The contrarian physics podcast subculture
timothynguyen.org
timothynguyen.org
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
People like musk and bezos and ai hype et al.
Made me realize I was projecting some aspects of her interest in rational thought all wrong.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
That being said, I thought the idolatrous fawning over Musk about 10 years ago, by the same people who now hate him, was obnoxious and sickening even then. Which goes to show: simply wait 5 minutes for the mob's little gods and petty messiahs to fall from grace, before they move onto the next celebrity to worship.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
It's very pleasant to see someone else saying it, too. Thank you.
We are not perfect creatures and sometimes do immoral things, for various reasons. But we did those things, nobody else did them.
That also suggests a practical guideline: whatever your rationale for taking action, anticipate living with that rationale for years and years. If you can’t see it looking the same 10 years from now, perhaps that is a strong clue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.
Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)
The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.
One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time
and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice
Religious belief is same biological phenom, chasing endless propagation of the religion.
Minds go fractal. It's like Snowcrash but they’re not blank, they speak in tongues, circumlocuting gibberish.
But they failed. Gödel's incompleteness theorm is now a widely accepted part of mathematical canon.
In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.
Touch grass.
And if we take that as fact, that means Zuck's culpability is nigh unprecedented in private enterprise. The mega-scale profiteering of Apple & Microsoft & Amazon distort markets and elbow out competition but that doesn't compare to the personal misery and destabilization and resulting downstream poverty and violence caused by social media. Purveyors of booze and cigarettes are closer, but those things never threatened democracy or global order. Fossil fuel companies may contribute to climate change, but no one can saddle them with full moral responsibility for selling a product that's the lifeblood of the world. Weapons manufacturers didn't start the wars or cause the instability.
So Zuck and his algorithmic friends - what to make of them? The mind boggles.
There was a time when it was a mixed bag with some bad stuff but some connecting of friends and letting people find new ones. Then the algorithmic timelines and other stuff came. Since then I think it has become a strong net negative.
On balance it’s the worst thing tech has built. Worse, I think, than crypto gambling. It might be worse than the mass surveillance stuff in terms of, as you say, mental destabilization and social harm.
She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.
I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en
and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.
Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".
Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.
There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.
> at least those I read
You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence
> She is pure show
less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.
Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.
I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.
It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.
I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to others. Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
It happens for a reason. There's something deeply satisfying about being a contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
E.g. I've probably talked about various aspects and extensions to the ISIS routing protocol with in-field experts for more hours than I could think to add together... but the bulk of my practical understanding really comes from the (comparatively) small amount of time I spent building custom implementations, debugging other implementations, and deploying ISIS in various locations. I probably couldn't have done the latter nearly as well without the former, but the latter is where I went from suggesting protocol changes that sounded reasonable to making critiques that were actually actionable
Similarly, I know I know BGP more than your average person, enough to sound like the protocol experts, but I lack most all of the practical working and experimentation knowledge. If you asked me what I think should be changed about BGP I'd probably rattle off a decent list, and it'd probably sound pretty convincing, yet I doubt I would even agree with half of it if I had the other half of the mental model built (or I told it to someone who specialized in BGP). That kind of step doesn't (and usually can't) come from working deeply in a different area (even if similar) and "talking the talk" about the other area.
That said, what makes social media addicting, especially in areas where specialists like to coalesce (HN is one such place, IMO) is you can get a TON of that kind of conversation, data, and readings about anything. Then it makes you overconfident because you got that style of interaction without even doing anything remotely related to that area.
All of this reminds me I've spent far too much time on HN... and I'm entering 12 days of PTO. Time to set noprocast to something ridiculous :).
https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared
I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.
Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...
But I agree social media has also made this dynamic more pervasive as well as distorted it in many ways
I don't see how you can make this claim. Putting aside the fact that these two groups were diverse, contrarian they were not. (Socrates, known for posing questions to fellow Athenians and his students, wasn't a contrarian. He was interested in arriving at the truth and challenging the Sophists, the quintessential bullshitters, who were interested in power.)
If anything, modernism tends to be more contrarian, and even when not by intention, then at least by construction. Think of the philosophical positions that fall under this label. Skeptical denial and making weird assumptions is sort of characteristic.
That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
Some or most of what these people discuss might be true, often because it’s low stakes or obvious. This builds trust and leads people to believe that the person is a universally trustworthy source.
Then they drift into topics where they are incorrect, don’t understand the subject matter, or have been misled by other grifters but they deliver the message just the same as everything else. To the uninformed parts of the audience it feels every bit as accurate and genuine as all of their other content.
This is a very common pattern in the health and fitness world. Andrew Huberman is the current most famous example of someone who has some narrow scientific knowledge but has shared a lot of incorrect and misleading content outside of his domain. He’s the guy who claimed he had to stop wearing Bluetooth headphones because he believed the radio waves were hearing his skin up and he didn’t like it, for reference. He’s been caught out recently as his fan base has started to realize he’s not the genius about every topic that he presents himself as.
But I'd like to avoid other associations people now have with Sabine Hossenfelder; does anyone know of a similar quality video on the topic?
Her (expletive-laden) message was essentially: "Weinstein is my friend. Yes, his theory is bullshit, but so is all of theoretical physics." Seriously, aren't you one of them? You would rather throw your entire academic field under the bus to defend your friend? (And mind you, what a great way to defend your friend, calling his theory bullshit.)
This blog post is incredibly illuminating and explains a lot. It's a prime example of "Don't expect someone to understand something when their YouTube paychecks depend on them not understanding it", a.k.a. audience capture.
