Free Will, Time, and Understanding Reality With Sabine Hossenfelder

This episode delves into the implications of physics on existential questions such as free will, the nature of time, and the structure of reality.

1. Physics provides insights yet has limitations in fully addressing existential queries.
2. Traditional concepts of free will are challenged by the deterministic and random elements of quantum physics.
3. The nature of time, as described by Einstein, presents a universe where time as we understand it does not exist linearly.
4. Our perceptions of time and free will are shaped more by psychological and societal factors than by actual physical realities.
5. Engaging with these complex ideas requires careful consideration of both scientific insights and philosophical implications.

1: Introduction and Book Discussion

Sabine Hossenfelder discusses her book "Existential Physics," explaining its theme about the relationship between physics and existential questions. Malcolm Collins: "What does physics answer about life's biggest questions?"

2: Free Will and Physics

The episode explores the concept of free will from a physicist's perspective, suggesting that physics sees free will as an illusion due to deterministic laws and random quantum events. Sabine Hossenfelder: "Which part would you call free will?"

3: The Nature of Time

Discussion centers on Einstein's theories and their implications for understanding time, suggesting a timeless universe where past, present, and future are indistinguishable. Sabine Hossenfelder: "Einstein worried a lot that his theory doesn't distinguish past, present, and future."

1. Explore different scientific theories to broaden understanding of complex topics like time and free will.
2. Remain open to revising personal beliefs in light of new scientific evidence.
3. Foster a habit of critical thinking to question and understand the impact of deterministic laws on personal autonomy.
4. Engage in discussions that challenge conventional views to better understand physical and existential dimensions.
5. Cultivate awareness of how personal and societal biases may influence perceptions of scientific concepts.

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.

People

Sabine Hossenfelder, Malcolm Collins, Simone Collins

Companies

None

Books

"Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions" by Sabine Hossenfelder

Guest Name(s):

Sabine Hossenfelder

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
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.

Yeah, that's why you're excited to have her on. But she doesn't have a giant, like, 1.3 million followers. Absolutely huge platform for hitting people with reality, which I love. But the book's title is existential physics, a scientist 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 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? So maybe I should first explain what I mean with existential physics. So, that's a little bit weird, because, actually, I didn't come up with a title. My editor did.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 something about us. And so, existential physics, the way that I understand it now, even though I didn't coin the word, is, but it's about what physics tells 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 a topic we talk about a lot. 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 free will. I think it was. You don't have free will, but don't worry.

Sabina Hossenfelder
And I think it was one of my first videos. That attracted some attention. Mostly because it pissed off a lot of people. It's always a good recipe. Us.

Malcolm Collins
The short version here. Yeah. The short version is. This is not a groundbreaking new insight. But I think everyone who studied the fundamental laws of nature.

Sabina Hossenfelder
Which you find in physics. Comes to the conclusion that it's basically a combination of a totally deterministic evolution law. Like it 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 like 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 gets people upset, basically. Now I understand perfectly well that there are very. Renown. I always mispronounce this word.

Which is it? Renown or renown? Renown. Renown. Yeah.

English is a terrible language. Renown. Philosophers who have found ways to define free will. In such a way that it's compatible with what we've learned in physics. And this metabolism and.

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

Malcolm Collins
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?

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 decisions I'm making.

Aren't necessarily heavily affected by any choice. That the sentient part of me has made affecting this probabilistic thing. Therefore, it is irrelevant from the topic of free will. And I wonder, is that sort of your take or do you have a different. Yeah, yeah, that's basically.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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, you know, 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 a question of whether these even play a role in the brain.

But that's another story. They were willed by them, after all. Sorry, I was just promoting your video on the subject. You did one on it recently. Yes, about the quantum effects.

So that's quite a long story. Just exactly what's the role of quantum effects on the brain? I'd say it's very controversial. 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 ingest, 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, 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 in will affect the way that you think about yourself and what's going on on this planet. I really appreciate that you come to that conclusion and advise people in that way. After coming to this deterministic conclusion.

Simone Collins
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, well, 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% 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. Yeah, that's an awesome summary of exactly what I was trying to do with my book. Okay, so we have arrived at this conclusion like, you don't really have free will, because physics, blah, blah.

Sabina Hossenfelder
But let's take it one step further. Yeah. 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. And for me, it's one of the most frustrating misapplications of physics, is we will admit that quantum states can affect, 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.

Malcolm Collins
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 there's something that always annoys me when I hear this. Yeah, no, that's basically also my attitude to the thing point where I disagree a little bit to exactly what those people mean with quantum effects in the brain. It's not just anything that's quantum, because, strictly speaking, everything is quantum anyway, so that it just becomes totally empty phrase.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 quantity 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 much of a chemist on 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. It's just quantum chemistry. Yeah. I would love to go further on your ideas around time, an area where, where I could use some education on what the state of the field is right now.

Malcolm Collins
So what did you talk about in relation to what we know about time right now? 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 the consequences 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.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 now?

