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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

timothynguyen.org

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#171
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand "establishment" science get their hairs up when she criticizes them, so there is that. She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in. I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.

Yes very admirable to dishonestly misrepresent scientific progress, and making millions by accusing scientists to steal public money by working on things that she calls bullshit (based on her misrepresentation).

As a publicly funded scientist there is nothing I find more frustrating than witnessing colleagues peddle bullshit to funding bodies and waste tax payers money, and more importantly waste opportunities for young scientists and the country to do something worthwhile with the available resources.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#172
I waded through some of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM

Carroll comes across as very reasonable. Weinstein comes across _very_ badly. The only positive thing I can think to say about him, is that he kept the equally awful Peirs Morgan quiet for a while.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#173

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…

Attention is a shit economy and people who spend their time trying to acquire it inevitably become covered in and completely full of...shit.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#174
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.

This is why science communicators need to master the art of to-scale visualizations, animated diagrams, and put working code into slides and presentations. Shit shovellevers are marked by a smokescreen of words and hand waving and pictures of real phenomena help separate the wheat from the chaff. It takes real balls to spend time faking graphs, while horseshit sentences are cheap and deniable. Fake data and fake graphs are real offenses with a real record. Talk talk is always weasely.

The only thing that will fix the mess is accountability. That accountability is the exact opposite of pretty much all algorithmic boosts today: you should get your knob turned down to zero for being a goddamned liar.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#175
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes very admirable to dishonestly misrepresent scientific progress, and making millions by accusing scientists to steal public money by working on things that she calls bullshit (based on her misrepresentation).

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.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#176

I waded through some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM Carroll comes across as very reasonable. Weinstein comes across _very_ badly. The only positive thing I can think to say about him, is that he kept the equally awful Peirs Morgan quiet for a while.

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"

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#177
It seems like this thread has become a referendum on Sabine - who along with Lex is the more popular of the podcasters mentioned

But I think that’s a pity and we need to acknowledge the great value they all these podcasts bring instead of just complaining about audience capture and various biases of one - we’re all human - if Einstein or Newton had or was on a podcast we’d be criticizing it just the same IMHO. Human nature being what it is. Also we should be following a wider variety of communicators and voices rather than simply crowing one king and ignoring and unfollowing the rest based on one incident or political leaning

- what shame it is when people set up their own echo chamber for their particular worldview - it’s the worst aspect of social media - trapping people into one perspective alone

I also specifically want to promote Curt Juimangals podcast TOE here despite the disparaging remarks in post (which are concerning but represent one point of view) - he deserves better and wider distribution than just this hacker news post https://youtube.com/@theoriesofeverything?si=n0x7wHcDx3V_Be7...

His theories of everything is a treasure trove of content with interviews with everyone from Chomsky, to Hinton along with the physics community including folks like Nobel laureate Penrose

Sure he interviews folks who are marginal and outsiders like Wolfram and folks like the Mensa IQ guy who claims that his TOE proves God etc but everybody is usually given their space to present with a very technical perspective that interviews like Lex’s podcast miss

This specific issue in this case is a concerning one in that I do think Weinstein s throwing his weight around to suppress as he can, but honestly it doesn’t seem to be working for given all publicity critiquing him either

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#178

At the risk of sounding dismissive -- this is all drama that amounts to nothing more than Internet entertainment. Legitimate claims of harm should be heard in court. Legitimate scientific debate should be hashed out at conferences or in peer-reviewed journals. Drama posted to an audience of 8 billion people, hosted in personal blogs and on YouTube videos, seems like soap opera entertainment at best and childish behav…

In this blog post: podcast: 22 times video: 13 times blog: 6 times rogan: 5 times youtube: 4 times clubhouse: 4 times paper: 14 times conference: 0 times journal: 0 times

These physicists love podcasts.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he would either respond to the criticism He has. Not in a particularly satisfying way, but in at least a few video interviews out there, he does offer some response along with deeper explanations of his work and position. I do not find them convincing but they exist. > or revise his position to something which is useful I think "revise his position" is an interesting phrasing. It seems like what you are after is fo…

> I think Eric is a symptom and not the disease. I agree with you on this one. It’s a symptom of scientific illiteracy, that people can’t see that a work of creative writing that makes no testable predictions about the world isn’t science. The problem isn’t that Weinstein is too creative or his math is too impenetrable. The problem is his paper doesn’t make testable predictions. It’s a complicated exercise in world b…

> The problem is his paper doesn’t make testable predictions.

Do physicists do this? String theorists mostly don't seem to try, and the most common point I've seen Sabine make is that particle physicists are happy to tell you their theories are falsifiable as long as you give them essentially infinite money to build bigger colliders, when they could possibly be doing something cheaper.

I also wonder if people believe Roger Penrose is a crank; he seems to be doing the same thing when he goes around claiming consciousness is because of quantum brain tubules.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the scientific enterprise has undermined itself already. Look at how we lost decades of research in alzheimer's as a good example. This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then bur…

Sketchy. It really is only apparent in hindsight after investigation. When something turns out to be a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy. When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that? You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?

No. There are some routes that are obviously pointless in foresight, and funding them is just giving money to someone's pet project, for example: Everything Julius Rebek does.

Then, there are people who are defrauding by making claims that are for SURE easy to know are sketchy. I promise you every active researcher (grad student, postdoc) can off the top of their head tell you AT LEAST three results that they know are on shaky ground.

"There are no right answers" is perfectly valid. Saying "there are no wrong answers" is a recipe for disaster, and cronyism.

To put it bluntly: Should the DOE fund perpetual motion research? Of course not. You 100% should block dumb paths of research. We don't do that enough.

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