It's also an important reminder of the precarious situation laypeople are in - being unable to tell what's true and what's bs, and often relying on social cues like how confident someone sounds. We are all laypeople in most fields and are subject to easy manipulation by various confident-sounding grifters and LLMs.
His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons.
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school
The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.
> A working model may be requested in applications for alleged perpetual motion devices.
The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica.
But if you've never heard about Drebbel, perpetual motion is the reason. That wasn't his only invention, of course. He also invented:
* The first cybernetic system (a thermostat; a self-governing oven for incubating eggs)
* The first air conditioning system
* The first functional submarine
* Magic lanterns, telescopes (including the one used by Galileo), microscopes, camera obscuras, and pump drainage systems (credited for draining cambridge and oxford)
He was also a beautiful artist — he made engravings of topless women teaching men science and math (the seven liberal arts). Actually, maybe that's why he was erased? IDK. But he was definitely a free thinker and 100% legit. Look him up.
That sounds awesome, but it also sounds like it's conflating two things: (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input and (2) a machine with automatic passive energy draw from ambient sources, but with the usual inefficiencies familiar to physics and engineering.
Sounds like Drebbel did (2). Which, don't get me wrong, absolutely rocks. But I certainly wouldn't want to use (2) to advertise a moral that even laws of thermodynamics were just yet another fiction from untrustworthy institutions, which seems like the upshot you were landing on.
Obviously, Drebbel was on the scene long before the laws of thermodynamics... so my upshot is definitely not that we should reconsider entropy because of his patent!
I suppose my upshot is that scientific establishments absolutely can expel excellent people for the wrong reasons. "Everyone knows" that perpetual motion is impossible... I'm actually a little surprised that you didn't understand my point — but you instead concluded I was a crank trying to attack entropy? Oh well, it happens, it's the internet, I don't blame you.
Another historical tidbit: the Royal Society of Hooke, Newton, etc all loved Drebbel's works. No wonder: Drebbel had a staring role in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis which was the model for the Royal Society.
So I'm not sure what the the upshot was of suggesting he was "scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows perpetual motion is impossible" if it wasn't implying some kind of institutional conspiracy that wrongly dismissed "perpetual motion", which only works if you treat (1) and (2) the same.
Moreover we're discussing this in 2025 and in this context we normally mean (1), and it was in response to a comment about (1) that you entered Drebbel's invention as if it belonged to that category.
Drebbel’s patent: > “We have received the petition of Cornelis Jacobsz. Drebbel, citizen of Alkmaar, declaring that, after long and manifold investigations, he has at last discovered and practiced two useful and serviceable new inventions. The first: a means or instrument to conduct fresh water in great quantity, in the manner of a fountain, from low ground up to a height of thirty, forty, fifty or more feet, through lead pipes, and to raise it upward by various means and in whatever place desired, continually to flow and spring without ceasing. The second: a clock or timekeeper able to measure time for fifty, sixty, even a hundred or more years in succession, without winding or any other operation, so long as the wheels or other moving works are not worn out.”
I mean, I don’t blame people for being skeptical! Neither do I blame people that discount claims like “perpetual motion” or “theories of everything”— after all, they are associated with cranks and charlatans. But I do blame those that dismiss them entirely, out of hand. This was the case for Drebbel, when several 19th century reviewers lumped him with all the Alchemists and called them all frauds.
Now, Drebbel had the opportunity to demonstrate that his inventions worked — without stage trickery. Furthermore, his ideas and mechanical theories also bore other fruit.
To the OP, I don’t understand UM or the critique. If the theory is good, it will lead to some interesting output.
(Aside: GPT5 seems to have become much better at sourced humanities research, though it still has limitations. See how it pulled material for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68a79d89-d194-8007-a8fa-c367cbf3fd... )
I've come to believe that this petty behavior is the default in most people. If in the mind of the observer something is impossible, and if that something is shown to be possible, it is ALWAYS attributed to trickery.
It takes a wise man to carefully examine a claim without being gullible. (My modified version of the rather banal quote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but it ALSO require extraordinary investigation.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_radiation_of_charge...
I believe that which is often referred to as the stagnation of physics is in a large part due to this instant-rejection in the modern physics community. There's plenty of "single point mutation" theories (think hypothesize particles with negative masses, hypothesize underlying elements below the standard model so that reactions once again obey the chemical conservation numbers,...) which individually are easy to lampoon, and are henceforth ignored (i.e. for negative masses simulations show they can pair up and accelerate indefinitely, or for a beyond-the-standard-model atomistic theory one can easily refer to the spectrum of hydrogen or positronium, and highlight that a single photon can excite it to a higher state, and then emit 2 lower energy photons).
What if our current interpretations form a very successful local optimum? I.e. suppose we can provably rule out each crooked idea if its the only modification in a theory, then we might be collectively conclude to rule them out in general, as they fail so embarassingly, but perhaps simultaneous consideration of 2 crooked ideas can make the inconsistencies disappear.
Imagine voting as a group of physicists on the most interesting crooked ideas, gathering the top 10, and then exhaustively going through the 2^10=1024 combinations, where bit K decides if crooked idea K is "enabled" a specific one of the 1024 candidates.
That wasn't the claim and is beside the point. The reference to the patent office illustrated what notion of "perpetual motion" we were using when Drebels invention was offered as an example of one. No amount of equivocation between the formal understanding and evolving historical understanding makes Drebels device into that in ths context and I don't understand the point is of trying to equivocate about it.
Edit: As a matter of fact the patent office did grant patents for devices just like this, such as the Atmos clock which relied on passive environmental energy draw and weren't confused about it being a perpetual motion machine. So again, Drebel's device didn't belong to that category which was the category we were talking about in this context.
