give it, it may have taken your variable ask too literally? :(
Here's its output:
Sabine Hossenfelder, after distancing herself from academia, has recently pivoted to monetizing a specific narrative:
Let’s define Premise A as “String theory is a waste of time because it cannot be empirically proven.”
She generalizes from Premise A to a broader Claim B: “Academia, more broadly, is producing fake work.”
Her argument seems to imply that:
If academia were to publicly acknowledge this, or apologize for promoting unverifiable theories, then the public might begin to trust it again.
This general thrust reached a kind of crescendo in one of her more notorious moments:
— An oddly written letter, allegedly from a whistleblower within academia, essentially begging her not to “bring down the system.”
The letter’s rationale? That dismantling the status quo would destroy the livelihoods of thousands of academics who, according to the letter, are fabricating just enough plausible-sounding work to secure grants and stay afloat.
Pretty valuable to have people who see A to be true, have presumably seen some of B to be true too (trivial to see with the many replication crises) - and then to do their best to disseminate that to the general public so change can be made. I see no problem there, and I'd hate for the case where people were afraid to make content covering it because they were waiting for years for huge studies (which could also be poorly done) to 'prove' it.
Sabine is an asshole. Doesn't mean she is wrong, and I appreciate when she reads some paper that has made a bunch of headlines to figure out if they're full of crap or not (spoiler alert: the answer is usually yes), but while she can identify the problem she's not part of the solution. Her divorce from academia means she has little power to affect change for the better given how the incentives are currently aligned. She can make a lot of noise, but the people actually pulling the levers have rigged the system in their favor enough to not care.
So she is an arsehole for exposing bullshit? I don't see the problem. I think people take issue with her because of her confrontational persona.
>while she can identify the problem she's not part of the solution
Does she have to be, in principle?
> Her divorce from academia means she has little power to affect change for the better given how the incentives are currently aligned.
Wouldn't be so sure about that. She is getting more public exposure than most academic would in their lifetime. More importantly, exposure to audience _outside_ of academia. Voters. Her effort in creating public awareness has certainly stirred the nest in some academic circles.
There have been countless academics who have discussed this topic, occasionally not behind closed doors. Regardless, it’s certainly my observation as well.
Countless academics have leveled targeted criticisms at various practices and gone on to back those up. They are targeted, actionable objections; not vague blanket dismissals.
I’m not the one you were referring to, but I have similar experiences. I’m living in Germany, and most bigger companies here have such issues. I also worked for companies in Netherlands and Island, so I assume it’s an European, if not global problem.
No one is concerned about keeping people busy. It’s a systemic problem. And there are multiple reasons for it. One reason is that the bigger a company grows, the more hierarchy is necessary. But increasing hierarchy will lead to people doing the work are not the people that are most responsible for it. So we have people that should do the work but they aren’t too motivated because they are not responsible enough - they are too low in hierarchy level. And we have people that are responsible but don’t do the work. They delegate. If something goes wrong or takes too long, they will have enough time and skill to find an excuse.
Another issue is that you need more people to get specific things done. At some point in time these things have been done, and you actually don’t need the amount of people anymore. But you can’t quit them because of worker’s laws. You maybe even don’t want to quit them because you think you still need them. People, of course, tend to find reasons why their own work is important. And they will communicate that. And the chance is good you’ll believe that and don’t question it enough.
There are more reasons for that. But it’s a fact that in many, many companies the economical results of a lot of employees is almost zero. If you don’t believe this, just google the biggest companies in Germany, pick one, apply for an office job and start to work there. It won’t take a month until you’ll find out. Btw. I don’t want to criticize the situation too much. Probably it’s good that people are employed, even if they don’t work efficiently. Otherwise the unemployment rate would be much higher. Then again, Germany‘s economy is flatlining and a crash is not unlikely.
An apt analogy. Circling back to scientific research, I'm sure an investigator would be more than happy not to spend the time, effort, and grant money on a project that wasn't going to produce worthwhile results. If only we could know in advance without doing the work.
That does not, of course, mean that "most research being produced isn't really research, just people keeping busy" or whatever other nonsense an uninformed outsider feels like spewing.
Workers generally like jobs where the workload is low. Managers gain status by having bigger teams, whether they need the extra people or not. Even investors often prefer hiring (a sign of growth) to layoffs, and executives are mostly concerned with pleasing investors.
Even well run tech companies with money to burn hired more people than they needed.
Companies can lay off thousands of employees and not have it affect growth, profits or, really, the workload of remaining employees. How could that be possible if everyone's work is so crucial?
Everyone (eh, most) believes their work is crucial.
There are cognitive biases like the self-serving bias, or the IKEA effect, which leads individuals to overvalue their own contributions, as well as subjective importance derived from their immediate impact and daily responsibilities. And of course limited visibility into the broader organizational priorities often obscures how different roles contribute to overall growth and success.
The people doing the hiring are typically not the people concerned about profits at medium and large sized companies. Sure someone has to approve the headcount numbers, but realistically this is an extremely flawed process.
The original claim was "Most jobs are really not important either, they just keep people busy." Causing numbers to change on a balance sheet is not important, unless that corresponds to actual worthwhile work – in which case, the worthwhile work is what matters, and the balance sheet is just an artefact of accounting for it.
The Bullshit Jobs jobs theory has been widely discredited by researchers, but you probably won't believe them. Consider that most business is B2B so it makes sense that the casual observer would not know what it's for. Additionally, the Bullshit Jobs book relies on a magazine survey, actual studies shows that the percent of people who consider their jobs meaningless is very low and also decreasing over time
No, but it's a core part of the Bullshit Jobs theory, that the jobs are obviously bullshit to everyone involved. I would suggest that most jobs that aren't particularly valuable are probably not locally recognised as such (i.e. by the person or by their manager).
(In general I think while plenty of people are familiar with varying levels of pointless effort in their jobs, it's rare that a whole job consists of that, at least as far as the person doing it and the person hiring for it are concerned)
I think you're right, but it's not how I remember it for some reason.
I didn't read the book "Bullshit Jobs" [1] as an attempt to quantify how many jobs were bullshit. The author was an anthropologist with no interest in quantifying the economic impact. It's lots of amusing anecdotes from frustrated workers and a nudge for people to question the efficiency of capitalism.
At least that's how I read it. But reading the wikipedia page it sounds like a lot of people fixated on the idea that society could double its efficiency. Hard to know if there's a correct interpretation of the book's claims, and unfortunately we can't ask: the author David Graeber died in 2020.
> while he claims that 50% of jobs are useless, less than 20% of workers feel that way, and those who feel their jobs are useless do not correlate with whether their job is useless. (Garbage collectors, janitors, and other essential workers more often felt like their jobs were useless than people in jobs classified by Graeber as useless.)
Well, again, there is a huge difference between one's own perception of their job being useful or not. I believe garbage collectors, janitors, and nurses, are not examples of useless jobs. Useless jobs are mainly in the office, called "paper pushers". I mean come on, have you not been to any jobs (nor heard of any) where you had to pretend you were busy just to get paid? I saw plenty of cases.
>The Bullshit Jobs jobs theory has been widely discredited by researchers, but you probably won't believe them. Consider that most business is B2B so it makes sense that the casual observer would not know what it's for.
I'm not sure how it's possible that anyone over the age of 30 can say something like this with a straight face. Have you ever worked anywhere? I'd love to know how the "researchers" have discredited this. I'd also love to see their other papers (likely, also, bullshit).
