Kind of, but there's a difference between trying to stir up controversy by "just asking questions" as opposed to attacking the actual experts while overconfidently pushing competing theories, for example.

Lately she's been dabbling with soft support for well known grifters like Eric Weinstein, though last I heard she stopped short of actually endorsing his theories. I think there's just too many views to be had by courting that audience, so it becomes irresistible to engage with. The best thing a good physics communicator could do would be to completely ignore the well known physics grifters and focus on the quality content, but instead she has been leaning toward defensing Weinstein and others.

She makes really really good money. Angela Collier recently made a sad video about this.

Sabine makes a video with sponsorship included basically every day. With her subscription numbers, that's a LOT of money.

Basically, screaming that "They don't want you to hear THIS" is extremely profitable. She's a very well paid member of the anti-science ecosystem.

> This comment reads like you have a bot of an axe to grind.

I actually opened the paper and started reading and I’m commenting on that. It’s frustrating that anything less than glowing positivity about YouTube influencers draws accusations of having an “axe to grind”. I don’t have any relationship to this person.

> She acknowledged to have used it for literature research,

Right, that’s the problem I was pointing out.

Using ChatGPT for physics research (even if it’s just summarizing papers, though it’s not clear what she meant) is well known to be fraught with hallucinations.

> she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.

This is fairly misleading as it’s not hard to see her YouTube channel has found a far larger audience than her physics blog or her academic posts at institutes like the the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

In the very beginning of the paper she says she’s seeking a new affiliation.

This isn't a published paper nor is it associated with a journal. Given the atypically casual writing style I'm not sure it was ever intended for publishing in an academic journal or to be on par with her other papers.

And same logic applies to all masses, not only black holes. It’s just nearly impossible to calculate for anything besides a black hole, for a variety of reasons.

Also, the reference to “known links between the solutions of Yang-Mills theory and those of gravity” (Y-M equations describing charge and EM field) seems to speculatively imply that charge-related information is encoded in the geometry of spacetime, alongside gravitational effects

That's way over my head, sorry. How does the solution differ gravitationally, if the black hole isn't spinning? And how are positive and negative charges distinguished?

Even if you can, that doesn't tell you whether the self-repulsion is due to a positive charge repelling itself, or a negative one.

So you dodn't watch the video but have things to say about it?

Glass houses heh?

And the book is a pile of trash

And you didn't watch the 4 hour video detailing the contents of the book and the character of the authors lmao.

It can be valid without being peer-reviewed, but it isn't automatically reliable. Regardless of whether it has been tested, it could be fundamentally invalid. I don't know that it is, I don't know enough about the field to understand what's being said, my point is that the standards to have a pre-print aren't high. They're meant to keep out garbage, not to make sure that something is reasonable.

>Ad hominem attacks are not part of the scientific method

Sure, but then again neither are arguments from authority. The thing is that we're not practicing the scientific method here on HN in general. Yes, from time to time on specific tech topics there have been cases we're posters have actually gone out right then and there and tried to replicate something or test an idea. But mostly we're a talk shop, not in a bad way but fact is most real world tests and experiments aren't conducive time-wise to the amount of time a typical discussion topic stays active. Actually practicing science for real is very expensive in both time and money and requires specific niche skills few possess. It's the work of a broad network of people over months, years an decades.

So we're left depending to a significant agree on evaluating authorities and what they're saying. Which is fun, but let's not confuse where we stand here. And while argument ad hominem is a fallacy against any stronger form of argument, it can be a perfectly logically reasonable argument against argument from authority. If someone says they are a licensed doctor practicing in a specific area of medicine, and that therefore the recommendation they're making about medicine in that area of expertise is worth paying more attention to, then it's very relevant whether they are telling the truth about their credentials or not, whether they seem to be reasonably sane, etc. We're left with proxy measures, but that can't be helped. We all have to economize and stand on each other's shoulders when it comes to advanced knowledge and technologies.

That's true, it just also misses the point, like most invocations of ad hominem I come across.

People have lives outside of pursuing the scientific method. To decide to engage in that pursuit means taking away time and energy from other parts of life.

The argument here then is not that the paper is wrong because of who wrote it, but instead they insinuate that it probably is, and so it likely isn't even worth the time to try and evaluate whether it is.

This is a subtle but crucial difference, as this makes the core argument a speculation rather than a straight claim, let alone a scientific claim or refutation. And so for this, the identity of the author is a crucial bit, ad hominem cannot apply.

And this is if we make the ridiculous assumption that this was any more than just someone's informal opinion, like some sort of formal argument rather.