And it's just mathematically, like if you look at the theory and derive the equation and so on, 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.

Simone Collins
It's everything everywhere, all at once. 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 now is pretty much the same.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 at once. This is the only way you can make sense of existence.

And that is hard to swallow. 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.

Malcolm Collins
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.

But 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 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 h two o molecules interact, but you cannot get from there to wetness within your own brain.

In the conceptual framing, this creates a lot of problems around questions like sentience or consciousness or big problems of the 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 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. Yeah, so I think I agree with most of what you said.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 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 and so on. But 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 that I'm more familiar with might be conductivity, the conductivity of a metal or the optical properties. Like, this is stuff which people now heavily study with metamaterials, 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 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 special, because we need to deal with what's going on.

Basically. If we actually had a memory of the entire past, like, it would be a mess. Like, how would we know what to do? So I think there's a strong. To 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. So, by the way, I completely agree with you. The reason I was using the fluid example is because, like, we understand the math of fluid dynamics, like, you can mathematically describe something, but this becomes uniquely important in the field of consciousness, which is one that I'm really interested, 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 equations and all these understandings of neural interactions. But it's not going to immediately click for most people.

But it might for some geniuses that I'm not part of that class. 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 something.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 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 comfortable with that kind of understanding, that we have the math and we know how to use it. 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?

Malcolm Collins
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 with 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, with 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 it's a prediction marketplace.

So we use prediction marketplaces, students ranking within prediction marketplaces, to then judge the quality of questions that we're asking them. Yeah, 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. Speak like, 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, then you're able to make predictions from them.

Sabina Hossenfelder
I think, actually, a good example of this is what psychologists call 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. If you study them for long enough, you develop a more or less predictive model about how this person is likely to behave in certain circumstances. Yeah.

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 as like an emulator that's running a separate operating system and little sectioned off place 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 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 siri 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 always want to interpret unexplained patterns through background intentionality instead of through alternate models. Because 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. Yeah. Here's a question I have for you.

Malcolm Collins
Do you think that, like, what is the state of physics right now on timelines? If you were to guess, do we live in a branching timeline, or do we live in a single timeline?

Sabina Hossenfelder
The person that I call me lives in a single timeline. So phrase this very carefully, because if you're talking about these branching timelines, the question what do you even mean by you? Becomes very difficult to answer. Am 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 out 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. 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.

Malcolm Collins
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 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. I would just add that I think the more important thing is how this. How the framing that you choose affects your behavior.

Simone Collins
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 when they see older, aged versions of themselves, or 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 just being like, I'm me here and now.

Sabina Hossenfelder
Yeah, I agree with. Certainly important. I'm gonna give an example of where it could matter tremendously and that it could lead to the destruction of life on earth. If we don't consider this question, it turns out that the physical models that we're dealing with right now point to a branching reality. If you try to create an aligned AI, and you align that AI around a topic like maximizing human happiness over time, and that AI then comes to the conclusion that we live in a branching timeline.

Malcolm Collins
It would exponentially rate the happiness of humans in future states over the happiness in humans 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 experience timeline as a single through fair. Yeah, that's basically the problem that long termists have run into, right? Yeah. 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 those are much more relevant.

Sabina Hossenfelder
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 are lots of big problems there. 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 their competing individuals.

Malcolm Collins
I often tell people that a human optimizing their life around happiness, or like a group of humans up saying, okay, we're going to be general utilitarians is like a group of paperclip maximizing AI's, 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 moral good? Sorry, I tried to stay away from discussions about morals.

Sabina Hossenfelder
I have my own ideas. What is 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 other societies, other cultural context, 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 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. When it came to raising my own kids, I have not exactly thought about the rules dictated by physics, to be honest.

Sabina Hossenfelder
Like, if you're talking about the rules of science more specifically, more generally, I actually think that society has a problem with incorporating new scientific knowledge and, 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'd love it if you could talk more about 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 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 the year 2024? How can this kind of thing happen?

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 these 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 get bigger. And so we need to find some way to at least communicate the basic stuff somehow, and not 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 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 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, though.

Simone Collins
And just like in between, christ just getting hungry. I just wanted to point out that I think all three of these 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. And alcohol.

You're absolutely right. And they have these different little flavors. But still, I think that's a 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 a large bureaucracy which certifies 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, but I'm just pointing out that the central bureaucracy is prone to negative externalities and corruption.

Malcolm Collins
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 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 see people like you as the light through this tunnel. That's not taking sides. Well, thanks for the kind words.

Sabina Hossenfelder
There's another aspect of this, if I may briefly mention this, which is that it's actually true that there are 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, there was this one scientist who said the 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. 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 who are just like, I don't 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.

Simone Collins
What and specifically that is science with Sabina. Check that out on YouTube. Also check out Sabina's books. They're 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 SkDH. Sabina, thank you so much. You are amazing. Lovely to talk to.

Sabina Hossenfelder
Lovely to talk to.