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Sabine's Contrarian Outrage: How Dare You Criticise Eric! (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-25 21:56:27
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

In this mini-decoding, we examine Sabine Hossenfelder's recent fervent defence of Eric Weinstein and her sharp rebuke of his critics. Sabine suggests that Eric poses a genuine threat to the physics establishment, claiming he terrifies them by exposing its weak points with his homegrown Theory of Everything, which she implies is on par with String Theory. This episode takes a critical look at Sabine's own heated rhetoric and performative outrage, exploring how her defence of Weinstein aligns with a broader anti-science contrarian narrative.

Join us as we consider whether Sabine is a brave, truth-telling rebel challenging a stagnant scientific orthodoxy to defend an honest man under attack for daring to question the powers that be, or whether she is simply another contrarian YouTuber pandering to anti-science sentiment, defending fellow influencers, and playing the online game of algorithm-driven clickbait outrage.

Links- Sabine Hossenfelder: Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein -- and they should be- Sabine Hossenfelder: Do we need a Theory of Everything?- Decoding the Gurus: Sabine Hossenfelder: Science is a Liar ... Sometimes- Professor Dave Explains: Sabine Hossenfelder Joins the Eric Weinstein Damage Control Parade- Sabine cheers on Bryan Johnson on Twitter- Tim Nguyen discusses Sabine's response on Twitter- Dr. Brian Keating: What Is A Theory of Everything? Featuring Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, & Eric Weinstein

Comments

PaulBFB

A surprise, to be sure - but a welcome one!

jpops

Wait. This isn't Gary. What the hell!

Kitchen Garage

I also have recently gotten into sleeping to 40K lore and am playing Rogue Trader and I'm concerned that Chris has parasocially incepted this into my subconscious.

Grignard Girlie

“He’s extremely normal”. Ma’am he works for a billionaire who thinks the human race shouldn’t exist. Extremely normal I guess.

Zaniken

I have such a hard time listening to her condescending tone. “You are all idiots at least he gets dark money for his papers🥸”

Nicholas

So, I often listen to this while painting and building my 40K peoples… it’s always a bit surreal when you mention it.

Dada de Broglie

“This is going to be awkward…” Sabine is quite the character, isn’t she? Interesting to hear she’s known Brett for almost 20 years. I’d love to hear what she meant when she called him “fairly normal.”

Nancy Hale

So her premise is: Not much difference between Eric and academic physicists like Carroll when it comes to their work. They both produce pretty worthless, dead end stuff that doesn’t advance the field. But she doesn’t care much that Eric’s model is weak because he doesn’t waste taxpayer $ and she thinks he’s a nice guy. So much pessimism in her argument, but I guess that gets the views.

Deniz Stiegemann

You brushed quickly over the fact that she blocked Tim Nguyen and removed his old article from her blog. I think this is probably the biggest and most important news I got from your episode! It’s a kind of lexfridmanification of Sabine. The beginning of the descent.

Brice F

It’s so obvious that Eric is the actual version of Sabine’s strawman physicist that doesn’t do any science and is paid handsomely for big talk and no results. Eric only isn’t at any university or at CERN or whatever.

Ben Godek

Does Curt Jaimungul have any training in physics or math?

Jazzy

Sabine has to have one of the all time worst accents. I don't understand how anyone can stand to listen to her.

Cautious Dissolute

Sabine continues to never fail to disappoint recently

Heidi Sævareid

It's almost impossible to listen to Sabine's clenched teeth pronunciation. Comparing her recent video to the one from five years ago, it's striking how much she's ramped up the angry tone! Her jaw must be totally locked by now.

Franz Pökler

Her vocal inflection and accent are the WORST (and I'm German)

Roland Weber

Sabine said Eric IS working on his theory, present tense. From the preamble that Sean Carroll read out, I understood that Eric's paper that was published (aka put on a website) years ago is a write-up from memory of stuff that Eric had worked on years before that. If he IS actively working on his theory, where are the results? I guess he's got to keep those a secret, because they would unlock the Power of Gods to any random person who might read them.

Jeff Kaste

Every time Sabine swears, she sounds like a little kid saying it for the first time, giddy to use the “no-no” words to impress their friends.

Erland Hvittfeldt

If physicists are afraid of Eric, why ostracize him? That's where his credentials come from in his and Sabines community. Invite him in, butter him up and revoke his outsider status.

Helen McCallum

It could be her accent but to be honest I have German friends who swear normally, so I think it's her. Her use of "lamguage" sounds forced and fake like shes trying to shock instead of dropping an honest fbomb

Roland Weber

When Brian Keating was on Robinson's podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz3waSvyUDg), Eric was briefly discussed towards the end. Keating is an experimental physicist. From what I remember, he said that Eric is a personal friend. And that for him, Eric's theory will have to pass the same criteria as every other: experimental results. I guess they get along fine because Eric's theory is nowhere near verification or falsification by experiments.

Fugazi

Can we be 100% certain Sabine isn't just AI? It's not just the accent but the rhythms and patterns themselves.

Russell

I came here to say that I find her voice and tone are so grating and I see that I’m not alone 😆

Ryan Schultze

I am glad Chris highlights that her take on Eric’s theories of everything are consistent. She got a tonne of negative feedback for that and it was a reminder that the internet can be brutal. That being said, it is utterly miserable to see “science communication” being polluted by grifters like Curt and her. If she had a shred of integrity, she’d reflect on the feedback she received for this little vlog piece and think hard on the issues with it that many have correctly pointed out. But she won’t.

