Free Will, Time, and Understanding Reality With Sabine Hossenfelder

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with renowned physicist and science communicator Sabina Hossenfelder to explore some of life's biggest questions through the lens of physics. Hossenfelder, author of "Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions," shares her insights on free will, the nature of time, and the challenges of understanding reality.

The conversation delves into the implications of determinism and randomness in quantum mechanics for the concept of free will, the consequences of Einstein's theories on our perception of time, and the role of emergent properties in grasping complex phenomena like consciousness. Hossenfelder and the Collinses also examine the importance of predictive models in defining understanding, the evolutionary biases that shape our perception of reality, and the potential risks of misaligned AI in the context of branching timelines.

The discussion also touches on the challenges of incorporating cutting-edge scientific knowledge into societal frameworks, the importance of science communication, and the need to address issues within academia while maintaining public trust in the scientific method. Throughout the conversation, Hossenfelder emphasizes the value of curiosity, tolerance, and the pursuit of understanding in navigating the complexities of reality.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone Collins, and we are joined by today, I think one of the best science communicators, if not the best science communicator on the internet, Sabina Hassenfelder. You can go find her on her YouTube channel. I suggest you check it out and subscribe, or you can check out her books, one of which, and when I read the title, everyone's going to know oh, that's why she's on the, yeah, that's why you're excited to have her on.

But she doesn't have a giant, like 1. 3 million followers. It absolutely huge platform for. hitting people with reality, which I love, but the book's title is existential physics, a scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. And what I wanted to talk with you about on this episode is where you see the limits like what does physics answer?

How have people misapplied physics potentially to try to answer life's biggest questions? I think a lot of people will. sometimes try to do. And yeah, just what are [00:01:00] your thoughts on this field as someone who is so knowledgeable in the best understanding of the fabric of reality that scientists have today?

Would you like to know more?

Sabina Hossenfelder: So maybe I should first explain what I mean with existential physics. So that though, that's a little bit weird because actually I didn't come up with the title. My, my editor did. So the original title of the book was more than this because I wanted to say that physics is more than. What you learned at school, it's not just about how atoms move and the ideal gas law and, switching the light on electricity, all that kind of stuff.

Physics is actually a tool that tells us something about our own existence because it's about discovering. the fundamental laws that the universe works with, and we're part of the universe. So it tells us some, it tells us something about us. And so existential physics, the way that I understand it now, even though I didn't coin the word is that it's about what physics tells [00:02:00] us about these big existential questions.

Like for example, does the past still exist? What really is time? What is this moment of now that we experience? How did the universe? begin? How will it end? Do we have free will? Are we really just big bags of atoms? And so all those big existential questions. And sometimes I come to the conclusion that actually physics can't really tell us anything about it.

But in other cases, I think physics does tell us something.

Malcolm Collins: I would love to dig into your thoughts on free will from the perspective of physics, because that's the topic we talk about a lot.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah. So this is what got me onto the entire topic in the first place, because I made a video a long time ago about yeah.

free will. I think it was taught, you don't have free will, but don't worry. And I think it was one of my first videos that attracted some attention, mostly because it pissed off a lot of people. So it's always a good recipe. But give us the short [00:03:00] version here. Yeah. The, the short version is this is not a ground groundbreaking new insight, but I think everyone who's, fundamental laws of nature, which you find in physics comes to the conclusion that it's basically a combination of a totally deterministic evolution law, like determinism all the way down.

And then you have this occasional random element that comes from quantum mechanics, and that's it. So now I ask you exactly which part would you call free will? So to me, it's the There isn't anything that makes sense to call free will. And so this is why I'm saying I just forget about the thing with free will.

It's useless. It just it gets people upset basically. Now I understand perfectly well that there are very renowned renowned, I always mispronounce this word, which is it? Renown or renowned? Renown. Yeah. English is a terrible language. Renowned. Philosophers who have found ways to define [00:04:00] free will in such a way that it's compatible with what we've learned in physics and this is what we've learned in physicality.

