121–130 of 196 posts
Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her writing, but it looks like much of it is specifically about Twitter interactions: about unhappy, defective people on Twitter (smart physicists, even) drawing other people into their miasma. These are people using Twitter with good intentions : smart people who…
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Overfitted models do serve a purpose here though - particle physics has reached a point where you can't build models and theories on direct observation so instead the community is throwing a huge number of falsifiable overfitted models with the expectation that all but one or two will actually be confirmed experimentally. It's certainly a time consuming, expensive, non-ideal approach, but valid. The authors argument…
what does she propose instead? spend more on theorists? spend less on experiments? spend less on the whole?
As someone who has no skin in the game at all, I find her way of presenting criticism very contrarian argumentative and snarky. She might be completely right, but I can definitely understand the reluctance to hear her out on merit of style.
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Overfitted models do serve a purpose here though - particle physics has reached a point where you can't build models and theories on direct observation so instead the community is throwing a huge number of falsifiable overfitted models with the expectation that all but one or two will actually be confirmed experimentally. It's certainly a time consuming, expensive, non-ideal approach, but valid. The authors argument…
what does she propose instead? spend more on theorists? spend less on experiments? spend less on the whole?
The biggest problem with something like Supersymmetry is that, contrary to what the previous poster was saying, it is not a falsifiable theory. It has free parameters that can be used to predict that supersymmetric partners to the known particles would have any mass that hasn't been ruled out yet, more or less (maybe they can't be planet sized, but they can certainly have masses that would require accelerators the size of a solar system to rule out).
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> A lay person's opinion on the matter is worth nothing. And yet they still want my money. Weird.
Well that's not your choice to make, that's how taxation works. The government choose how to manage and spend a portion of your money. Do you think your opinion matters in deciding if a hospital should be built? Or if we should pay for a new vaccine? No, because you don't know anything about those things. And neither do I. So yes, I will take your money and build my big experiment, and I don't feel bad about it, beca…
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A lay person like a politician can complain they get no return on their investment, for example
Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment" Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for e…
I only have a master in (engineering) physics but working with statistical modeling and AI I’ve come to appreciate the “all models are wrong but some models are useful”-mindset, and I’ve started applying that to physical “laws” as well: I no longer see them as some divine truths waiting to be discovered, but more like models of the world that will always be wrong but sometimes useful. From that point of view what’s h…
Overfitted models do serve a purpose here though - particle physics has reached a point where you can't build models and theories on direct observation so instead the community is throwing a huge number of falsifiable overfitted models with the expectation that all but one or two will actually be confirmed experimentally. It's certainly a time consuming, expensive, non-ideal approach, but valid. The authors argument…
Supersymmetry has been ruled out twice already, but with a different choice of parameters, it is being proposed again - and, in fact, you can chose those parameters such that you would need the whole energy of the Sun, or more, to rule them out. String Theory and its few predictions are even worse in this regard.
Models of black hole evaporation would not only require extreme measurement precision, but also a good few billion years to collect any sort of data to confirm or deny.
Personally, I will note that I am hopeful some new insights into the measurement problem will come about from work on quantum computing, which is also eminently practical work.
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Well that's not your choice to make, that's how taxation works. The government choose how to manage and spend a portion of your money. Do you think your opinion matters in deciding if a hospital should be built? Or if we should pay for a new vaccine? No, because you don't know anything about those things. And neither do I. So yes, I will take your money and build my big experiment, and I don't feel bad about it, beca…
This comment will be a wonderful exhibit in the letter I write to my congressman about waste, fraud, and abuse. Thank you!
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Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment" Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for e…
Politicians think of Big Science in terms of appropriations and sending cash to their principals, who are neither the electorate nor scientists. They don’t consider any money that buys their re-election a waste. They don’t give a rat’s ass if you discover anything and it sounds like you know it. So-called science these days is little different from military spending. As usual, follow the money.
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> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? > These are people using Twitter with good intentions I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person with…
IMO this isn't just a Twitter thing. When I ran a company, we had a public forum that, in the beginning, was civilized. As we approached about 2000 people, that 5% you're talking about became so much of a problem that we had to shut them down. And in fact, it wasn't even 5% (100) people causing most of the problem: it was more like 10.