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Comment by wildmanx | Hacker News Reader

> Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space.

While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere.

As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, a "solution" will not only consist of a theory that "solves" the problem in the sense that Sabine described, but even propose experiments that can actually be executed within a time frame (and budget) in order to validate the theory. Just because her colleagues (and Sabine herself) have failed at that so far should not be a reason to give up. With that attitude, there wouldn't be much science left today.

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> While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere.

What I read in this article is pointing out that these black hole information loss papers are not doing science.

There are no falsifiable predictions, because we can't actually run a meaningful experiment on black holes. At least in regard to information loss. As someone else in the thread said, thinking about how things might work without a way to tell if your idea is right is philisophy. Last I heard, physics was supposed to be science and not philisophy.

Lots of results in theoretical physics couldn't be verified in experiments until decades later. It doesn't mean that it's not science if you can't make an experiment at the moment.

"Not falsifiable" commonly refers to no experiment being possible in principle. That's quite different from what you mean.

I'm not sure whether her cynicism is helpful or not. But, style aside, it seems like it's mainly a function of whether her subfield as a whole skews optimistic?

It seems like her impression is that (parts of) the high energy theory community are too optimistic to an extent where they unintentionally or intentionally deceive the public (who are ultimately funding science through taxes).

If that's correct, perhaps it can be beneficial for science as a whole to provide a counterbalance?

>> It seems like her impression is that (parts of) the high energy theory community are too optimistic to an extent where they unintentionally or intentionally deceive the public (who are ultimately funding science through taxes).

This is a fair take. I really appreciate it. Sometimes i'm too cynical about the motivations of the folks being cynical :)

Yeah, cynicism is actually terrible for science, and as a result many scientists aren't overly cynical. I think it's something that happens as folks mature: they tend to look for the positives in papers, rather than the negatives.

This has certainly been my experience in cryptography: as a student you often start off proposing schemes which get broken by your advisor/collaborators (not out of malice, but just because broken schemes are broken), and so you learn to react to novel ideas with "how is this broken?". However, as you mature, you realize that all new correct ideas arise from the ashes of many broken attempts, and so your reaction slowly changes to "how can I fix this?", leading to an overall more positive outlook on both your work as well as others' work.

You are partially correct, absolute cynicism would mean that you would see the possibility that any hypothesis can be wrong before testing it so you’d just not do any experiment at all. So you do need to be optimistic.

But that’s not what most scientists do today. They are cynics masquerading (even to themselves) as optimists. They have preprogrammed themselves to never even think of a question that has a good chance of failing, modern academia has collectively programmed them all to only ask questions that never have a real chance of being false to begin with. So just softball niche questions or in the case of the videos topic, reformulate the question in a way so that the answer doesn’t fundamentally solve the real problem. Both because the real problem might be unsolvable and also because if you solve the problem then you have fired yourself from yoUr job.

Now you might think I and Sabine and others are just shitting on scientists doing the work, but many of us are only doing so after wasting decades with this establishment and giving up. Perhaps you can see that for yourself earlier and save yourself a lifetime.

Dang man, what?????? Tell us more of this tale!

Duck Tales, woah oh!

> a reason to give up

I don't think Sabine is telling us to "give up". Let me give an example. Suppose there is an experiment that is solvable by building a super collider whose diameter is the diameter of the moon. Should we be rushing to fund it now? Or should we wait for lunar construction techniques to bring the costs down first?

Even a lot of physics myths around doing the hard thing to seed other tech is flat out wrong. There's an often claim that the ssc tech resulted in MRI superconducting magnets; but that tech was actually descended from NMR research done by petrochem (and if you can believe it, dairy) industries that precedes the SSC by 1.5 to 2 decades.

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