And, yeah and it's, I don't have a big problem with that. I just think that it makes the entire phrase free will meaningless. But yeah, so basically that's the summary of the video.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it sounds very similar to videos that we've done on the subject where I often point out, it's humorous to me that in the world that people who don't like my definition of free will would want, I would feel like I have less control of my thoughts.

By that what I mean is I'm like, so if the next action I take is not determined by my life history and my biology, then it's determined by randomness. That isn't empowering. That's not an empowering thought. And people will be like you believe that the, because I don't know if this is what current physics says, but my understanding is that there's some level of randomness within quantum events.

And so that doesn't mean that the future is predetermined. And I'm like, yeah, but even if that's true, that doesn't augment the fact that the [00:05:00] decisions I'm making aren't necessarily heavily affected by any choice that sentient part of me has made affecting this probabilistic thing. Therefore it is irrelevant from the topic of free will.

And I'm wondering, is that sort of your take or do you have a different?

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's basically that's the core problem like it's like you can't have it both ways like it's either free or you wilt it, but it doesn't fit together. And I think the way that most people try to accommodate it is that they have this idea that somehow this random element from quantum processes, so it's questionable whether these even play a role in the brain but that's another story.

They were willing to buy them after all. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I was just promoting your video on the subject. You did one on it recently.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yes, about the quantum effects. Yeah, that's quite a long story. It just exactly what's the role of quantum effects on the brain. say it's very controversial. [00:06:00] Basically how much does it play a role for consciousness?

These quantum coherent states. Yeah, so it's an active area of research. Maybe they don't open minded about it, but either way I'd say it doesn't really give you free will. And the reason I keep talking about it, why it matters to me is that because they believe in free will, a lot of people seem to think.

They're much less affected by their environment. They're much less influenced by what happens in society around them than is actually the case. And I've been trying to, convey the message like, you have to be careful about what kind of information you share. In just basically because once it's in your brain, you don't get it out.

It'll be there forever. And it will affect you. The kind of stuff that you listen to you, the kind of stuff that you read it will affect you. And you also have to be aware that the culture that you've grown up in and the society that you find yourself and will affect the way that you think about yourself and what's going on this planet.

Simone Collins: I really appreciate that you come to that [00:07:00] conclusion and advise people. In that way, after coming to this deterministic conclusion, because I haven't finished it yet. I've started Robert Sapolsky's determined. And there's a lot of people discussing this and a lot of people saying, Oh, it's dangerous telling people this because it could affect their behavior, but taking it that one step further and just saying one, okay, you don't have free will, but you do have control over every action you take.

So functionally, depending on how you look at it, you're still responsible for everything you do. And you can 100 percent shape who you become by choosing what you're exposed to. And I like that you take a message that would make a lot of people feel hopeless and make it quite empowering in the end.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's a, that's an awesome summary of exactly what I was trying to do with my book. I was trying to say, okay, so we have arrived at this conclusion. Like you don't really have free will because physics, blah, blah. But let's take it one step further. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And a point that I want to pull out here because we've mentioned this a few times, and I've noticed the way that this is often misapplied by people.

[00:08:00] And for me, it's one of the most frustrating misapplications of physics is we will admit that quantum states can affect it. Potentially the way that neurons work and may even have like instrumental effects to the way neurons work, but that doesn't mean that a soul or intentionality can hide within those quantum effects.

Those quantum effects are happening in your brain the same way they're happening all around you, which is mechanistically, if randomly. If they are affecting your neural architecture, it is in the same way they work within a quantum computer, which is with a level of, anyway, does that make sense what I'm saying there?

Because that's something that always annoys me when I hear this.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, no, that's basically also my attitude to the thing. It's the one point where I disagree a little bit is exactly what those people mean with quantum effects in the brain. And it's not just. Anything that's quantum, [00:09:00] because strictly speaking, everything is quantum anyway.

