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Comment by firebot | Hacker News Reader

Problem with Sean and most cosmologists is they are proliferate regurgitates with little independent thought.

I really don't understand how you can put forth a criticism like this and be so vague at the same time. It really undermines your credibility. Be specific or why bother.

I have no credibility.

Sean jumps on the hype train all day long. I'm skeptical. I don't think this illustrious dark matter or big bang mean anything. So it's like that telephone game where Sean is the last person and gets to tell you what the first person said and he's always very excited but baseless. Really do like his energy. I just don't think he's much of an independent thinker.

Well, as someone with a shred of credibility, he really does have strong theoretical evidence for the things he's saying. The difficulty here is that theoretical physics is really fucking hard. Way too hard to distill down into a paragraph. I'm sure the man could do a lecture series on star formation in spiral galaxies to convince you but you're going to need a bachelor's at minimum to even start that.

I think he's easy to dismiss because much of his exposition deals in philosophical physics, it's really his specialty. There's levels of solidity. Experimental physics is reality. Theoretical physics is an explanation of reality, sometimes attempting to extend to predict the next experiment. Philosophical physics takes theoretical tools and expands them to explain everything in the Universe, including the Hard questions. I don't think it's a problem that they do it, someone should be thinking of this stuff. Do you have much experience with theoretical physics or cosmology. I have some and the math really helps make these things comprehensible and reasonable. Theoretical physics without math is indeed just continuous excited, but baseless assertions. The math fixes this

I don't believe you.

I prefer alternative theories. Plasma physics. Electric universe models.

There's Gareth Samuel on YouTube, See The Pattern. He just explores various theories. Treats them as merely theories (instead of facts) and I like that approach. It's very historic and really fleshes out ideas. Then you got the Lerner himself, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, which I think has been overwhelmingly falsified so you mean you can take Sean and his amazing fantastic firework singularity that blew up from a dimensionless point and yeah blah blah blah blah blah inflation blah blah blah acceleration blah blah blah and it makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

I'm really good at math. At least compared to most people. I'm 38 and really only started questioning the big bang maybe in the last decade, and then I found Eric Lerner and well, now I can firmly say the big bang never happened.

You might want to be careful with accepting alternative theories. They can sound very convincing when you don't understand the subject very well. Often people make illogical connections that sound nice but are either in conflict with other observations or theories, or are simply incorrect but just sound logical on the surface.

Professor Dave Explains has a lot of scientific debunking videos where he thoroughly discusses these kind of popular alternative theories. For example about the electric universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9q-v4lBGuw&t=0s

Btw, the big bang theory is not something personal from Sean Carroll. He might talk about it (a lot), but a lot of scientists talk about it, and it's a theory that has evolved over the last 100 years by thousands of scientists around the world. So in that sense it's not really "Sean" against another guy with an alternative theory. No it's 100 years of worldwide collaborative science research.

And yes it is an incomplete theory, like all the theories we currently have. But it is currently the theory that matches our observations in experiments the closest.

It could always be that we're on the wrong path, and that a completely other paradigm is necessary. And it is good to be open to such posibilities and to think about it. But as long as an alternative theory doesn't do a better job at predicting the observations we get in experiments, you can't dismiss the current theory.

> now I can firmly say the big bang never happened.

You really can't. And aren't. If you could, you would be, and people with credibility would be listening and taking you seriously. They would have to, because seriously composed arguments aren't ignorable by individuals who understand and care about the subject matter.

This is the purpose of mainstream scientific work: to take serious arguments seriously and to dispense with those that don't hold up.

Being a contrarian with crackpot theories is far easier, since the only people listening are people who don't know what they are talking about, and so all you get is false validation in response to any output.

In general, if a theory isn't endorsed by professionals in a field, it's because the theory is wrong.

They probably adhere to some crackpot theory. The focus on “independent thought” as opposed to facts point in that direction. Don’t bother.

Even before LLMs were dismissed as "stochastic parrots" (and even more so since then), I find myself noticing when people dismiss the intellectual capacity of entire groups.

"Mickey Mouse degrees", https://xkcd.com/793/, the attitude displayed by the bully in "Zero for Conduct" and similar IRL dismissals of the entire ME area in the post 9/11 discourse, mid-Brexit politicians saying the country had had enough of experts, some of my fist girlfriends' anecdotes from her childhood, town v gown, …

I don't follow.

You, like all my examples, are blithely dismissing everyone who does understand a subject that you don't understand.

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