Hacker News Reader

This is an ad hominem attack that doesn't really help us understand whether the core substance of her argument is true, which is what really matters.

which is what really matters

Says who? This isn't a debate and you're not the debate moderator.

For my money, interesting things about the author are absolutely on topic. They help us put what we're reading in context.

And opinions are okay here too.

>This isn't a debate

It's a public discussion of an important matter, and these tend to go best when people present arguments based on their positions. When someone like you fails to do this, then I tend to assume that it is because they lack such.

edit: here is a link from below that is an example of such an argument: https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/large-hadron-collider-f...

With apologies for Appeal to Authority: Paul Graham elucidates the low value of Ad Hominem in his post How To Disagree: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

It's not as though the author's biases or background are completely irrelevant; but discussing them is unhelpful without additional clarifications on the mistakes, ignorances, or dishonesties alleged.

Imagine a different context: maybe I have a strong opinion as a lay citizen on campaign finance issues. It's all well and good for someone to enter saying "I'm a political operative/lobbyist/etc, and you don't know what you're talking about"; but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't (which would be just as helpful and pertinent if I had turned out to be an expert anyway).

> but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't

I don't think it's a zero-information statement at all. If S. Weinberg tells me that my physical arguments are wrong but he doesn't have the time to say how/why, then it's certainly a non-zero information statement and I'll scrutinize my line of thoughts thoroughly after that. Dismissing this as a zero information statement would be pretentious from my part. The same goes for you against the expert in political finances.

It seems that there's an underlying assumption in your argument that we're all equal and equally capable of having opinions on anything unless someone comes to us, and spends time thoroughly showing us why we are wrong. Or that we are all correct until proven wrong. This is problematic because 1/ we're not all equal, and acknowledging that we dont know everything is important, 2/ it's unlikely that there's always an expert around willing to spend time educating us everytime we feel the need of commenting on things we dont know, and 3/ we may not comprehend why we are wrong by lack of proper education.

I’ve heard a lot of the terms from that post but never read it. it’s extremely awesome and thanks for sharing. Was particularly inspired by this line:

You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

Here are some thorough debunkings of this line of reasoning

https://twitter.com/srrappoccio/status/1087839488557105153

https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1087836008585019392

Neither of those twit sequences directly address the points made. Yes, a larger collider would probe the Higgs field with more precision. It would lead to more precise measurements of what is already known. The question at hand is "is it worth 20 billion dollars"? And if it is, why are all the press releases surrounding the proposal hyping up new physics?

I don't see a thorough debunking to be honest. The first commentor points to the practical results of particle accelerators. The Vox article (and the blog author) acknowledge this fully. But all examples that are given are the result of past accelerators, where we had reasonable expectations to find new technology because we were still exploring the standard model. This is not the case for a larger accelerator, and this is Hossenfelders point.

The second commenter follows a similar logic. He doesn't seem to engage the point that we don't expect the discovery of something new, he seems to suggest that scientists should build bigger accelerators simply because we can.

But he must know that this is not how science works. Chemists don't just simply perform all imaginable chemical reactions just to completely map the space of chemistry. We allocate scarce resources like time and money to experiments that, according to our best models, may yield promising results. We have ideas for experiments like this in physics, they just happen to not involve a larger accelerator. Scientists are not blind cartographers.

That is not at all how science works. Models yield predictions about the world, not "results" as you suggest. We design experiments to test if those predictions, and thus the models, are correct. Often, new "results" are found when a model fails, and that is why we test boundary conditions.

There is no way of predicting which line of work is likely to yield new physics as you suggest there is.

The first link is not very compelling. Nobody disputes that particle physics has produced useful derivates for humanity in the past. The question is whether it will in the future, and whether they will be worth $20B.

> Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.

This kind of observation is valuable, I think, even if it's only statistically true. Certain disciplines encourage practitioners to work within conventions and with capabilities that closely match the activity of blogging (or being on Twitter). For other disciplines, tweeting/blogging is very far from the core competencies, so practitioners who do pursue it are more likely to be outliers.

The other, not-so-neutral aspect of this is the narcissism problem. People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.

I agree. I've come to the same realization recently when I started following the work of some CS researchers. I was (and still am) amazed to see how active they are on the internet (here, twitter, medium, youtube, github, blogs, etc.)

In the far more conservative physics community, there are (essentially) only two ways of communicating that are acceptable: writing academic papers, or delivering academic talks. Online presence is seen with suspicion.

I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

>People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.

Spot on.

In my experience many of the CS people who are most active are basically doing it for career visibility reasons and much of what they post is either highly misleading or exaggerated to the level of clickbait. But it depends who we are talking about.

I was thinking specifically of the AI/ML folks. Many top researchers from universities, google, open ai, fair, etc. are super active online. I don't think they do it for career visibility.

There's a cargo cult blogging thing going on in ML, where you also have a large number of tutorials written by variably-competent people written not to inform, but to look good. As I'm sure you know, the results are fairly mixed.

>much of what they post is either highly misleading or exaggerated to the level of clickbait

Could you give some specific examples of each, name some names?

Sincere question: what’s crazy about her article? It seemed pretty fact-based to me, and I don’t understand what she was twisting.

For a reasonable rebuttal of her arguments, please take a look at this article on slate [1]. The main argument against her article is that progress in science is not just measured by how many particles you've discovered this year. (disclaimer: former HEP physicist here)

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/large-hadron-collider-f...

That article is nowhere near a rebuttal of Hossenfelder. It makes a semi-decent case that the LHC was not a failure, which no one is disputing AFAICT. It doesn't even attempt to argue that a new, bigger accelerator is a good idea... unless you count the mere juxtaposition of the hypothetical new accelerator with the non-failure of the LHC, which is a despicable, manipulative form of persuasion.

Then there's this:

> Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world.

Which is Not Even Wrong. It sounds like it was generated by a Markov bot trained on quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson.

See for example https://twitter.com/srrappoccio/status/1087839488557105153

Yes, and that she has a book to promote with the same thesis doesn't help matters... It makes it look even more like a selfish cry for attention and ultimately money. She has something interesting to say, but to say that the Higgs Boson measurement was somehow well predicted is... odd. One could also make similar arguments against the Gravity Wave observatories, but now that we've actually seen (and continue to see) events, that is silly.

Really, there was a golden age of particle physics when it was easier to theorize and find things. Maybe the allocation of money should be different, but that has more to do with politics and how governments make funding decisions. How do they view the benefits of what we learn building an LHC, collecting, and analyzing the data? You can argue about whether those benefits matter to physics... but Tim Berners-Lee had to work somewhere.

Gravitational wave observatories are not the same thing at all. They're a new kind of telescope, and new cosmology and astrophysics results are going to keep coming in. Confirming yet another prediction of GR is icing.

Two of the most popular and active bloggers in HEP are totally crazy and politically extreme

May I ask who the other crazy person is?

Motl

I would second your observations. The blog seems to whining about things without substance or any constructive propseal. It even runs the risk of bashing those who dedicate their life in exploring nature. It is stromgly recommended that the German lady think more maturely ...