So that it just becomes totally empty phrase. The brain is a quantum computer because it does something with quantum. Oh yeah. They're referring to normally certain types of coherent state or certain types of entanglement. So part of the problem of this field, which is called quantum biology, is that everyone has their own definition for exactly what they mean with a quantum effect.

So in this recent paper, which I talked about, it was some kind of. big coherent state loosely speaking. And but yeah, like this isn't anything that's specific to the brain. Like actually I think in the paper that I talked about, they didn't even do it in the brain. They just, they bought a box of certain molecules and put them to a petri dish and there's some chemistry going on and I'm not part of it.

much of a chemist. Don't ask me. And so they produce these kind of bigger molecules and then they shine light on them and it's nothing to do really with plates. It's just quantum chemistry.

Malcolm Collins: I would love to go further on [00:10:00] your ideas around time. This is an area where I could use some education on what the state of the field is right now.

So what did you talk about in relation to what we know about time right now?

Sabina Hossenfelder: This is actually really old story. This is all based on Albert Einstein's theories of space and time. It's just that I think it's really hard to understand and just what are the consequences, what the consequences are of this theory hasn't been really sunk, it hasn't sunk into society by large, because the theory is much weirder than you might think.

And one thing that Einstein worried about a lot is that his theory doesn't distinguish the past, the present, and the future. You just have this one thing, this space time. And the entire universe is just one thing. There's a special moment in it. And so this worried him a lot. It's now called the problem of now, like what's this thing that we call now?

And it's just [00:11:00] mathematically, like if you look at the theory and derive the equation, that's on it. It's quite simple to see where it comes from. Like there, there is no way to consistently define a moment of now that everyone agrees on. So that's the problem. Like I can define my moment of now.

You can define one and you can define one, but in general, we wouldn't all agree. It's

Simone Collins: everything, everywhere, all at once.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Exactly. That's a brief summary. So now for practical purposes, since you and I, so I don't know exactly where you are, but you're probably not moving with close by the speed of light relative to me.

For practical purposes, it doesn't make any difference, our nows are pretty much the same. But if you want to understand it on a fundamental level, like what is this thing called time? How can we make sense of it? You have to think about these sorts of problems. And so this whole line of thought, which comes out of Einstein's theory just said that everything exists [00:12:00] at once.

This is the only way you can make. It's of existence and that it's hard to spot it.

Malcolm Collins: It's interesting. One of the things that I actually forget which one of Einstein's theories this was where he's Oh, the theory would predict this, but I'm just going to assume this never happens.

And then it, because it would be too weird if it did. And then later it turned out the thing that he assumed never happened is something we observe. Yeah, that might be what it is. Yeah. And so even other places where he's no, this is just too weird, but the theory predicts this it may turn out that it's just right.

It's just not the way we perceive things. And I think when we're talking about things like time and physics, it's interesting that when you went into science, you wanted to understand, I think, like the nature of reality. And so you went into physics. And when I went in, I wanted to understand the nature of reality.

So I go into neuroscience because I'm like what are we? We're the brain. So I want to understand how that works. So I can understand. But where these two fields differ is really interesting to me in that if you're looking at psychology or the way we perceive [00:13:00] reality as humans, The ways that we evolve to perceive reality don't necessarily have to align with the physical reality within which we live.

They just have to be optimal from an evolutionary perspective. So probably the most important factor here is humans neurologically Appear impossible, just incapable of conceiving of emergent properties. And this is hugely important for understanding reality because a lot of reality is made up of emergent properties.

So I'm going to quickly go over an emergent property here. It'd be something like you can conceptually understand the way that H2O molecules interact, but you cannot get from there to wetness within your own brain. Okay. In a conceptual framing, this creates a lot of problems around questions like sentience or consciousness or big problems of the [00:14:00] universe, because just there was no evolutionary reward for being able to understand these sorts of emergent properties.