Jen

Her way of speaking has changed so much from those older clips. She is using her accent in such a weird way now to pull people into her lair of clrap 💩🚽

Ben Godek

Is it somehow possible that Eric comes across well interpersonally, and is just a malignant narcissist in public appearances? I doubt it

Ben Godek

I asked my friend who’s a German teacher, and he said it should be “Sa-been-ah” and that German doesn’t really do silent letters.

Emma

LOL. With friends like Sabine, who needs enemies. Yes your idea is stupid Eric, but at least you didn't spend money on it.

Bevin Flynn

I like the way Sabine says "Sean." Like it's french or something.

Saad Ahmed

I listened to another podcast refer to Sabine's views as science populism which seemed like an apt description. This was before her YouTube channel became as popular as it is now and her shift to being openly anti-science

Greg T-K

Very nice. There's an aspect of Sabine's defense that I think you overlooked, perhaps for time, but it's a theme of her rhetoric that bothers the hell out of me. Her MO is a sort of "next-level both-sidesing", where for example she criticises Eric's TOE as empty but somehow no more empty that string theory or supersymmetry. There's a bit in her video you highlight where she says "In all fairness Eric's idea is a big sketchy. But honestly I don’t doubt what with some effort you can somehow make the maths work. So that is roughly what Eric is working on. It’s all fairly unremarkable really. The mathematics is pretty close to what physicists are using already, and it’s totally in line with all the other nonsense that physicists in the foundations now work on" Sabine's both-sidesing of physics is obvious, but she also slips in a defense of Eric's TOE that she must know is false, in the line "I don’t doubt what with some effort you can somehow make the maths work." But Eric's math *cannot work out*, which was a central finding in Tim Nguyen's response to Eric and very clearly discussed in Christian Ferko's appearance on Professor Dave Explains. So while I agree that Sabine largely avoids Nguyen's critique, and that Dave Farina opened up a line of response Eric could drive a truck through, Sabine's did engage with Nguyen's work in this one way: to undermine it with a falsehood. I'm probably nitpicking here, but I think this move is a theme in Sossenfelder's rhetoric and one that synergises with her cranky online persona.

Ron McKinnon

Eric’s theory made me think of another geometric theory of everything postulated by a fellow named Garrett Lisi back in the 2000s. It made waves in the pop science literature but never went anywhere and also failed to make some predictions. So I searched Eric Weinstein Garrett Lisi to see if anyone else had made the comparison and found an odd video by Eric where he calls Lisi his arch-enemy and says that everyone should have an arch-enemy to motivate them. Kind of wacky.

Guy Walter

Really enjoyed this one. So sad to see a capable science educator willingly sacrifice their integrity for the sake of ingratiating themselves to such a horrible ecosystem.

Lord Brannigan-7

"Hello, and welcome to Physics Today. I hope we will have a mature and informative discussion without resorting to childish insults." "You see that fag kiosk by the railway station, where all the winos hang out?" "Yes, but I fail to recognise the relevance?" "That's your university, that is. That's your mum selling ciggies to your students. Now, see that blob of spit over there with some chewing gum in it?" "I am aware of it." "That's your girlfriend that is, look, she's waving from your swimming pool." "Oh, a ha ha ha ha ha" (etc ..)

Linda Sears

It sounds like Sabine used this encounter between Sean and Eric as another opportunity to ride her specific hobby horse that the physicists are all in on a big money making scam. It doesn’t seem like she has anything interesting to contribute.

Kgar

She’s an odd bird, this one

Trees

The bit about Sean knowing that physics is all a racket is where she really jumps the shark. There is a reasonable way to take the Pierce Morgan debate and reframe it as pointless drama when the real issue is that all of theoretical physics is stuck in a rut and suffers from groupthink. Maybe wrong, but not obviously deranged. Once she starts mind reading Sean, the claims of groupthink become claims of an explicit, widespread conspiracy.

Matt Dear

I really love Eric's shade and aspersions on Sean, highly entertaining. Particularly enjoyable is the pause after Sean asks "how dare you read your paper?" "... ... No, Sean."

Mathias Bolton

I love anything that has to do with clowning Eric. Id pay 50 a month on patreon if it were purely focused on eric weinstein

Amy

What gets me about all this drama is that the target audience isn’t other physicists, but it’s random people who watch Sabine and Eric on YouTube. They don’t have the ability to stand up to their peers so they take the fight to a place where they can more easily get supporters. It’s pretty transparent.

EagleHasLanded

The bit with Jaimungal dramatically praising Eric’s “remarkable” work, followed by Eric’s intentionally long, exaggerated pauses as he says “………………….I don’t even know how to be with that, to be honest…look…thank you.” Beyond parody.

Rod Hodges

I wonder if Eric scammed Peter Thiel into believing that he knew something about finance and then was fired after Thiel found out that he doesn’t know shit from shinola. Just my personal theory based on nothing but fun to speculate.

Soapy Dishwater

there's something weirdly satisfying about checking back in on some gurus and seeing that they are progressing as expected. like checking on slow cooked stew