Life on this planet is harsh. Let's make a revolution!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8[*quote*]
3:01 / 13:40
My dream died, and now I'm here
Sabine Hossenfelder
1.19M subscribers
Apr 5, 2024 #uinutube
This is my contribution to bring the "you" back into YouTube #uinutube
You can support me on Patreon ➜
https://www.patreon.com/SabineTranscript
Follow along using the transcript.
Sabine Hossenfelder
1.19M subscribers
[*Transcript*]
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0:00 When I signed up for studying at the university, I thought being a physicist was my dream job.
0:07 But here I am, on YouTube.
0:09 How did that happen?
0:10 I think I owe you an explanation.
0:13 When I started studying at the university my expectations were based on biographies
0:18 of scientists.
0:19 They wrote a lot of letters to each other; they went to conferences.
0:22 They were thinkers and tinkerers and had sometimes heated but usually respectful arguments.
0:30 This is what I expected.
0:31 Yes, that was hopelessly naïve, I know I know.
0:35 But.
0:36 In my defense.
0:37 I don’t come from an academic background.
0:39 I come from a family of teachers and accountants and post office workers.
0:44 They’re normal people.
0:46 I did an internship in the chemical industry and another one at a bank, gleefully stamping
0:53 transfer slips.
0:54 I just didn’t know anyone with a PhD.
0:57 And those were the early 1990s.
0:59 You couldn’t just ask the internet and within a day you have 2000 people giving you advice,
1:06 and some marriage proposals along with that.
1:08 The first years at university were glorious.
1:11 Because for the first time in my life I was in the company of other people who were like
1:16 me.
1:17 At school I had always been the weird one for actually being interested in science and
1:21 maths.
1:23 But at the university everyone was like that.
1:26 We talked about everything from maths to philosophy, physics and politics.
1:31 And yes, alcohol was involved.
1:32 It was a really good time.
1:34 And that was all very nice, except I was getting older and still didn’t have a decent job.
1:39 I made a little money by selling oil paintings, those were the days people, but I didn’t
1:44 seriously think I was a particularly good artist.
1:47 I really had to get a normally job and stop asking my grandma to help out with paying
1:52 rent.
1:53 I thought that the institute of physics would give me a job when I’d finished my masters
1:58 degree with good grades.
2:00 Though technically at the time that was called a diploma.
2:03 I thought they’d give me a job that because that had worked for all the other students
2:09 previously.
2:10 If your grades were good, they’d offer you a job as a graduate student.
2:15 It wasn’t particularly great pay, but it was a real job.
2:18 And that’s where things started to go wrong.
2:22 Because I finished my exams with excellent grades.
2:25 I don’t mean to brag, but I think you need this context.
2:29 But I wasn’t offered a job because I’m a woman.
2:32 I’m not guessing that that’s what happened, I know, because they told me.
2:37 You see, the guy who was head of the institute told me that, since I’m female I should
2:44 apply for a scholarship that was exclusively for women in the natural sciences.
2:50 Because then the institute wouldn’t have to pay for me.
2:53 Makes sense, doesn’t it.
2:54 So, well, I applied for the scholarship and got it, alright.
2:58 But these scholarships don’t come with any benefits like pension savings and health insurance.
3:04 I know this sounds very German, but these things matter to us.
3:09 Also, I was now reminded on various occasions that I wasn’t actually employed at the institute.
3:14 I was just there because I had this scholarship for women.
3:17 And that was totally true.
3:20 This by the way is why I am against programs or positions that are exclusively for women.
3:26 I think that treating women differently just reinforces the prejudice that women are less
3:32 capable than men.
3:33 But I digress.
3:34 Alright, you might say, stop whining, at least I did have an income now.
3:40 Yes, so far so good.
3:42 At this time I was the only woman at the institute, except for the administration.
3:46 But the next problem was that the head of the institute made a lot of money with selling
3:50 textbooks.
3:51 He wrote very little of these textbooks himself.
3:54 Rather, he gave assignments for parts of the books to students and postdocs.
3:59 Which is why, in case you’ve ever wondered, these textbooks are so discontinuous and partly
4:04 repetitive.
4:05 He expected me to also work for him, to which I said “no”.
4:10 I was then ordered into his office, in which he gave me a very angry speech, according
4:15 to which I was not “loyal” to all the other students who did their part.
4:20 I told him that I was under no obligation to work for him and didn’t care what the
4:25 rest of the students were thinking.
4:28 He got angry, I laughed at him, he started shouting that I was fired and physically shoved
4:34 me out of his office.
4:35 True story.
4:37 The irony is that he couldn’t fire me because, if you remember, he had refused to hire me
4:43 in the first place.
4:44 I was paid by that scholarship for women and that wasn’t managed by the institute but
4:49 by the office of the university president.
4:52 I’m not just telling you this because it’s entertaining, it was also a rather rude awakening.
4:58 It made me realize that this institute wasn’t about knowledge discovery.
5:03 It was about money making.
5:06 And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn’t just this particular
5:12 institute and this particular professor.
5:15 It was generally the case.
5:17 The moment you put people into big institutions the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to
5:23 money making.
5:24 Here’s how this works.
5:25 If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, then the institution gets part of that
5:31 money.
5:32 It’s called the “overhead”.
5:34 Technically that’s meant to pay for offices and equipment and admin etc.
5:40 But academic institutions then part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to
5:45 keep that overhead coming.
5:47 Small scholarships don’t make much money, but research grants can be tens of millions
5:52 of dollars.
5:53 And the overhead can be anything between 15 and 50 percent.
5:58 This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant
6:04 money.
6:05 And partly they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants
6:12 to get paid themselves.
6:14 While the administrators who are paid on the overhead usually have permanent positions.
6:19 But you get used to this kind of crap.