And the same is likely true with time. If time, like the past and the future aren't particularly different from each other, if even a mono directional pathway through time isn't even possible. particularly unique, there would have been no evolutionary reward for being able to conceive of that, which means that we would have an evolutionary bias against reality.

And I think looking for the areas that we might be evolutionarily biased against reality is really important when engaging with physics.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah. So I think I agree with. Most of what you said. I'm not entirely sure about the emergent properties because I think that what we do in physics, I mean you might be saying like you, you can't intuitively understand it.

Like you either have this one picture like it's molecules bumping into each other, or you have this other picture and it's like a fluid and it flows [00:15:00] and so on. Yeah. Mathematically, we certainly have certain examples of emergent properties where we can understand how they come about. Now, you could say maybe I don't really intuitively understand the mathematics, but I can certainly use it.

I can use those equations like, I don't know a lot about fluid dynamics, but I'm more familiar with Might be a conductivity, the conductivity of a metal or the optical properties like this is stuff which people now heavily study with metal materials. If you've ever heard of those, like the custom designed materials with very specific emergent properties, like the way that they react to certain sound or absorb it.

And I'd say that people who work on metamaterials must have a pretty good understanding of emergent properties. Now that said, sorry, I know you, you want to say something, but I think you're quite right when it comes to this notion of time. It's something about the way that our brain works that we have this experience of the moment of now being [00:16:00] special because we need to deal with what's going on, basically, we actually had a memory of the entire past, like it'd be a mess.

Like, how would we know what to do? So I think there's a strong evolutionary incentive to to do something. You blend out all this stuff which happened in your past, except for some very special memories that you need, traumatic experiences that you need to be able to call upon very quickly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so by the way, I completely agree with you. The reason I was using the fluid example is because like we understand the mass of fluid dynamics. Like you can mathematically describe something, but this becomes important in the field of consciousness, which is one that I'm really interested in, which is to say that even if we could mathematically and mechanically describe exactly how consciousness works, a person looking at that description wouldn't necessarily like immediately go.

Oh, and obviously this explains sentience. Because we would say, oh, sentience is downstream of all these [00:17:00] equations and all these understandings of neural interactions, but it's not going to immediately click for most people, but it might for some like geniuses that I'm not part of that class.

Sabina Hossenfelder: I think it comes down to the question what do we even mean by understanding? I get a lot of people who are like, but we don't really understand gravity or we don't really understand quantum mechanics and that kind of stuff. And I'm like if we do have the equations, and we know how to use the equations and we can actually make predictions that agree with reality, what does it mean that we don't understand?

To me, This is what it means to understand some, you have the mathematics, you know how to use it. Like we can discuss how well the mathematics of quantum mechanics actually works, but that's a different story. So I don't necessarily so on. I understand that people probably mean on an intuitive level, they look at the equation, it doesn't tell them anything, because you must have worked with them for a long time to understand how it works.

But to me that I'm, I'm comfortable with that kind of understanding that we have the math and we [00:18:00] know how to use it.

Malcolm Collins: I actually want to elevate this question here about what does it mean to understand something? Because one of the things that we've been building out, the Collins Institute, which is an alternative school system.

And it's one of the questions that we've been asking, a lot to ourselves is how can we get objective measures of understanding within subject domains? And the definition of understanding that we came to is that it is knowledge that helps an individual. Through understanding through knowledge of an environmental context, predict future environmental states and that the better if you're judging better understanding a person was more of whatever this measure is, can more accurately predict future environmental states.

And this is something that is as important from physics as it is to more controversial topics like. Politics or economics. And it's why was our school. We're actually partnered with Metaculous, but we haven't done anything with them yet because we haven't gotten to that level of our development, but [00:19:00] it's a prediction marketplace.

So we use prediction marketplaces. Students ranking was in prediction marketplaces. To then judge the quality of questions that we're asking them. It's a very, Yeah.

Sabina Hossenfelder: I'm surprised, but I actually pretty much agree with what you say. I would have put it a little bit different. I'd say it's the ability to create a predictive model of a certain system.

