Comment by slau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slau | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting that you cut off your quote right where you did. I feel her explanation makes complete sense:

> So, this is one of the points that I try to get across in the book, but I know that for someone who doesn't really know the math of the theories, it's hard to understand. So, let's take this example of the Higgs boson. If you have the standard model of particle physics without the Higgs boson, this theory just does not work at LHC [Large Hadron Collider] energies. You cannot make predictions with it. You get probabilities that are larger than 1; so this is obviously mathematical nonsense.

This seems to me like one of those cases where a woman can’t be confident or assertive without looking like an asshole. He was wrong, and wrong in a way she literally dedicated part of a book about, at that.

Just reading the transcripts above, she comes across as rude and condescending, not as confident and assertive

Although without knowing the tone of the interviewer before the excerpts above, I don’t know if it’s warranted

I don’t think this has anything to do with being a woman

Academics in general can be rude and condescending if you look up all the stories on the phd subreddit about the experiences of phd students with their supervisors. There are lots of stories of academia being a toxic workplace. I would presume at this point that the academic researchers themselves are a core causal factor of that phenomenon.

It doesn’t sound rude to me at all, just matter of fact. I would guess Sabine is ND in some way and this is a common misinterpretation of ND behaviours.

ND?

Neurodivergent probably

So... it _is_ rude. Just under the justification of being ND

That does not make sense to me.

AS far as i know, both the standard model and the higgs boson are proven. Why would you caveat that predictions cannot be made, by taking out the Higgs Boson ?

The analogy to what Russ Robers is making, is equivalent to her saying: "take radioactivity out of chemistry" "AHA! Now since atoms can't decay, then you cannot get certain elements, so now i can conclude that the periodic table is crap! it can't make predictions about atom size!"

Why ?

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