6:21 And the overhead isn’t even the real problem.
6:25 The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to
6:31 produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.
6:36 That’s how academia works.
6:38 Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grand holder.
6:43 And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.
6:48 The result is a paper production machine, in which students and postdocs are burnt through
6:54 to bring in money for the institution.
6:57 Most of that money comes from your taxes.
6:59 After my PhD, I applied for another scholarship and got that and then I got a postdoc job
7:05 and a grant and another job and another job and another grant, and so on.
7:10 And I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or get hired.
7:16 You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.
7:21 You want them to be a little bit edgy.
7:24 But not too edgy, noo.
7:26 it needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.
7:30 And since most grants are 3 years or 5 years at most, it also needs to be something that
7:35 can be wrapped up quickly.
7:37 The more I saw of this, the more I realized this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life.
7:44 The other thing that happened was that the more I saw of the foundations of physics,
7:48 the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn’t based on sound scientific
7:54 principles.
7:56 I know this sounds wild, like I’m the crank next door on YouTube.
8:00 And maybe that’s what I am.
8:03 But I like to think that my argument was and still is very academic.
8:07 I never intended it to be offensive.
8:10 I just explained why thinking up new particles isn’t a good strategy for progress in physics,
8:16 and why that had gotten an entire disciple stuck.
8:19 And naïve as I was, I expected physicists to think about it.
8:23 I expected rational debate.
8:26 But that never came.
8:27 No one was interested.
8:29 No one is interested.
8:30 They were interested in writing more papers.
8:33 And that’s what they need all these particles and other wild ideas for.
8:37 To write papers.
8:39 To get grants.
8:40 To get postdocs.
8:41 To write more papers.
8:42 And round and round it goes.
8:44 Meanwhile, I had moved half around the world because that’s standard for postdocs.
8:49 It’s just expected of you.
8:51 And at some point you just accept the constant moving as normal because the only people you
8:57 know also do it.
8:59 It’s incredibly hostile to personal life, detrimental to mental health, and women suffer
9:04 from it because our reproductive reality is that we need to start families earlier than
9:11 men.
9:12 By my mid-thirties, I had somehow miraculously managed to get married and have two children.
9:18 But I couldn’t find a job anywhere near my husband.
9:21 So for several years I commuted from Frankfurt to Stockholm.
9:25 And yes, those cities are actually in different countries.
9:28 After 5 years of my murder commute, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
9:36 I constantly felt guilty for not working more and not spending more time with my kids.
9:40 My mental health was worse than ever, I was permanently stressed out, I had several nervous
9:42 breakdowns, I was constantly ill.
9:44 I decided I’d go back to Germany and not move out of country again, until the kids
9:50 were out of school.
9:51 Instead, I applied for research grants on projects that lasted one two or three years
9:57 and that could be located in Germany.
10:01 A lot of water has flown under the bridge since, so let me be honest.
10:05 At this point I’d figured out what you need to put into a grant proposal to get the money.
10:11 And that’s what I did.
10:12 I applied for grants on research projects because it was a way to make money, not because
10:18 I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science.
10:21 It’s not that was I did was somehow wrong.
10:24 It was, and still is, totally state of the art.
10:28 I did what I said I’d do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the paper,
10:34 I wrote my reports, and the reports were approved.
10:38 Normal academic procedure.
10:40 But I knew it was bullshit just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit
10:45 and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit.
10:50 The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself.
10:55 Of course, I’d try to tell myself and anyone who was willing to listen that at least unofficially
11:02 on the side I would do the research that I thought was worth my time but that I couldn’t
11:08 get money for because it was too far off the mainstream.
11:12 But that research never got done because I had to do the other stuff that I actually
11:17 got paid for.
11:19 Then COVID came and it reminded me how short life really is.
11:24 I pivoted, applied for funding on the research that I wanted to do, that I was rather afraid
11:29 wouldn’t get funded.
11:30 It didn’t get funded.
11:32 And so here we are, on YouTube.
11:34 Where I talk about why I love science and hate it at the same time.
11:40 This sounds like a sad story and in some sense it is.
11:44 Because it’s the story of a young scientist whose dream died.
11:49 And it’s the story of an old scientist who thinks they could have made a difference,
11:53 if it hadn’t been necessary to get past 5 reviewers who didn’t share my interests
11:59 because that’s what it comes down to eventually.
12:01 It’s not that they say there’s something wrong with your proposal.
12:05 It just doesn’t excite them because it’s not the main current interest.
12:10 My problem has always been that I just didn’t fit in.
12:14 But there’s a happy ending in that I’ve found you.
12:18 A community of people who share my interests.
12:21 Well, more or less, or why the heck have you not been watching my video on indefinite causal
12:27 structures.
12:28 It’s been quite a change to switch from academia to being self-employed.
12:33 I had to learn how to write invoices.
12:36 I had to register a business.
12:38 I have a tax consultant, two agents, and a twelve-person team that’s distributed over
12:43 half the world.
12:45 Very steep learning curve.
12:47 Mistakes were made.
12:49 But eventually, today, I feel good about it because unlike academic research, this is
12:54 an honest trade.
12:56 You get some of my knowledge.
12:57 I get some of your attention.
12:59 I like the simplicity of that.
13:01 And I am also heartened that there are so many people who care about obscure problems
13:06 in the foundations of physics.
13:07 Though I think you underestimate the relevance of indefinite causal structures.
13:12 So, that’s my story, no more and no less.
13:16 Please do not think that my experience with academia is universal or that I have claimed
13:21 it is.
13:22 I know many people who love academia the way it is and who think it’s working just fine.
13:27 I’m just not one of them.
13:29 Have never been, and I don’t think I’ll ever be.
13:33 I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video.
13:36 It’s a bit too much isn’t it.
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