One issue is that it's just (essentially) repeating things that she has said before: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-lhc-may-spell-e...

But the bigger issue is that all she's saying is that there is a problem (which everyone in the field knows) but doesn't offer any solution.

Note for example the bit about how there are many possible choices for what thing to test next, but only a finite amount of resources to do the tests which makes how one chooses what to try next a very important factor.

What modification does she propose to ensure it is done better? None! She just says "do it better", possibly thinking that is helpful advice?

So in summary these days Hossenfelder is being _exactly_ as helpful as the college that rolls in to your office, and, while filming for tiktok, glances at your screen and tells you to fix that stubborn segfault you have been struggling to debug for the last three hours.

Watch the video again. She offered solution. Look into papersthat expound necessary to current model not keep on making science so complicated. If any of tbose papers are real and correct, they would discovered something. As of now...that records stand at ZERO. It burns away useful research grants that would be better put into useful paper research but alas, big names in particle physics dictate more money need to fund their hypothesis because around the corner they will make the discovery....if not....who cares.

> But the bigger issue is that all she's saying is that there is a problem (which everyone in the field knows) but doesn't offer any solution.

The solution is to stop pretending there's a problem to solve when there isn't. That's literally what she's saying.

The obvious corollary is, "work on real problems instead of pseudo problems and stop trying to take funding away from people working on real problems".

It seems perfectly obvious that we've passed the point of diminishing returns and it's time to focus on other things until we have a compelling reason to revisit this.

Something seems to be rotten in the state of science.

Who decides about the money?

I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let's try democracy instead of oligarchy (and maybe ending up in populism or anarchy).

I kind of both like and dislike the idea. I suspect this would just become a popularity contest, where the big, prestigious names get all the money and other worthy projects starve. I'd rather the voting be blinded based on project descriptions, and then something like 20-30% of it is lottery based to fight entrenched dogma.

The reviews and funding decisions are normally based on project description. It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. What's the prior experience, etc. It's impossible to give that information without essentially unblinding the personal information anyway.

> It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research.

Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.

However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.

> Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.

Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is:

https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...