471–480 of 545 posts
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> don't need to look further than your local school district for proof. Yeah mine didn't have it. And the teachers fought every attempt to do so because it hurt their metrics (who gets stuck with the lower class average). Are you by chance part of the PMC and your local school district is of similar demographics?
What's PMC?
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Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun). String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
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Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of when I took a certain Microbiology midterm in college. I hadn't put much effort into that class leading up to it, as I had some tough CS classes that consumed my focus that semester (also was admittedly not a great student in general). So when I finally went to take the midterm, after cramming like mad before the exam, I quickly realized I basically didn't know the answer t…
> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding. I used to do something somewhat related during exams: I could never find contradictions/mistakes while working forwards, because somehow my brain would make the same mistakes consistently every time I go through somethin…
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The error with this approach is that every single physics theory gets exactly the same criticisms. You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction. In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it…
And in the meanwhile you ignored Susskind, literally one of the fathers of String Theory saying "we need to start all over again"... :-)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind
As for Susskind, the fact that he was a main contributor is not a factor, on the contrary, what I had in mind is about the percentage of experts in the subject that later criticize the field. You have plenty of other examples in other fields: Shiffman on SUSY, Loeb on WIMP, Hirsch on applied fusion, ... or even Einstein on quantum physics ("Yes, I may have started it but I always regarded these ideas as temporary. I never thought that others would take them so much more seriously than I did.")
Some outsiders are seeing a normal scientific process where people are continuously questioning the validity or the efficiency of things, and they start in their fantasy "look, they say it should not be done this way, it's the proof it's all wrong".
Again, what we observe with String Theory is not at all exceptional. The reason it is "a big deal" is because of the populist message and the scam around "these physicists who stole the public money". It is a bit like "vaccines cause autism": it got some media attention, it resonated with the populist conspiracy theory of "the physicists know but they are farming money" and the anti-intellectual trend, and now it has become both some kind of cultural war and an easy way to farm views and followings and show themselves as "so rebel, so edgy".
Don't get me wrong, I personally think that String Theory is overrated (and I was thinking that way before it was popular to criticize it). And the return of the pendulum means that it may now be in the edge side of the average. But nothing significant to pretend there is a particular dysfunction.
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I don't know where you're getting that from. The sorting of students into "gifted" and "non-gifted" categories is very common. You don't need to look further than your local school district for proof.
> don't need to look further than your local school district for proof. Yeah mine didn't have it. And the teachers fought every attempt to do so because it hurt their metrics (who gets stuck with the lower class average). Are you by chance part of the PMC and your local school district is of similar demographics?
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I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector).
Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector.
As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…
Another ai article, another group of self-identified smart people claiming they are not as smart as a statistical engine. "Are most ideas not original?" Sure. "Was every idea discovered first at one time or another?" Sure. Maybe what's going on is you are not as smart as you think you are and intelligence is less proprietary than you believe. Nobody owns ideas. What matters is if you know which ones to use. There is…
Or are you perhaps defining true intelligence as that which computers do not have (yet)?
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Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector. You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotion…
That is not true. In academia you have extremely niche research specializations and tenure as two major contributors to inertia. In general software development you have an enormous amount of career mobility.
Software developers learn new languages, new frameworks, new tools, new development methodologies all the time. A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
I can't help but think of Michael Nielsen's essay "Augmenting Long-Term Memory" [1]. > Many people's model of accomplished mathematicians is that they are astoundingly bright, with very high IQs, and the ability to deal with very complex ideas in their mind. A common perception is that their smartness gives them the ability to deal with very complex ideas. Basically, they have a higher horsepower engine. > It's true…
It's probably worth checking the site history before posting. The guy who wrote this looks like some kind of "race science" crackpot.
Interesting fellow. He has publicly claimed that he has ESP: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/wikipedia-wars... https://openpsych.net/forums/18/thread/25/?page=1#124