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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

timothynguyen.org

71–80 of 269 posts

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#71

I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics. 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…

I had a similar trajectory, but I would add that she lost me when she started sucking up to public figures and corporate interests I despise. 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.

[flagged]

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#72
post #36

Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)

There are other motivations besides money for cranks.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#73

I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video. 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 go…

>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.

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?!

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#74

I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics. 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…

i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office on grounds of being a perpetual motion machine The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.

Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible. The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica. But if y…

>It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#76

I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics. 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…

Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss. I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.

One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office on grounds of being a perpetual motion machine The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.

Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible. The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica. But if y…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_harvesting

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

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9460457/

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#78

Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it. 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…

>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#79
post #39

I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research. 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 n…

Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.

She's trying to get into the populist Sagan, Greene, Kaku, Tyson type pundit game.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#80

Sabine's early video's seemed pretty sincere, and had a lot of valid points. 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.

You must be one of the aliens trying to deceive humanity.
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