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Comment by budu3 | Hacker News Reader

On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world.

> I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out

Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?

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There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the tenure committee).

You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.

It just dawned on me that I should of course disclose I work at the Perimeter Institute. However, I actually disagree a lot with Neil Turok on hiring philosophy and what PI's priorities should be, in a way that makes me very sympathetic toward this former physicist. But I know nothing about her actual work (she left before I arrived), and for all I know Neil made the right decision and it wasn't close.

When people say things like "really courageous" (Hossenfelder) and "really very different and hardly acknowledged by leading researchers in the field" (Turok), those are polite ways of damning someone with faint praise in writing a recommendation letter for them if you think they're a crackpot. Only Lloyd struck me as genuine in that article (and Hossenfelder because she's in a similar spot, not because of her quote)

>On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world.

And a huge gain for everyone else?

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