This is

Malcolm Collins: just,

Sabina Hossenfelder: speak like you, you collect information from by learning and you create a certain model of how the thing or the field or whatever you want to talk about works. And then you're able to make predictions from that. I think actually a good example of this is what It's like college is called a theory of mind.

I think basically the way that it works is that you observe other people and you figure out, how do they react to other stuff and you create a theory of how their mind works. Absolutely. And if you study them for long enough, you can. You develop a more or less predictive model about how this person is likely to behave in certain [00:20:00] circumstances.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and this is actually a great thing to elevate here because it's one of the ways that evolution sort of messes with our brain. So we can think of a theory of mind if you've worked with computers for a long time, it's like an emulator that's running a separate operating system and a little sectioned off placed of your operating system, but humans evolved to be very good at creating these emulators to the extent that in a video that I haven't.

I haven't gone live yet where I talk about because one of my fields of expertise used to be schizophrenia is that in schizophrenia, my thought is what's happening here is these are actually just hyper stimulated little emulations that are running that we evolve for Syria of mine, but it also creates a problem with human, which is, this is where a lot of magical thought comes from, where people intuit intentionality behind either global events, which can lead to conspiracy theories or behind weather patterns, which can lead to theology Or behind the way things are arranged in a shop window is that we, we always want to interpret unexplained patterns through a [00:21:00] background intentionality instead of through alternate models, because it's if your brain's a hammer, everything's a nail.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's right. I think there are many other things coming in there. Like a lot of people, I think they don't like uncertainty, so they can't just let it out. We just don't know what happened there. We don't know we can't explain it And so they have this need to have an explanation And I think this is also one of the factors that creates a lot of conspiracy thinking.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah here's a question I have for you. Do you think that like what is the state of physics right now? on Timelines is it would if you were to guess do we live in a branching timeline or do we live in a single timeline?

Sabina Hossenfelder: You The person that I call me in a single timeline, phrase this very carefully, because if you're talking about these branching timelines, the question, what do you even mean by you becomes a very difficult to answer am [00:22:00] I the thing that would be branching over all these timelines if they exist?

And then what does it mean that they even branch? All of them. So that's weird. But as I go on in my book, existential physics, which we started talking about is that you can't ever confirm that these other timelines exist. So to me, it's a little bit pointless to even go on about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So Simone's theory on this particular topic or the way that she conceives of herself, which I found to be very useful because it wasn't the way that I did when I met her, is to only think of herself as existing in any particular frame of time. And all future iterations of her are fundamentally a different person.

But this is just a framing. Obviously, the concept of self is a semantic construct that we use in terms of communicating with people to compress information, which is another problem about how we communicate. A lot of these concepts is that as humans, because we verbally communicate, we need to collapse ideas, which [00:23:00] Perhaps could be more nuanced or just there's this definition of self and there's this definition of self and neither one is superior.

But people need to choose one to more efficiently communicate with other people, which causes disagreements, but you may disagree with that.

Simone Collins: I would just add that. I think the more important thing is how this, how the framing that you choose affects your behavior to your earlier point, like the point of the book is depending on how you view yourself you are going to behave very differently.

Like psychology studies have found, of course, I don't know if they've been replicated but they found that when people are primed to think about their future selves, They make different decisions in the present, and they like see older aged versions of themselves. So they've gone through an exercise in which they're encouraged to think about, future Sabina, future Malcolm.

And so I think it does matter how you ultimately choose to frame things because it will significantly affect your behavior. And if you see yourself as one ephemeral person in service to a larger identity, which is what I do, it helps me make more responsible decisions. Versus sort of things [00:24:00] just being like, I'm me here and now.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, I agree with that. Certainly important.

Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna I'm gonna give an example of where it could matter tremendously in that it could lead to the destruction of life on earth. If you don't consider this question. If it turns out that the physical models that we're dealing with right now.