Drawing from an ambient energy source is perfectly legitimate, and is not what anyone meant by perpetual motion machine in the context of this thread. Next you say "but that distinction didn't exist at the time" and then I say "but it did in the comment section here where the example was introduced" and round and round we go.
That's easy to make. If you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever.
If doing it in space is not allowed, then you have to allow machines that take advantage of terrestrial conditions such as drawing energy from ambient sources.
Even interstellar space is not 100% vaccuum. So it will slow from the occasional contact with matter. No doubt it would take a very long time, though.
Well yeah, that's (2), not (1), so no one's disallowing those.
Edit: And although it's kind of moot, I'm not sure what the relationship is between space and ambient draw such that disallowing one would necessitate allowing the other.
Is it possible for a man to run 100m in less than 10 seconds? If he's not allowed to run on any kind of surface. So now we've proven that it's impossible to run 100m in less than 10 seconds?
Science is interested in principle. Engineering is interested in practice.
You don't need to walk 1000km or 1001km or 1002 km to know that, in principle, these can be done.
For a while YOShInOn was showing me a lot of papers in MDPI journals where somebody made wearable device that had peizeoelectric crystals that harvest energy from the wearer's motion or remote sensor stations that are powered by raindrops
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996074
or sensor dust that captures power from WiFi emissions
For a nice little English language piece on him and his "air conditioning": https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sh...
> we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.
That seems high, but I can't contextualize it based only on these results. What would the figures be for doctors, blacksmiths, farmers, computer programmers, etc.? I guess you're likely to find disproportionate numbers of children who followed in their parents' footsteps in any profession. It's likely not something special to academia.
In any case, there are plenty of other factors that contribute beyond nepotism: early guidance and encouragement, support and understanding of career choices, parental expectations or pressures, genetics, and so on.
> Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.
Ok, this is a bit more suggestive, but it's also plausible to me that the factors I mentioned above are amplified for children of parents working at prestigious universities.
> Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.
This seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me. The results show that children of academic parents go into academia more than others, not that "socioeconomic privilege" predisposes to going into academia. For example, are the children of billionaires (or millionaires) more likely to go into academia than the children of humble academics at non-prestigious universities? I doubt it.
(I only read the abstract so please let me know if these points are addressed in the article)
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
That is the heart of every con, isn't it? Tell people what they want to hear.
I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them.
Surely this can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
"DISC" is literally just shorthand for "people who disagree with me are conspiring."
The problem, as I understand it, is that Weinstein simply isn't "doing science". He's "doing big thinkies" and then complaining when the world doesn't snap to attention. That problem has not much at all to do with his specific ideas.
He's set himself up a win-win situation by creating a crux. If GU is rejected, that supports his narrative. If GU is embraced, he’s vindicated as a suppressed genius. In either case, he wins in his own story.
Eric wants to be celebrated by science, but the only way to achieve that (rigorous math, predictions, peer review) would force him to abandon the very posture that sustains his popularity.
Eric's draft contains an unusual statement that says "this work [...] may not be built upon without express permission of the author". To the extent that this refers to derivative works which substantially reuse the text of the paper, this is normal copyright law. To the extent that this refers to the use of scientific ideas or discoveries, this is not enforceable under US copyright law. Copyright cannot prevent anyone from citing or responding to a work. See, e.g., https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf.
(I am an academic, not a lawyer.)
Two things we noticed were: (1) there weren’t really that many crackpot submissions but they were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”
From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia
https://www.verywellhealth.com/paranoia-5113652
particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman
and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.
Let me guess: theoretical particle physics, relativity, gravity, and magnetism?
It's a label that sounds like something from some amateurish elementary school book of "historical inventors" or some cheesy popularization of science from the 1950s that propagates the view that there are these mythical creatures called "inventors" who appear once in a generation to bring fire to humanity.
Touché.
Actually this isn't true, at least as far as anything the public needs to care about is concerned. There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that. The model can use whatever intricate math it wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.
The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
"The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval (as in pre-Newtonian, and increasingly pre-germ theory), and while it's important to maintain political support, it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN.
In fact, it's not reasonable to expect a very smart lay person to do the same. The problem is basically that the information that gets encoded in papers and public datasets is not spanning! There's a shocking amount of fiddly details that don't get transmitted for one reason or another. Say what you want about how things "should" be done, but that's how they are done. If you want things done differently you can encourage that behavior by rubbing cash on the problem.
No, it isn't. It's determined by whether the models make accurate predictions. The fact that in our society, science is viewed as an authority, where Scientists can pontificate as "experts" without having to back up their claims with a predictive track record, is a bug, not a feature.
> "The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval
The public doesn't care about "science literacy" in terms of understanding the models. Nor does the public have to. If the models make good predictions, that will be obvious to the public if it's something the public cares about.
A good example is GPS. "The public" has no clue how GPS actually works, and doesn't understand all the nuances that had to be carefully considered in order to get it to work as accurately and reliably as it does. Building and maintaining the system requires experts, yes. But knowing that GPS works is simple: does your smartphone show you where you are accurately? The fact that it does is strong evidence that GPS works, since GPS is what your smartphone uses to do that. (Yes, I know there are other things involved as well, like your smartphone having access to accurate maps. Your smartphone being able to tell you accurately where you are is also strong evidence that the people who produced those maps were doing it right.) And "the public" can make this simple observation without having to know anything about the details of how GPS does what it does.
> it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN.
Nor does Joe Schmoe have to. Joe Schmoe doesn't care. The cutting edge physics experiments being done at CERN have no practical impact on anything in anyone's daily life, unless you're one of the people who has to analyze the data.
