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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

timothynguyen.org

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Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#191

Post by janalsncm »

ACCount37 wrote: post #186
janalsncm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe at some point, but as of now it’s much more applied and empirical. Aside from money, there’s nothing stopping you from training a new architecture or loss function and sharing the weights for everyone to use. 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 i…

Applied ML is truly blessed by being incredibly empirical. 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…

Very well said. I also think the goal of crackpots isn’t to create something useful but to have their names next to Maxwell, Einstein, and Hawking. Household names of geniuses. Their individual accomplishments are less important.

> 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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#192

Post by kelseyfrog »

hermitcrab wrote: post #108

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein : "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.

It's the classic frame of "Haha, I was only joking. Unless I wasn't and you want to take me seriously." Eric comes across as having a wounded ego that he protects at any cost.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#193

Post by carlosjobim »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #183
cycomanic wrote: post #46

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'm not really in the habit of watching content in this genre, I suppose. But Sabine Hossenfelder has published one of the best videos on the dangers of sugar alcohols (which I happen to be incredibly sensitive to), which is now my go-to recommendation for those who ask me why avoid them. But I'd like to avoid other associations people now have with Sabine Hossenfelder; does anyone know of a similar quality video on…

Step away from yourself for a while and consider if people really want to watch a video (any video) about your dietary choices.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#194

Post by jiggawatts »

gwerbret wrote: post #184
pdonis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. 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 w…

> 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. 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 t…

An example of this ideal can go horribly wrong is CERN.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#195

Post by calf »

seanhunter wrote: post #62
calf wrote: post #31

The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us. (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…

There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing). Here’s a page giving s…

But that's the issue, Nguyen is not the institution as a whole so then their concerns are just talking past each other. (And perhaps typical of a professional physicists Nguyen's complaints miss this point.)

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#196

Post by jcranmer »

cycomanic wrote: post #175
eecc wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does she make millions? I highly doubt that

She has close to 2M subscribers, puts out several videos per months with 10s of thousands to millions of views and wrote a (or more) popular science book i suspect she would be on 6 to 7 figures. But that's a reasonably uniformed guess.

Ad revenue runs around $1/1000 views, and her output looks roughly daily with a few hundred K views per video on average. That means she's grossing maybe a few hundred K/year. But that's gross, not net; she still has to pay for all of her expenses out of it, and converting that to a net income... I suspect the average Bay Area tech worker has a higher take-home pay than she does.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#197

Post by carlosjobim »

glenstein wrote: post #75
dr_dshiv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> (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

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#198

Post by glenstein »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #166
glenstein wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason not to treat his invention as if it belongs to that modern category.

But there wasn’t a difference in categories at the time — yet, at the time, perpetual motion was still treated as impossible.

If the category didn't exist at the time, the example shouldn't have been volunteered as an example that fits our present day understanding of perpetual motion as understood by the U.S. patent office in the 20th century.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#199

Post by senderista »

amadeoeoeo wrote: post #104
cycomanic wrote: post #46

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…

Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.

Sometimes contrarianism is just sour grapes.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#200

Post by causality0 »

cycomanic wrote: post #46

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 stopped being willing to consume any of her content after she made that video about "Academia is terrible and everyone I worked with were poopyheads and that's why I have to make these videos even though I hate it and all my viewers are stupid losers".
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