Dr Becky is a fantastic science communicator that is clearly very passionate and optimistic about her field
One of the take aways I've got from what I've seen of academia (whether this applies to Sabine or not) is that you'd be surprised how disconnected a senior academic is from the current state of their field. Not that they're ignorant of the latest findings (though, again, you'd be surprised how little time they have actually read papers unless they have to), but they're often not doing actual research at all, not reading the latest papers as widely as a good postdoc would be, and see the field through older often outdated (though sometimes still valuable) lenses, and can be very distracted by their other responsibilities. A young excited researcher is genuinely looking out for the future of their field, and, IMO, I think you can see that Dr Becky
Of course if you follow this to its logical conclusion you eventually hit "become a scientist, work with the material, form your own opinion", but well, a little bit more aggregation and summary would be of service to me.
I guess what Hossenfelder offers me is content above the quality bar of most science journalism, on that spectrum.
The one that comes to mind is when talking about fusion she said the output energy of the reaction * efficiency must be > input energy which seems perfectly logical. Except the input energy doesn’t all disappear much of it ends up in the plasma which in a steady state is then converted at some efficiency to electricity again. This is why Q is considered independently of the total power used by the facility which goes on to invalidate much of the rest of the video.
I don’t know if that was intentional oversimplification or a mistake on her part, but it makes me question the accuracy of her videos on other topics.
Seems to know her shit and doesn’t seem to hate it.