The contrarian physics podcast subculture • Hacker News Board

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#251

Post by dennis_jeeves2 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #163

glenstein wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history books you're talking about were presumably written hundreds of years later (e.g. the 19th century), which would mean thermodynamics had been established. So I don't think they would have scrubbed him on the grounds that his perpetual motion machine was a threat to their orthodoxy. So I'm not sure what the the upshot was of suggesting he was "scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows perpetual…

They scrubbed him on the grounds that he was an alchemist and charlatan. He wasn’t the only one to claim he had created a perpetual motion device in those centuries before thermodynamics was discovered. The French patent office banned perpetual motion submissions in 1789. I just don’t know if any other perpetual motion devices that worked — back when people didn’t know the difference between what you call (1) & (2) —…

>dismiss them entirely, out of hand.

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.)

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#252

Post by pdonis » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:44 AM UTC

MengerSponge wrote: post #249

pdonis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While we try to make things accessible to the public, the determination of what is "good" is ultimately made by experts. 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 publ…

> It's determined by whether the models make accurate predictions. 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 to…

> it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#253

Post by MengerSponge » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 4:08 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #252

MengerSponge wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's determined by whether the models make accurate predictions. 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 to…

> it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said. 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.…

Some answers are more subtle than a smartphone map.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#254

Post by tomhow » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

antithesizer wrote: post #71

hughredline wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

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Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#255

Post by jjaksic » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 10:48 AM UTC

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…

As a physics layman I sometimes watched Sabine's show and found it interesting. The one where she defended Weinstein was the one where she lost all credibility to me and I stopped watching her.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#256

Post by lo_zamoyski » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 11:31 AM UTC

griffzhowl wrote: post #228

uncircle wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once posted a video by Jonathan Bi, a lecture on Rousseau and his views that intellectuals with large egos eventually play contrarian positions just to have a chance to argue and prove how smart they are; Rousseau’s opinion was that the democratization of knowledge, the printing press at the time as he couldn’t foresee the internet, would amplify this phenomenon until society would lose itself arguing about p…

> 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. 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

> Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#257

Post by lo_zamoyski » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 11:41 AM UTC

owebmaster wrote: post #117

Aunche wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should you expect her to have the same opinions about Musk and Bezos as you? Do you think that everyone who likes them have nothing of value to contribute?

I mean, Elon Musk? Yeah, someone still thinking great of Elon Musk might add a negative value

This view seems mostly driven by his political associations with Trump, and his recent behavior on places like Twitter/X, which you have to distinguish from his other activities.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#258

Post by lo_zamoyski » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #139

themafia wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse. 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…

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…

I think calling oneself an "inventor", while not a proof, is at least a smell. Nobody actually working on anything calls themselves that, and there are plenty of people working on things.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#259

Post by lo_zamoyski » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 12:50 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #244

glenstein wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If you're not allowing the machines to be tested in space (no environmental factors) nor on earth (environmental factors), then there's nowhere allowed to test or make such a machine. So a perpetual motion machine becomes impossible because there is nowhere in the universe where they are accepted. 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 w…

There's a difference between impossible in principle and impossible in practice.

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#260

Post by lo_zamoyski » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #127

krunck wrote: post #95

"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." Touché.

> 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…

How can you determine whether it makes accurate predictions? This isn't always as trivial as you make it seem. Even the data's trustworthiness requires proxy measures like provenance and criticism of figures one takes as trustworthy. And even then you have to be able to evaluate the data to determine whether it predictive, which itself requires skills and domain knowledge.

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.