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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.”

I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; check your ego at the door. I know nothing about him... but in my book, Lubos Motl can go pound sand.

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Motl is notorious for this sort of thing. He once called me a "category 5 loon" because something I said in a talk was wrong. But the reason it was wrong is because I was advancing it as a straw-man precisely to show it was wrong.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-...

That sounds like a great HN handle.

I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk.

Also read the comments, where he says:

I am watching the talk (final minutes now) and except for the history, meaning of interpretations etc., he actually understands QM more correctly than many people employed as physicists...

(The audacity! Someone that actually watches the thing they'll be bitching about!)

[0]: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanic...

> I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk.

What makes you think I stopped reading? How do you think I knew that he was attacking a straw man (and hence making a fool of himself)?

> read the comments

Well, that's nice. I feel vindicated. But that doesn't change the fact that he published a totally unwarranted ad hominem attack directed at me based on incomplete information and never retracted it, let alone apologized for it. (Sorry, but a comment doesn't count. Most people don't read the comments.) So I stand by my position that his behavior was unprofessional to say the least.

> What makes you think I stopped reading?

Well his complaints about the talk are after the "loon" bit, and you didn't say anything to the effect of, "well he called me a loon but did explain his position", so I figured.

I explained it as clearly as I could: he called me a loon because I said something that was wrong. And he was correct: the thing he claims is wrong is indeed wrong.

What he failed to notice (or at least failed to mention) was that the wrong comment was preceded by me saying, "I am about to tell you something that is wrong because it makes an interesting and illuminating puzzle to figure out why it is wrong." And it was followed by me saying, "Obviously what I just told you can't be right (because if it were I would at the very least have won the Nobel prize in physics), so there must be a flaw in the reasoning. But where is it? Well, it's here..."

Lubos Motl hasn't been in academia for almost a decade. Almost everyone inside and outside it finds him obnoxious.

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.

So you'd rather people quietly knife you in review? Because that's what happens if you penalize people for public rudeness. Personally, I'd rather have a loud critique to my face than a polite one behind my back or, even worse, no engagement at all.

I don't need your politeness or friendship when I'm putting forth some new theory. I need accurate, engaged criticism and the number of people who will do that is vanishingly small. And a lot of the ones who will do that have social issues almost by definition.

At least the quote pulled out here isn't useful critique, it's just insulting. I think that's the distinction being drawn here.

Accurate, engaged criticism is great, that stuff belongs everywhere.

"I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper" is not accurate, engaged criticism, it's mean-spiritedness under a veneer of toughness.

It's easy and fun to be rude and insulting, and when you can get away with it because of the subculture you're writing within, why not, right? Because being a dick is being a dick no matter who or where you are, that's why, and being a dick doesn't advance anything beyond your own momentary joy.

Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.

Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.

I disagree. The blunt people (who come off as "dicks" to the outsiders) are like a community's immune system. They protect the community against the sort of people who take accurate engaged criticism, make one or two changes to fix specific issues, and then resubmit their work, wasting the community's time and resources, driving off the people who are making good-faith efforts to help the community. They're not being dicks "just for fun". They're protecting the time and attention of other community members by saying bluntly what many other people are often thinking.

Communities that have too many of these people become closed and ossified. Communities that have none of these people evaporate, as the core contributors just walk away and find better things to do than deal with people who are more interested in getting fame and attention for themselves than making good-faith efforts to advance the project of the community. The trick is to find a good balance.

There's the constructive rude:

> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! ...To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

And then there's this:

> It's a Category 5 loon. Popular sources are full of anti-Copenhagen crackpot pseudoscience and of exactly this kind of bullshit – claims that the proper Copenhagen quantum mechanics implies superluminal or acausal effects (for the latter, see some largely confused fresh text by Nude Socialist about entangled photons in graves, London, and Beijing: this sort of stuff gets produced every minute, it seems) – but you may still find people who think that the presentation should be even more anti-Copenhagen.

http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechani...

That's pretty much what academia told Motl.

He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is.

Characterizing him as an example of any sort of trend in academia is both uninformed and deeply insulting.

> He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is.

It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then.

They certainly seem to be presenting him as someone worth paying attention to.

> It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then.

Is it harder than to understand that they publish an article with the false title and false interpretations?

As others have mentioned, Lubos Motl is no longer in academia. He seemed to have spent more time criticizing others (and not just their works) than on actual physics. His appointment at Harvard was not reviewed.

I'm frankly surprised New Scientist bothered to quote him.

Eh - I meant "not renewed"

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.

vs all those "I just don't believe in being fake and sugar coating things" folks in every other industry? Not much unique to academia on that front.

Like food critics, some have taken the art of shitting on things to absurd heights.

"I find this theory highly disagreeable, it contradicts findings by X and Y et al."

Compared with:

"I once asked my dog for a theory on the nature of the universe, whereupon which he vomited violently on the floor. This explanation has more truth to it than the one presented in this paper, which I can only presume was written by students who, in their youth, were savagely beaten upside the head by their parents much to the detriment of their intellect."

He's engaging in a power fantasy that has a fellow scientist as a student. I'll bet this guy is a lot of fun to have as a professor.

For me, more interesting "gossip-like" detail that Motl enviously mentions is the "money" Verlinde received. Wikipedia has the details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde

"In June 2011, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded Verlinde the Spinoza Prize, the highest award available to Dutch scientists including a 2.5 million euro grant for future research.[14] The committee cited his work on the Verlinde formula, the Witten–Dijkgraaf–Verlinde–Verlinde equations, the Cardy-Verlinde formula and entropic gravity as the major achievements leading to the award."

By the way, my impression is that reading Motl is not a pleasant experience for anybody but himself.

He's not exactly a crank, but he's not a working physicist either, afaik.

I'm being pedantic, but I downvoted you because you started with the obvious observation "Motl is really really rude" (yeah, he's a real piece of work, check out the rest of his blog for stuff much worse), and then wrote "I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.", which isn't supported by the observation that that one guy is rude. (But the rest of your comment is fine.) Individual people can be really rude with or without it being a cultural problem. There's no need to bring academia up like that—that's a lot of people, decent people, and most of them are really quite nice people and good scientists.

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