But if you come and tell Joe Schmoe that hey, this new discovery they just made at CERN means everyone has to suddenly turn their entire lives upside down, then Joe Schmoe is going to want to see the predictive track record that backs that up. And it better be a strong track record, of predictions that affect people's daily lives, not just what tracks are going to be observed in CERN's detectors.
Here's another example: prediction of possible impacts on Earth by comets and asteroids. Astronomers have an extensive track record of being able to predict, years in advance, the trajectories of such objects, with an accuracy much smaller than one Earth radius--i.e., accurately enough to be able to distinguish an actual impact from a close approach. So if astronomers ever come out in public and say, we're tracking this comet and it's going to hit the Earth 29 years, 3 months, and 7 days from now, and here's the region where it's going to hit, and we'd better start planning to either alter its trajectory or set ourselves up to withstand the hit, yes, they can make that claim credibly because of their track record. But most public claims by scientists, even "experts", don't achieve that high bar--and that means the public is perfectly justified in just ignoring them.
And it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said. Fortunately, it's not a priesthood that is linked to your family or a caste or some wildly selective process. All you have to do is spend a few years studying (2-6 depending on the particularities). You can learn the language and basically that makes you an expert too.
What society do you live in where scientists' expertise is taken on face value and acted on without substantial pushback and criticism? I'd like to live there, maybe.
> means everyone has to suddenly turn their entire lives upside down
This happened. Starting over a century ago, and continuing ever since with increasing loudness, urgency, and accuracy. And yet. The US is making it harder to build solar and wind power.
What's so hard to understand about "does your smartphone show you where you are accurately"?
> What society do you live in where scientists' expertise is taken on face value and acted on without substantial pushback and criticism?
Um, planet Earth? What you describe is exactly what happened during Covid, for example.
> This happened. Starting over a century ago, and continuing ever since with increasing loudness, urgency, and accuracy.
What are you talking about?
If you're talking about the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, those didn't turn people's lives upside down. Various technologies based on QM eventually did affect people's lives significantly, though I wouldn't say they've turned them upside down, but in any case that had nothing to do with scientists making predictions about them. GPS is the first technology based on relativity that has significantly affected people's lives, but again I wouldn't say it's turned lives upside down.
What has turned people's lives upside down is, for example, the scientific pronouncements about Covid that led to governments imposing lockdowns that did nothing to stop the spread of Covid, but took away countless people's livelihoods.
My man, what on earth are you talking about w.r.t. Covid? There was substantial pushback. From early days. People ate horse paste. Entire states tried their best to let it rip. Even now wearing a mask has become political signaling, and vaccines are being targeted by the US executive.
I was talking about the link between carbon emissions and climate. I thought I'd do you the courtesy of a direct example that does ask people to fundamentally change their lives.
And I fear you've built a sizeable and unfortunate filter bubble for yourself. America had mild inconveniences, but we never had lockdowns. Nobody was ticketed for walking outside of their house. We closed schools (a good idea, because kids get sick and spread disease), and tried to stop people from gathering indoors unnecessarily (also unsuccessfully, mind you).
The US also fared terribly as a result of our ineffective and largely unsuccessful policies. It should be still another source of ongoing national shame. We did worse than Sweden, which is humiliating.
It's quite obvious from your position on this matter that you're not a practicing scientist, so it's very unfortunate that your position is so assertive, as it's mostly wrong.
To understand the predictions, as it were, you do have to understand the experiments; if you don't, you have no way of knowing if the predictions actually match the outcomes. Most publications involve some form of hypothesis-prediction-experiment-result profile, and it is the training and expertise (and corroboration by other experiments, and time) that help determine which of those papers establish new science, and which ones go out with last week's trash. The findings in these areas are seldom accessible until the field is very advanced and/or in practical use, as with the example of GPS you gave elsewhere.
> The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality.
There is; it's called a textbook.
There's one apparatus (of each type) and each "experiment" ends up with its own team. Each team develops their own terminology, publishes in one set of papers, and the peer reviews are by... themselves.
I don't work at CERN, but that criticism was from someone who does.
They were complaining that they could not understand the papers published by a team down the hall from them. Not on some wildly unrelated area of science, but about the same particles they were studying in a similar manner!
If nobody else can understand the research, if nobody else can reproduce it, then it's not useful science!
Note that this isn't exactly the same as Sabine's criticism of CERN and future supercolliders, but it's related.
1) People at CERN publish papers in "normal" physics journals, which do the usual peer review. Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment. There is, of course, also an internal reviewing for each collaboration, but it is to improve the quality and something totally natural and obvious if you want to have a collaboration (by definition, a collaboration is a place where people read each other work and feedback to each others). But it is totally different from "the work is only reviewed by the collaboration".
2) I've worked ~5 years in one experiment, and ~5 years in another, and I did not notice any different terminology. In both experiments, I've very rapidly met and learned the name of people of other experiments working on similar subject. I don't know any workshop or conference where the invited scientists are not from different experiment. During these events, there are a lot of exchanges.
3) What is true, and it is maybe the reason of your misunderstanding, is that you are strongly advised to not share non-cross-checked material outside of the collaboration. The goal is to avoid biasing the independent experiments: if you notice a strange phenomena that will later turn out to be a statistical fluctuation or if you use a new methodology that will later turn out to have unnoticed systematical biases, if you mention this to the other experiment, you will "contaminate" them: they may focus their research or adopt the flawed methodology. But this is only for non-cross-checked and it does not make any sense to pretend that it has a negative impact (a lot of scientists, in collaboration or not, towards all history, don't like to share their preliminary results before they acquired a good confidence that what they saw it reliable).
