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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

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Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#181

Post by Aurornis »

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…

Being likable and presenting yourself as an open-minded skeptic is the current winning formula for being an influencer grifter.

Some or most of what these people discuss might be true, often because it’s low stakes or obvious. This builds trust and leads people to believe that the person is a universally trustworthy source.

Then they drift into topics where they are incorrect, don’t understand the subject matter, or have been misled by other grifters but they deliver the message just the same as everything else. To the uninformed parts of the audience it feels every bit as accurate and genuine as all of their other content.

This is a very common pattern in the health and fitness world. Andrew Huberman is the current most famous example of someone who has some narrow scientific knowledge but has shared a lot of incorrect and misleading content outside of his domain. He’s the guy who claimed he had to stop wearing Bluetooth headphones because he believed the radio waves were hearing his skin up and he didn’t like it, for reference. He’s been caught out recently as his fan base has started to realize he’s not the genius about every topic that he presents himself as.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#182

Post by FrustratedMonky »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #180
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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 back a few decades. Just because they don't understand science, so it must all be bad.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#183

Post by pcthrowaway »

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 the topic?

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#184

Post by gwerbret »

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…

> 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 the experiments; if you don't, you have no way of knowing if the predictions actually match the outcomes. Most publications involve some form of hypothesis-prediction-experiment-result profile, and it is the training and expertise (and corroboration by other experiments, and time) that help determine which of those papers establish new science, and which ones go out with last week's trash. The findings in these areas are seldom accessible until the field is very advanced and/or in practical use, as with the example of GPS you gave elsewhere.

> The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality.

There is; it's called a textbook.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#185

Post by ajs1998 »

antognini wrote: post #148

As a counterbalance to the "renegade" character of these kinds of podcasts I do recommend Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. He does a good job representing the "establishment" position in physics, so to speak. A good episode to start with is "The Crisis in Physics" in which he (unusually?) argues that there is no real crisis in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...

I absolutely love Sean Carroll's podcast. He's so good at explaining things in terms most people can understand, but also not afraid to get into the weeds and spend an hour building up to a point. Also not afraid of politics or how he will be seen by taking a political stance.

He seems like a great guy on top of being an excellent communicator.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#186

Post by ACCount37 »

janalsncm wrote: post #121
dachworker wrote: post #35

ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.

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 perform, no simple experiment to run that would show whether string theory has merit. So we get very questionable theories, and then a lot of even more questionable theories, and then crackpots and madmen as far as eye can see.

The curse on physics isn't that it has crackpots. It's that the remaining unsolved problems are incredibly hard, the space of solutions is vast, and there isn't enough experimental data coming in to quickly weed out the obviously wrong ones.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#187

Post by ahartmetz »

antithesizer wrote: post #70
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 noticed exactly the same thing with Sabine. Her spiral into crankery has been disappointing. It's very pleasant to see someone else saying it, too. Thank you.

My Hossenfelder experience was: "Oh nice, somebody is getting kind of famous for calling out string theory for being probably hogwash" followed (years later) by "Why is YouTube recommending this dumb clickbait by... Sabine Hossenfelder?! to me?"

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#188

Post by kelseyfrog »

tptacek wrote: post #136
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…

You're arguing with an oversimplified model of the complaint about Weinstein. It's not that Weinstein has a theory that's orthogonal to mainstream physics, but rather the means with which he pursues the inquiry. He doesn't write real papers, when he released the GU paper he copyrighted it and claimed it as a "work of entertainment", in effect demanding that the rest of the field not cite and address it. That's not ho…

That's essentially my conclusion. Weinstein is playing an ego game using science as the stage set.

He's set himself up a win-win situation by creating a crux. If GU is rejected, that supports his narrative. If GU is embraced, he’s vindicated as a suppressed genius. In either case, he wins in his own story.

Eric wants to be celebrated by science, but the only way to achieve that (rigorous math, predictions, peer review) would force him to abandon the very posture that sustains his popularity.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#189

Post by api »

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’ve talked to a few podcasters and every one of them has at one point quipped about how much more money they could make if they had no moral or intellectual standards and pandered to whatever the algorithm said worked. Usually that’s either conspiracy stuff THEY don’t want you to know about or culture war rage bait.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#190

Post by zamadatix »

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…

To add to this, I think we have a tendency to underestimate how much of our mental model derives from "direct working experience" type hours vs discussion/reading/listening hours.

E.g. I've probably talked about various aspects and extensions to the ISIS routing protocol with in-field experts for more hours than I could think to add together... but the bulk of my practical understanding really comes from the (comparatively) small amount of time I spent building custom implementations, debugging other implementations, and deploying ISIS in various locations. I probably couldn't have done the latter nearly as well without the former, but the latter is where I went from suggesting protocol changes that sounded reasonable to making critiques that were actually actionable

Similarly, I know I know BGP more than your average person, enough to sound like the protocol experts, but I lack most all of the practical working and experimentation knowledge. If you asked me what I think should be changed about BGP I'd probably rattle off a decent list, and it'd probably sound pretty convincing, yet I doubt I would even agree with half of it if I had the other half of the mental model built (or I told it to someone who specialized in BGP). That kind of step doesn't (and usually can't) come from working deeply in a different area (even if similar) and "talking the talk" about the other area.

That said, what makes social media addicting, especially in areas where specialists like to coalesce (HN is one such place, IMO) is you can get a TON of that kind of conversation, data, and readings about anything. Then it makes you overconfident because you got that style of interaction without even doing anything remotely related to that area.

All of this reminds me I've spent far too much time on HN... and I'm entering 12 days of PTO. Time to set noprocast to something ridiculous :).

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