Point to a branching reality. If you tried to create an aligned a I and you align that a I around a topic like, maximizing human happiness over time, and that a I then comes to the conclusion that we live in a branching timeline, it would exponentially rate the happiness of humans in future states over the happiness in humans in Today, because those humans would exist in multitude compared to humans today, leading it to make decisions that no human would ever make, given that we experienced timeline as a single through fair.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Yeah, that's basically the problem that long [00:25:00] termists have run into, right? So yeah, you come to the conclusion that basically, it doesn't matter what we do now, because there'll be, hundreds of billions of people coming later. And there's so much more relevant. Yeah. So this is a big can of worms.

Like, how do you even quantify happiness? Is this something you even want to maximize? Is this a good thing to strive for? There's a lot. of big problems

Malcolm Collins: that I think we're not going to sort out. We argue no very strongly on our podcast. We're hugely anti utilitarian. I don't understand basing your life around things that were just like environmental rewards that caused your ancestors to have more surviving offspring than they're competing individuals.

I often tell people that a human optimizing their life. Around happiness or like a group of humans up saying, okay, we're gonna be, generally, utilitarians is like a group of paperclip maximizing ais, creating a moral system off of how many paperclips exist in the world. But that's my thought.

I'm wondering what your thought is. How do you judge [00:26:00] moral good

I,

Sabina Hossenfelder: sorry. I try to stay away from discussions about morals. I have my own ideas what. It's good and isn't good. I guess I'm more focused on trying to avoid evil, trying to avoid suffering. But I'm aware that this also has, you don't want to optimize avoiding suffering because if there aren't any people, then no one will be suffering.

But yeah, I guess in my personal life, I think it's like first do not cause any harm. It's certainly something that I live by. Live and let live. I tend to be fairly flexible about, other people have grown up in, in other societies, other cultural contexts, and they just judge things sometimes dramatically differently.

And I'm trying to be tolerant of it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of like one of the core things we dedicate a lot of our channel and our personal thought to. Is how do we create cultural systems that have external rules but that these [00:27:00] rules harmonize with the current state of physics and can evolve as the state of physics evolves but still lead to positive action.

I'm wondering if this is a topic you've ever thought about in terms of raising your own kids, because I know that you've been, lucky.

Sabina Hossenfelder: When it came to raising my own kids, I have not. exactly thought about the rules dictated by physics, to be honest. Like if you're talking about the rules of science more specifically more generally, I actually think that society general has been, has a problem with incorporating new scientific knowledge.

And it's something that I certainly try to instill in my children, like a general desire to find out how things are going on. So like we're certainly nourishing this natural curiosity, I'd say. So my husband's also a physicist, so it's not that difficult.

Malcolm Collins: I love it. Yeah, no I love it.

If you could talk more about [00:28:00] where we as a society, because I have my own thoughts on this, but I'd love to hear yours fail in terms of the way we engage with cutting edge science and overly incorporating it into our cosmological frameworks.

Sabina Hossenfelder: So it's a little country dependent. So I think the, in the United States, there's a lot of effort being made in the direction of science communication.

And in Europe we see far less of this. And I think it's a big problem because there are lots of people, they just get left behind, they want to understand how science works. There's really a lot of desire but there aren't enough people to explaining it to them. in such a way that they can actually understand it.

And I recently made a video about this, why I'm worried about flat earthers, because to me, they're like the cannery and the coal mine. Because I think what's really driving this problem, like how can people, believe that the earth is flat, like we're living in in, in, in the year 2024, how can this kind of thing happen? And [00:29:00] And I think they're just totally disconnected from how modern science actually works. They just have no idea how far behind everything they are. And the issue is now that flat earthers are just an extremely weird example, but we also see the same thing with vaccines, of course, new methods of vaccinations.

People are like, I've never heard of this before. It's certainly some evil stuff. And lots of other things like genetically modified crops and all this sort of things where people are just like, don't understand how it works. I want, Nothing to do with it. And this is a big problem, which is only going to get bigger.

