Is there something she is not skeptical of or controversial about?

Einstein equations

Hm, that may be controversial in itself, depending on where you stand in the current cosmology.

I don’t know if she has changed or I have changed but I don’t enjoy her stuff anymore. Maybe I should watch some of her old stuff and figure that out.

I’m starting to feel the same indeed.

It's her whole schtick: being contrarian. Maybe she had a point about the excesses of string theory but she's been full-on into crackpot territory for a while now, sadly.

There was one video where she said she believed time travel was "probably possible"

A broken clock....

Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.

can you be more specific what you are alleging?

and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway

There was an email she claimed to have received many years ago from another academic essentially saying "you're right that a lot of academic research is BS and just a jobs program for academics, but you shouldn't point that out because it's threatening a lot of people's livelihood." Some people are claiming she fabricated this alleged email etc., I haven't looked too much into it myself.

I end up playing father confessor often enough at work that I have had to launder things people have complained about.

When you are trying to make the right calls for a team, you need to know what the pushback is, but the bullies and masochists on the team don’t need to know who specifically brought forward a complaint as long as the leadership accept it as a valid concern.

So if everyone knows I had a private meeting with Mike yesterday it’s going to be pretty fucking obvious that I got this from Mike unless I fib a bit about the details.

Saying a conversation during a visit happened in email sounds like about the sort of thing I might lie about while not making up the conversation from whole cloth.

Not that Sabine is perfect. I’ve let the YouTube algorithm know I want to see less of her stuff. But just because there is no email doesn’t mean there was no conversation.

She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field and thinking you're an expert in all of them.

Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague comments like this about her, but very little in the way of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem rumor mongering.

Extreme specifics: her comments on work out of MIT on Color Center Qubits was basically "finally an example of actual progress in quantum computing because of reason A, B, C". That statement was in the class of "not even wrong" -- it was just complete non sequitur. People actually in the fields she comments on frequently laugh at her uninformed nonsense. In this particular case, the people that did the study she praised were also among the ones laughing at her.

This is still extreme vague without A,B,C and an explanation why there is no connection, i.e., specifics re why she was wrong. Just more vague reference to other people's reactions

She said "because the color centers are small which would enable miniaturization". Miniaturization is the last thing these are good for, and while they are "small" for a human, they are gigantic for an electronic device. She had absolutely no idea why these new devices are useful but made sweeping comments about how they will change the field. She hyped up something silly while at the same time she complains about hype over actually interesting results. She betrayed complete incompetence on the topic while pretending to be an expert. And she does that constantly, over such trivialities, that it is just exhausting to argue about it.

So it's not "because of reason A, B, C", but just "A", and "small which would enable miniaturization" is also not "non sequitur", let alone "complete".

By the way, the "B" was the ability to "target individual qubits more easily". In what way is this "complete non sequitur"

And you also "forgot" to specify "why these new devices are useful" so that we can't check whether she even mentioned it to asses whether she has no idea (is it interconnectedness of the modular systems ("C"), single-step ease of transfer on the CMOS, compatibility with modern semiconductor fab processes, remote control, something else entirely?)

> while pretending to be an expert

Where was that? Could you link to her statement pretending to be an expert on quantum computing?

> that it is just exhausting to argue about it.

Indeed, it's much easier be very vague in your arguments, because then you can't verify any claims and don't have to respond to when such verification fails to match

No, I'm intentionally not taking a position or alleging anything. I'm pointing out the existence of some controversy. It's up to you to decide whether you want to look into it, and if yes, what sources to prefer.

I've found great success in ignoring, entirely, baseless aspersions cast by faceless anon avatars about people in the public eye.

Good for you, I, on the other side, like when people raise those concerns so I can check for myself if I need to change my views in any way