4) Do you have example of things that one could not understand while it was done down the hall from them? I don't recall "not being able to understand" (the point of a publication is to explain, so people care about making it understandable). I do recall "harder to understand", but it was often from people from the same collaboration, and the reason was because of they needed to use some mathematical tools I did not know and that there was not really any other way.
I'm sure there are cases where two groups end up diverging and it makes the collaboration more challenging. But I really doubt it is not something exceptional, and that everyone in the collaborations will try to mitigate.
Your comment makes me wonder to which extend the outsiders of CERN don't have plenty of crazy myths totally disconnected from the reality. I guess it is a good example why people like Hossenfelder are a problem: they feed on these myths and cultivate them.
They don't though! They farm it out to expert physicists, which in the case of CERN research almost certainly also work at CERN.
> Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment.
But were they from CERN?
> Do you have example
This was a few years ago, it was a comment here on HN, but it would be hard to dig it up without an AI reading through everything.
You're correct, I'm not. But I'm also not scientifically ignorant. For example, I actually do understand how GPS works, because I've read and understood technical treatments of the subject. But I also know that I don't have to have any of that knowledge to know that my smartphone can use GPS to tell me where I am accurately.
In other words, it's quite obvious from your position that you haven't actually thought through what the test I described actually means.
> To understand the predictions, as it were, you do have to understand the experiments; if you don't, you have no way of knowing if the predictions actually match the outcomes.
Sure you do. See my examples of GPS and astronomers' predictions of comet trajectories downthread in response to MengerSponge.
It's true that for predictions of things that the general public doesn't actually have to care about, often it's not really possible to check them without a fairly detailed knowledge of the subject. But those predictions aren't the kind I'm talking about--because they're about things the general public doesn't actually have to care about.
> There is; it's called a textbook.
Textbooks aren't independent. They're written by scientists.
I'm talking about a record that's independent of scientists. For example, being able to verify that GPS works by seeing that your smartphone shows you where you are accurately.
This is a gross over-generalization imo. I would say at least the hard sciences are characterized by their extremely accurate predictive models. Are you thinking of maybe string theory specifically? Because that's a minority part of even the field of physics, and exceptional in many ways, so it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science
Parts of them are. General relativity and quantum mechanics have been extensively tested within the domains we are able to test, and so yes, we have mountains of evidence as to the predictive models built using those general theories in those domains. And in cases where those domains extend into people's everyday lives (I gave the example of GPS upthread), the predictive accuracy of the models is now a matter of common knowledge.
But that's only part of "science", even "hard science". See further comments below.
> Are you thinking of maybe string theory specifically?
String theory is one example of the problem, but certainly not the only one.
> it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science
I think you have it backwards. The wrong generalization is to think that, because certain parts of our best current "hard sciences" have predictive models whose accuracy has been confirmed by mountains of evidence, that that's the norm. It's not. The predictive models we have based on GR and QM in certain domains are the exception, not the rule; they're the lucky cases where we've been able to run many, many controlled experiments, or where the domains are simple enough that we've been able to get Nature to give us lots of useful evidence (for example, we can now measure GR corrections to the basic Newtonian model of the solar system to fairly high order).
But most of what is called "science", even "hard science", is not like that. Not only do we not have predictive models of anything like the same accuracy, in many cases we don't even have predictive models at all. More important, the science doesn't get judged on whether it has predictive models. It gets judged on how plausible the pronouncements of "experts" sound.
The idea that we can live without authority is nonsense. We can't. So, when dealing with subjects where we are out of our depth, we must learn ways to discern who is likely to be more trustworthy, and this often requires using proxies. Institutions exist to help makes this possible, even if they are not infallible, and they alone do not suffice: basic reasoning and tradition also factor in.
See the example I gave of GPS upthread. Does your smartphone tell you where you are accurately? That's the kind of test I'm talking about.
If you're talking about a domain where you can't make that kind of test--then it's not a domain you care about enough for the test to matter.
> The idea that we can live without authority is nonsense.
No, it isn't. "Authority" means accepting what someone says without applying critical thinking. That is a recipe for disaster.
It's true that not accepting what anyone says as an authority requires you to have critical thinking skills, and many people in our current society don't have them. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that not applying critical thinking to what everyone says, no matter how much of an "authority" they claim to be, is a recipe for disaster. So if you don't currently have critical thinking skills, my advice would be to learn them.
> Institutions exist to help makes this possible, even if they are not infallible
It's true that institutions can help, if they can establish a track record of being trustworthy, and if they can then resist the temptation to misuse that trustworthiness when the stakes are high enough.
Unfortunately, no such institutions have ever existed in human history for any significant length of time. Every institution that has claimed such trustworthiness has abused it, usually at the worst possible time for those who were trusting it.
The only thing that will fix the mess is accountability. That accountability is the exact opposite of pretty much all algorithmic boosts today: you should get your knob turned down to zero for being a goddamned liar.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed.
He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.
Weinstein had that opportunity with Lex Fridman and instead is avoiding it. This is not he behavior of someone with a serious scientific position.
Weinstein has never alleged any kind of issue you’re suggesting, so I don’t think we need to invent any issues for him.
But I don’t know him nor have I read material from him or his targets. Maybe he’s right on a few points.
Still, there is a smell about his blog that says “stay away”
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
It all seems very odd.
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
According to Weinstein?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM
Carroll comes across as very reasonable. Weinstein comes across _very_ badly. The only positive thing I can think to say about him, is that he kept the equally awful Peirs Morgan quiet for a while.