And so we, we need to find some way, to, to at least communicate the basic stuff somehow. And not on, on a level where we just say, don't worry about it. Go away. Just believe us. It's not going to work.

Malcolm Collins: I actually find the three groups that you highlighted here. Something that I could do even a whole other video on because It's so interesting the ways that they're different from each other and their motivations.

The flat earthers, I don't know if you've ever looked at [00:30:00] them, but the thing I actually find most interesting about the flat earthers is that they are really dedicated to the scientific method. If you watch the ways they try to prove the earth is flat, they rely on traditional scientific method and experimentation in their attempts to prove the world is flat.

They just disregard all expert consensus. And if you look at something like the GMO people they often seem to have more of, okay I'll use as a middle ground the anti vaxxer people. They seem to have anti vaxxer and GMO are actually very similar. They have often almost theologically driven concerns which are driven by a desire for things not changing or a suspicion of change.

Combined with a suspicion of the way that powerful interest groups that have the ability to make a lot of money if certain things are communicated as true. You're missing a key point

Simone Collins: though. And just like in between cries, she's getting hungry. I just wanted to point out that I think all three of these [00:31:00] groups have been empowered because of a crisis of reality where they feel like they have been lied to, and there have been real instances of misrepresentation or obfuscation of information, or just well meaning groups and experts coming to the wrong conclusion in the middle of trying to figure things out, like during the pandemic.

And so because there was this one crisis of faith, Now, suddenly they feel like they cannot trust any expert consensus. And I think that's the one unifying bond that they all have. Malcolm, you're absolutely right. And they have these different little flavors, but still, I think that's a

Malcolm Collins: really major, this is something we talk about in the terms of what we call the academic reformation, where we say that in society today, we have structured truth in a system where you have an a large bureaucracy, which certifies is, and affirms individuals that have better Knowledge of what's true.

And then you have another group that says, yeah, but that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. I don't hate the scientific method. I'm just pointing out that the central bureaucracy is prone [00:32:00] to negative externalities and corruption. And we went through this before, and that was the reformation.

And we are seeing. And one of the things I talk about is the negative externalities of this particular battle we actually saw was the reformation itself. For example, the Protestant groups would go much more extreme in their witch trials because they didn't have a centralized organization to prevent sort of conspiracy theories from spiraling out of control, which is what with the academic dissident groups now with things like Q and stuff like that.

But anyway, I'm not going to pontificate too much further. But you are a guiding light. In this, in that you are so un if you watch her channel, she is so unafraid to just say this is what the evidence actually says. Without any pandering towards any type of audience preference or anything like that.

So I, I see people like you as the light through this tunnel that's not taking sides.

Sabina Hossenfelder: Thanks for the kind words. There's another aspect of this, if I may briefly mention [00:33:00] this, which is that it's actually two, two, that the things going wrong with academia and with science, and a lot of scientists don't want to talk about it exactly because of the problem, which you just mentioned, because people will throw out all the babies with the bathwater.

They're like, was this one scientist who said a wrong thing? Therefore, all of science is wrong, right? And so every time I talk about problems with science and academia, I get emails from physicists who are like, you shouldn't talk about this, because, people were just distrust scientists. And so I insist on talking about it anyway, because I think that the attempt of sweeping it under the rug just makes things worse.

Malcolm Collins: This has been an absolutely spectacular conversation and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. And I really hope people check out your channel as a good place to learn what is cutting edge in science these days. Which can feel like we know some friends were just like, I don't [00:34:00] trust any science after the eighties.

And I'm like, no, you go to her channel and you can get a fairly honest and sober minded view of what. And specifically

Simone Collins: that is science with Sabina. Check that out on YouTube. Also check out Sabina's books, their Existential Physics and Lost in Math. Existential Physics is what we were discussing today.

The Lost in Math is also fascinating in its premise. And then of course you can find Sabina on Twitter at S K D H. Sabina, thank you so much. You are amazing. Lovely to talk

Malcolm Collins: to you.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe