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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer's podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.
There's no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now she's associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesn't accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We don't know. So it's hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not "a lost cause". Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, "The moral of Bell's theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory." The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It's probably only among the Bohmians that you'll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.