"The phrase "Fake it until you make it" has become "Weinstein until you Einstein""
"My reactions as a physicist were every time Sean Carroll explains something: "I could not think of a simpler way to explain this" every time Eric Weinstein explains something: "I could not think of a more complicated way to explain this""
"Eric Weinstein is the Steven Seagal of Physics"
he reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Both are clearly smart (raw IQ) but are deranged, they speak in convoluted sentences that are intentionally overcomplicated and that make no sense and
Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper:
On the first page:
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.
And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section:
> As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located.
> The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research. This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology.
And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.
Very recently some researchers at a Chinese lab invented a new optimizer Muon Clip which they claim is better for certain types of LLM training. I don’t think there are enough AdamW fanboys out there for it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
So many crackpots get filtered by "oh, if your new theory is so good and powerful, then show a small scale system built on it". This hard filters 99% of crackpots, and the remaining 1% usually builds something that performs within a measurement error of existing systems.
Grand Theories Of Everything don't have such a filter. There is no easy demonstration to perform, no simple experiment to run that would show whether string theory has merit. So we get very questionable theories, and then a lot of even more questionable theories, and then crackpots and madmen as far as eye can see.
The curse on physics isn't that it has crackpots. It's that the remaining unsolved problems are incredibly hard, the space of solutions is vast, and there isn't enough experimental data coming in to quickly weed out the obviously wrong ones.
> the remaining 1% usually builds something that performs within a measurement error of existing systems
Another point that people miss when they wax poetic about how neural nets are like brains or whatnot: we didn’t pick transformers because they were the most elegant method. We use them because they work really well on the hardware we have. It’s why RNNs fell out of favor, they’re way too slow to train. Transformers made training on the whole internet possible.
Maybe RNNs can be salvaged, but my guess is they’ll be approximately as good as transformers but slower to train.
But later, I think the pressure of creating constant content, and moving into non-expert areas, has gotten just as pop-sci as anybody else.
Still think she is on another level from Eric who will throw out any crazy idea he can if someone will listen.
Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
I think Paul Feyerabend debunked that idea.
Disclosure: Old physicist.
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD.
A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
It depends, many fields intersect, and there are interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. The generalist approach is to be T-shaped, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. The T might be shallow on some ends, but deeper on others, so you may even have a prong, trident, or comb. Truly, it depends.
It's entirely possible that a PhD theoretical physicist does know a lot about biology (maybe they got a job in a biophysics or something) but I'm saying it's definitely not implied, and it might even suggest that they don't have expertise in that field.
Obviously people can have opinions on anything, and of course you can't be an expert on everything, but I feel like what Sabine does goes beyond "having an opinion"; she seems to have pivoted into fear-mongering about academia. I don't love academia either, and I have my criticisms of how it is run in the US, but I think a lot of my complaints can largely be explained by incompetence at the administrative level, not a grand conspiracy to control narratives or suppress questions or anything like that.
Granted, the research I've worked on has been pretty apolitical [1], mostly mathy computer science stuff, so maybe I was never at a risk of my research being suppressed, but I certainly don't think that Eric Weinstein is being censored by no one taking his attempt at Unified Field Theory seriously.
[1] Yes I know everything can be political. You don't need to explain this to me.
There's a term for that: Engineer's Disease.
This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.
But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
Academia is what she is criticizing, btw, not the "scientific enterprise," even if she doesn't say it all the time. You know what else she doesn't say? What we should do instead.
Here's what she thinks we should do instead: privatize academic research. Can you think of any problems with that?
When something turns out to be a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy.
When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that?
You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?
Then, there are people who are defrauding by making claims that are for SURE easy to know are sketchy. I promise you every active researcher (grad student, postdoc) can off the top of their head tell you AT LEAST three results that they know are on shaky ground.
"There are no right answers" is perfectly valid. Saying "there are no wrong answers" is a recipe for disaster, and cronyism.
To put it bluntly: Should the DOE fund perpetual motion research? Of course not. You 100% should block dumb paths of research. We don't do that enough.
Even for Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine.
Recent discussion on pro/con of Alzheimer’s controversy. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
I'm just super wary of the 'right's tendency to throw the baby out with bath water, like JFK JR, and set the US back a few decades. Just because they don't understand science, so it must all be bad.
the FDA is all fucked up anyways and if you doubt that, look up propublicas expose on serious drug safety lapses there.
> Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine
it wasn't perpetual motion level fraud, but it was bad. you weren't there. everyone doing work in the salt mines was like why the fuck arent my experiments working but nobody really stood up to say this is bullshit, because that would be the end of your career if you were a junior researcher... much easier to half ass a result, get the publication, and move on with your life.
> String Theory, It seemed promising in the beginning
maybe it shouldn't have been. there is a heuristic for what actually makes discoveries in science. and the string theory approach is not it. people were sounding the alarm at the time, like, among others some guy named richard feynman. but nobody was listening to them evidentally.
Not to go off topic, it could be like Vorlon and Shadow war in Babylon 5. You need the side of order that can become stuck, and the side of chaos that can't really build anything. And they fight back and forth. Neither is really good/bad.
For research, FDA. I don't have an answer. I still think current system of scientific method, peer reviews, publishing openly to public, providing the raw data. All that, while it can have problems, I can't think of another way.
Of course, humans are fallible, and for any system to work, people need to stand up to fraud and bad ideas. But that comes down to individuals doing the right thing.
Being a contrarian is often an intellectually dishonest way to seek power. Goes all the way back to the serpent in Adam and Eve.
