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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

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Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#231

Post by eviks »

xenotux wrote: post #159
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 think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. 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…

> Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.

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?

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#232

Post by api »

m_fayer wrote: post #229
mlsu wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming. 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.

Your comment sounds hyperbolic at first blush. But the more I think and observe and read about incoming evidence, it seems correct. 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 do…

I call social media the “tobacco companies of the mind.”

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#233

Post by FrustratedMonky »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #214
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but was it really obvious we shouldn't pursue String Theory? It seemed promising in the beginning. 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…

yes of course JFK jr is brainwormed to hell but he's not setting back the US decades. many things he tears down will be rebuildable and some things he puts in are fine, actually. what is far far more dangerous is the rot in the science infrastructure. because that will take decades to unwind (if we even do), and it's not an obvious problem like the way anything in politics is. people implicitly trust science, which i…

For JFK, and current regime, anti-science, Nasa cuts, etc... I think what you are espousing is the theory that sometimes you need to burn it down in order to rebuild. I really hope you are right. That is only silver lining to current times, is that maybe sometimes the current calcified structures need to be hit hard in order to re-form. I'm hoping it is that, as opposed to actually just burned down so far it never builds back.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#234

Post by eviks »

400thecat wrote: post #220
hermitcrab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some great comments below this video. "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"

> 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

Doesn't making nonsense be the opposite of smart?

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#235

Post by m_fayer »

shermantanktop wrote: post #153
m_fayer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.

Do they lose moral agency? Having practical reasons to take an action is not the same as ceding moral agency. 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…

Talk to me about agency when it’s the wellbeing of your vulnerable dependent loved ones, young or old or sick, that’s on the line.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#236

Post by glenstein »

carlosjobim wrote: post #197
glenstein wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ener…

>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.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#237

Post by PaulHoule »

duskwuff wrote: post #202
PaulHoule wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in charge of technical measures for controlling crackpot submissions at arXiv because we were trying to get a very ornery physicist from not getting us in trouble sending nastygrams to HBCUs and such. The endorsement system was my work. 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 t…

> [crackpots] were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them Let me guess: theoretical particle physics, relativity, gravity, and magnetism?

Not so much magnetism, but maybe that's because I'm trained in cond-mat and I think of magnetism as a kind of order in materials and not that dual of the electric field which people explain with that weird right hand rule. (I remember getting chewed out my students because I'd be drawing on the board with my chalk in my right hand and using my left hand and reversing the direction.)

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#238

Post by raattgift »

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.

Several of her first-or-sole-author minimal length quantum gravity phenomenology papers have more than a hundred citations:

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#239

Post by glenstein »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #225
glenstein wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was volunteered as an example of a legitimate invention in a category that is viewed as wholly illegitimate.

Not true, because it's (2), not (1) in a context where we were talking about (1).

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#240

Post by glenstein »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #206
glenstein wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The patent office doesn't serve the patenting of physical theories (which would be a horrible thing), but if it did, its easy to imagine Einsteins theories regarding relativity to have been summarily rejected: surely charged particles at rest in a gravitational field don't radiate energy, yet by the Equivalence principle it seems that radiation is nonetheless predicted by relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par…

>The patent office doesn't serve the patenting of physical theories

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.

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