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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

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Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#261

Post by crispyambulance »

qoez wrote: post #84
crispyambulance wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other motivations besides money for cranks. In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires. I don't know what the en…

The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that. > obscurantist Nothing he…

> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading,

My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.

THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.

Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#262

Post by glenstein »

hermitcrab wrote: post #204
carlosjobim wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever. Even interstellar space is not 100% vaccuum. So it will slow from the occasional contact with matter. No doubt it would take a very long time, though.

Right. And also efficiency is about its interaction as part of a system, which is the difference between perpetual motion, and perpetual motion machine.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#263

Post by qoez »

crispyambulance wrote: post #261
qoez wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that. > obscurantist Nothing he…

> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length. THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud. Capable scientists who insert themselves into pub…

Again I disagree. I've listened to many many of his interviews and it never comes across as indecipherable. If one person can understand it with some effort but some people find him hard to follow perhaps it's not that he's purposefully being hard to understand but that the audience not following isn't putting in enough effort or just giving up and calling him 'jargon filled' when there's actually a real clear understanding to be had behind what he's saying, to put it bluntly and at a risk of an angry response.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#264

Post by pdonis »

MengerSponge wrote: post #253
pdonis wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Evidently we don't live on the same planet, so we can't have a useful discussion.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#265

Post by pdonis »

griffzhowl wrote: post #227
pdonis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way [i.e., make accurate predictions]. This is a gross over-generalization imo. I would say at least the hard sciences are characterized by their extremely accurate predictive models. Are you thinking of maybe string theory specifically? Because that's a minority part of even the field of physics, and exceptional in many ways,…

> I would say at least the hard sciences are characterized by their extremely accurate predictive models.

Parts of them are. General relativity and quantum mechanics have been extensively tested within the domains we are able to test, and so yes, we have mountains of evidence as to the predictive models built using those general theories in those domains. And in cases where those domains extend into people's everyday lives (I gave the example of GPS upthread), the predictive accuracy of the models is now a matter of common knowledge.

But that's only part of "science", even "hard science". See further comments below.

> Are you thinking of maybe string theory specifically?

String theory is one example of the problem, but certainly not the only one.

> it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science

I think you have it backwards. The wrong generalization is to think that, because certain parts of our best current "hard sciences" have predictive models whose accuracy has been confirmed by mountains of evidence, that that's the norm. It's not. The predictive models we have based on GR and QM in certain domains are the exception, not the rule; they're the lucky cases where we've been able to run many, many controlled experiments, or where the domains are simple enough that we've been able to get Nature to give us lots of useful evidence (for example, we can now measure GR corrections to the basic Newtonian model of the solar system to fairly high order).

But most of what is called "science", even "hard science", is not like that. Not only do we not have predictive models of anything like the same accuracy, in many cases we don't even have predictive models at all. More important, the science doesn't get judged on whether it has predictive models. It gets judged on how plausible the pronouncements of "experts" sound.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#266

Post by pdonis »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #260
pdonis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How can you determine whether it makes accurate predictions?

See the example I gave of GPS upthread. Does your smartphone tell you where you are accurately? That's the kind of test I'm talking about.

If you're talking about a domain where you can't make that kind of test--then it's not a domain you care about enough for the test to matter.

> The idea that we can live without authority is nonsense.

No, it isn't. "Authority" means accepting what someone says without applying critical thinking. That is a recipe for disaster.

It's true that not accepting what anyone says as an authority requires you to have critical thinking skills, and many people in our current society don't have them. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that not applying critical thinking to what everyone says, no matter how much of an "authority" they claim to be, is a recipe for disaster. So if you don't currently have critical thinking skills, my advice would be to learn them.

> Institutions exist to help makes this possible, even if they are not infallible

It's true that institutions can help, if they can establish a track record of being trustworthy, and if they can then resist the temptation to misuse that trustworthiness when the stakes are high enough.

Unfortunately, no such institutions have ever existed in human history for any significant length of time. Every institution that has claimed such trustworthiness has abused it, usually at the worst possible time for those who were trusting it.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#267

Post by owenversteeg »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #66
jurking_hoff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office on grounds of being a perpetual motion machine The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.

Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible. The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica. But if y…

Years ago I took many exams in a building bearing his name, so I would not personally say he was "erased", but yes, certainly under-appreciated relative to his contemporaries.

For a nice little English language piece on him and his "air conditioning": https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sh...

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#268

Post by crispyambulance »

qoez wrote: post #263
crispyambulance wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length. THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud. Capable scientists who insert themselves into pub…

Again I disagree. I've listened to many many of his interviews and it never comes across as indecipherable. If one person can understand it with some effort but some people find him hard to follow perhaps it's not that he's purposefully being hard to understand but that the audience not following isn't putting in enough effort or just giving up and calling him 'jargon filled' when there's actually a real clear unders…

... and in the cases where one does manage to put in the effort to understand what EW is actually saying, the ROI has been trite and uninteresting and could have been said with simpler words and gotten to the point in far fewer words.

Example: See the conclusion of Nguyen's teardown response paper to "Economics as Gauge Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03460

Basically... 1) Tautology, 2) Inconclusive, 3) Not usable

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#269

Post by owebmaster »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #257
owebmaster wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 messiah…

What I could understand from your message is that you still worship Elon Musk just like 10 years ago? And you are complaining about the people that worshiped him with you and now hate him?
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