A good episode to start with is "The Crisis in Physics" in which he (unusually?) argues that there is no real crisis in physics.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
He seems like a great guy on top of being an excellent communicator.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA
Regarding her other points, she is definitely on the bandwagon of peddling "all academic research is bullshit". There are plenty of examples of that. Now as often there is some grain of truth underneath her points, but she is disingenuous in here arguments.
"I saw 2 persons being judged by a judge, and turned out they were both guilty of the same crime, but the first one got less than the second one. The first one had the same letter in second position in their family name as the judge, so it's the proof that judges are biased favorably towards people who have the same second letter"
But then, the problem is that "their own bullshit papers" is doing a very heavy lifting here. The point of Hossenfelder is that String Theory is as bad as GU. But is it really the case? Hossenfelder keep saying it's true, but a lot of people are not convinced by her arguments and provide convincing reasons for not being convinced. The same kinds of reasons don't apply to GU, so it already shows that GU and String Theory are not on the same level. Even if String Theory has some flow or is misguided on some aspect, does it mean that the level of rejection in an unbiased world will obviously be the same as any other bullshit theory.
Another aspect that is unfair is that a lot of "bullshit theory within the sector" dies without any publicity. They stop rapidly because from within the sector, it is more difficult to surface them without being criticized early. For example, you can have 100 bullshit theories "within the sector" and 3 survive and surface without being as criticized as GU while 97 have been criticized "as much" as GU during their beginning which stopped them growing. Then, you can just point at one of the 3 and say "look, there is one bullshit theory there, it's the proof that scientists never confront bullshit theories when it comes from within". Without being able to quantify properly how the GU-like theories are treated when they are "within", it is just impossible to conclude "when it is from within, it is less criticized".
"she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics"
Sure, it is an extrapolation to say "all other".
But this sentence still has the point of showing how unfair and unscientific is the basis of Hossenfelder's arguments. Even if you don't know String Theory, you should stop and think "ok, but how can she pretend that conclusion is valid" (in my previous comment, I provided 3 elements she overlooked: the fact that BU and String Theory may not be the same level of bullshit-ness, the fact that having 2 different theories receiving a different treatment can be explained by other reasons that a bias for the insider, the fact that she has no access to the rate of criticism of BU-like theories that come from the inside).
Even if you don't know String Theory, you should ask "did she even consider that maybe there are differences in the level of bullshit-ness that make some people criticize GU and not String Theory".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
Most physics papers have not been debunked or have rebuttal papers written about them. If Weinstein was serious about his work, he would either respond to the criticism or revise his position to something which is useful. It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.
If I open a PR and it fails some CICD tests my next move should be to fix the PR or fix the tests. Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.
He has. Not in a particularly satisfying way, but in at least a few video interviews out there, he does offer some response along with deeper explanations of his work and position. I do not find them convincing but they exist.
> or revise his position to something which is useful
I think "revise his position" is an interesting phrasing. It seems like what you are after is for him to publicly and completely abandon the theory. Is there no room to "revise the theory [itself] to address criticisms?"
Wouldn't a fair criticism of the work itself be "it's too impenetrable and inventive for the majority of the field to show much interest or spend much effort on it." He should revise it to be simpler and to avoid tricks like the "ship in a bottle" operator. Until then it's a curiosity only for advanced players.
Is that not fair?
> It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.
I hate to do it again but "our job" is interesting phrasing. Why does the existence of his paper make you feel this obligation? In Engineering it's fun to dissect and to dismantle other peoples theories and systems. If it's so weak then why do physicists take such umbrage at such an easy task?
> Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.
I think there's a "cult of physics personalities" that don't appreciate when /any/ public attention is given to fringe ideas from outsiders like Eric. I honestly think that they're the most responsible for giving Eric's theories the credibility and air time they have received. Had they taken a more professional and earnest approach to his and others work I doubt it would even be a topic of discussion on "popular social interest" programs like Joe Rogan or Piers Morgan.
It's a 15 year old paper that didn't really go anywhere. There's no reason it should still be a topic of discussion. I think Eric is a symptom and not the disease.
I agree with you on this one. It’s a symptom of scientific illiteracy, that people can’t see that a work of creative writing that makes no testable predictions about the world isn’t science.
The problem isn’t that Weinstein is too creative or his math is too impenetrable. The problem is his paper doesn’t make testable predictions. It’s a complicated exercise in world building, not science. A physics paper has well-defined terms and equations. Things that can be tested.
He said himself that it’s entertainment. He isn’t being suppressed by the DISC (“distributed ideas suppression complex”), it just turns out that fiction is a tough industry, readership is declining, and it’s a little too involved for an airport bookstore.
I don’t want him to abandon his work, I want him to engage with its critics in a serious way, not claim to be the victim of some kind of institutional conspiracy. But that would require work.
> Wouldn't a fair criticism of the work itself be "it's too impenetrable and inventive for the majority of the field to show much interest or spend much effort on it."
The problem isn’t that it is inventive or impenetrable. The standard model has plenty of unintuitive aspects as a theory. The difference is that those theories made very accurate predictions about the world which explained empirical results much better than prior theories. Weinstein’s does not.
If you make an unfalsifiable claim about a teapot orbiting Jupiter, you’re not a genius whose theories are being ignored by the establishment.
> Why does the existence of his paper make you feel this obligation
It doesn’t. I was responding to your suggestion that there might be some salvageable bits from his talk/blog post, despite your belief that it isn’t correct.
> I think there's a "cult of physics personalities" that don't appreciate when /any/ public attention is given to fringe ideas from outsiders like Eric
It’s not up to Neil DeGrasse Tyson what makes it into the Standard Model, and if I had to guess he’s probably not up on cutting edge research anyways. The relevant question is whether a new theory can explain empirical results better than existing theories. The fact that Weinstein’s paper doesn’t even attempt to do that puts it into the category of creative writing, not science.
Do physicists do this? String theorists mostly don't seem to try, and the most common point I've seen Sabine make is that particle physicists are happy to tell you their theories are falsifiable as long as you give them essentially infinite money to build bigger colliders, when they could possibly be doing something cheaper.
I also wonder if people believe Roger Penrose is a crank; he seems to be doing the same thing when he goes around claiming consciousness is because of quantum brain tubules.
This article and this quote are something I have also noticed recently.
I've been working on researching AI and trying to visualize more data structures to help connect ideas, and I want to bounce ideas off of people to make sure I'm truly comprehending things. I've been trying to have conversations to talk more in depth, but I haven't been able to get anyone to read a research paper. That doesn't stop anyone from telling me something about what I have been researching without reading the research or comprehending it. Everyone feels empowered with AI. But when asked to debate the merits of their ideas, everyone I have asked has said people won't stick to the debate. I think you pointed it out clearly. People can't debate a topic they truly don't know.
"Professor Dave" interviews 6 physicists regarding Hossenfelder including one guy whose name you particle physicists in particular might recognize.
Feels good putting a face to the author of one the books that made you struggle but also enjoyed.
Dave is a bully.
https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...
possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw
and that's like 95% of available documentation :)
Once in every now and then a genius comes along and turns everything up side down. But there are 1000s of cranks and blowhards for every Einstein. I don't see anything to make me think Weinstein is an Einstein (the similarlity in name notwithstanding).
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
This is not a criticism of the author—we know what people have to do on the internet. But it's in keeping with what we're optimizing this site for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
(Submitted title was "Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder a Crisis of Credibility")
As an aside, scientists are highly motivated to take credible outsider ideas seriously because the cost/benefit makes a lot of sense (e.g. Max Planck taking Einstein seriously). The motive to suppress Weinstein doesn't make sense, regardless of the underlying claims. But really, I don't know.
But I think that’s a pity and we need to acknowledge the great value they all these podcasts bring instead of just complaining about audience capture and various biases of one - we’re all human - if Einstein or Newton had or was on a podcast we’d be criticizing it just the same IMHO. Human nature being what it is. Also we should be following a wider variety of communicators and voices rather than simply crowing one king and ignoring and unfollowing the rest based on one incident or political leaning
- what shame it is when people set up their own echo chamber for their particular worldview - it’s the worst aspect of social media - trapping people into one perspective alone
I also specifically want to promote Curt Juimangals podcast TOE here despite the disparaging remarks in post (which are concerning but represent one point of view) - he deserves better and wider distribution than just this hacker news post https://youtube.com/@theoriesofeverything?si=n0x7wHcDx3V_Be7...
His theories of everything is a treasure trove of content with interviews with everyone from Chomsky, to Hinton along with the physics community including folks like Nobel laureate Penrose
Sure he interviews folks who are marginal and outsiders like Wolfram and folks like the Mensa IQ guy who claims that his TOE proves God etc but everybody is usually given their space to present with a very technical perspective that interviews like Lex’s podcast miss
This specific issue in this case is a concerning one in that I do think Weinstein s throwing his weight around to suppress as he can, but honestly it doesn’t seem to be working for given all publicity critiquing him either
I’m promoting Jaimungals podcast (which was disparaged on this thread) which is an absolutely wonderful for cross-disciplinary exploration of TOEs and cutting edge concepts in physics, AI, biology and consciousness and philosophy
For example this podcast Frederic Schuller, an award-winning theoretical physicist and professor
https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg?si=2PwkFzH4OJ2r8eMT
And this with Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes https://youtu.be/gEK4-XtMwro?si=bYAHDO4iWh9WRV8J
Just my humble opinion as a bystander looking in.
These physicists love podcasts.
In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.
I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
> obscurantist
Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.
My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.
THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.
Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).
Example: See the conclusion of Nguyen's teardown response paper to "Economics as Gauge Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03460
Basically... 1) Tautology, 2) Inconclusive, 3) Not usable
And yet the author has done just that, and not in a very transparent way. The second quote the author didn't provide was:
> ... looked closely enough at Weinstein's... Wolfram's ... theories of everything ... to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved ... > Not interested enough to look any closer ... don't want to waste my time
This is clearly not the opposite, but the same thing. "Closely enough" could hypothetically be as simple as reading the summary and skimming in a few minutes and realizing there isn't a single formula with the solution. That's not a detailed review that could require many hours (or even days?) of work
> several of our most prominent science communicators – nay, science populists – are willing to distort the truth to suit their own interests.
Indeed, a universal human trait even science can't tame!
Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
We live in deeply unserious times.
Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.
I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.
There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:
> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science
But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.
I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/
My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.
I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.
It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?
Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?
> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone
Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.
Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
Is there a legitimate fear of mob justice from political opponents, or some type of covert mafia action instead? Sure, but remember that this climate is so polarized that anyone who gets “cancelled” now will instead become a hero for one faction or another. So, you have a real chance of becoming either AOC or MTG in this extremely polarized political climate instead of becoming cancelled.
But I don’t care about politics per se, I just don’t like how extremism has permeated every sphere of life. So how to conduct truth-seeking under these circumstances? It seems to me that the best course of action is to instead have serious discussions, like workshops. It would make sense to also invite your opponents, and other neutral parties from the field, and try to understand whatever the issue is with an open mind.
That said, from what I can tell Hossfender has criticized GU as a theory. But it seems she’s being castigated for not breaking ties with people who are political enemies of some groups.
I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
Gotta bag those conference expenses!