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 she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming.
In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.
> 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 contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
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 :).
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 pretty much everything, and people would delight being contrarian even about the most mundane of things.
I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. 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. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.
> Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?
Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.
and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.
Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".
Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.
There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.
> at least those I read
You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence
> She is pure show
less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.
Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.
I read her books, FWIW, I quite like them. As with anything, take things with a grain of salt, and I see it more as 'interesting food for thought'.
I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.
It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.
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.
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.
The important thing is are you a mathematician or physisict? If you are not then you never were understanding or engaging in the first place, just reacting to tone and presentation, could have been she was always bad, you can't say. I don't know enough ohysics and math so I avoid watching people like Sabine.
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
I have two friends who are in trade school after studying physics. They're applying physics everyday. They'll make a perfectly adequate living in a few months and meanwhile they're both getting paid to go to school.
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?
I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
I stopped being willing to consume any of her content after she made that video about "Academia is terrible and everyone I worked with were poopyheads and that's why I have to make these videos even though I hate it and all my viewers are stupid losers".
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?"
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’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.
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).
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
> 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 can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
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 how papers work.
The problem, as I understand it, is that Weinstein simply isn't "doing science". He's "doing big thinkies" and then complaining when the world doesn't snap to attention. That problem has not much at all to do with his specific ideas.
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 them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”
From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia
particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met
and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.
The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
> we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.
That seems high, but I can't contextualize it based only on these results. What would the figures be for doctors, blacksmiths, farmers, computer programmers, etc.? I guess you're likely to find disproportionate numbers of children who followed in their parents' footsteps in any profession. It's likely not something special to academia.
In any case, there are plenty of other factors that contribute beyond nepotism: early guidance and encouragement, support and understanding of career choices, parental expectations or pressures, genetics, and so on.
> Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.
Ok, this is a bit more suggestive, but it's also plausible to me that the factors I mentioned above are amplified for children of parents working at prestigious universities.
> Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.
This seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me. The results show that children of academic parents go into academia more than others, not that "socioeconomic privilege" predisposes to going into academia. For example, are the children of billionaires (or millionaires) more likely to go into academia than the children of humble academics at non-prestigious universities? I doubt it.
(I only read the abstract so please let me know if these points are addressed in the article)
There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted."
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
"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."
> 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 wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.
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. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
> 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.
While we try to make things accessible to the public, the determination of what is "good" is ultimately made by experts.
"The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval (as in pre-Newtonian, and increasingly pre-germ theory), and while it's important to maintain political support, it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN.
In fact, it's not reasonable to expect a very smart lay person to do the same. The problem is basically that the information that gets encoded in papers and public datasets is not spanning! There's a shocking amount of fiddly details that don't get transmitted for one reason or another. Say what you want about how things "should" be done, but that's how they are done. If you want things done differently you can encourage that behavior by rubbing cash on the problem.
> 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, so it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science
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.
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.
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
Agree. Science communicators should stick to talking about well-established or at least peer reviewed results. They do not need to be peddling fringe crackpottery. I don't think Tim's prose is magnificent, but the work speaks for itself: he wrote a serious technical document which stands alone with no response. Serious, credentialed physicists should platform these types and not grifters.
My path crossed Nguyen many years ago and I can vouch that he is a very smart, nice, ethical, and solid dude who knows his stuff. I’m also a physicist and know enough about the relevant math and physics to evaluate Nguyen v. Weinstein, though I haven’t processed either of their papers deeply. But, fwiw, Tim’s critique is detailed and readable. In particular, what he says about a faulty complexification step makes perfect sense and would spell death for an approach to unification that hinges on detailed accidents of representation theory (as Weinstein’s seems to). To really judge this, I’d have to delve into Weinstein’s baroque-yet-vague theory, which I’m unwilling to do as I’m pretty sure it would be a waste of time.
If Weinstein believed there was an issue with Nguyen’s personality or this was all a misunderstanding, he would not have avoided going on multiple podcasts to clear the air. That Nguyen has a character flaw would immediately be apparent in a long form interview.
Weinstein had that opportunity with Lex Fridman and instead is avoiding it. This is not he behavior of someone with a serious scientific position.
Weinstein has never alleged any kind of issue you’re suggesting, so I don’t think we need to invent any issues for him.
Timothy Nguyen’s way of introducing his grievances does feel heavy handed. Lots of emotionally laden, suspenseful language, that I usually hear from people who have an axe to grind.
But I don’t know him nor have I read material from him or his targets. Maybe he’s right on a few points.
Still, there is a smell about his blog that says “stay away”
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
It's the classic frame of "Haha, I was only joking. Unless I wasn't and you want to take me seriously." Eric comes across as having a wounded ego that he protects at any cost.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
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.
"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""
he reminds me of Jordan Peterson.
Both are clearly smart (raw IQ) but are deranged, they speak in convoluted sentences that are intentionally overcomplicated and that make no sense and
I highly recommend watching this debate (I use the term very loosely here) between Weinstein and Sean Carroll - and particularly this exchange about 37 minutes in: https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269
Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper:
On the first page:
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.
And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section:
> As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located.
> The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research.
This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology.
And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.
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 it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
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.
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.
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.
I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp.
Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
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 burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
She has done nothing of the sort and this kind of narrative is exactly the self-victimization that science-academic industry tells itself to insulate its own thinking. Sabine does not have that much power or influence.
Sadly this is a common path for many people on Youtube. Once they reach a certain level of popularity the original topic of their channel becomes a vehicle for "content creation" which they try to maximize for "engagement". The quality of the original content always nosedives.
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
> "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
This article and this quote are something I have also noticed recently.
I've been working on researching AI and trying to visualize more data structures to help connect ideas, and I want to bounce ideas off of people to make sure I'm truly comprehending things. I've been trying to have conversations to talk more in depth, but I haven't been able to get anyone to read a research paper. That doesn't stop anyone from telling me something about what I have been researching without reading the research or comprehending it. Everyone feels empowered with AI. But when asked to debate the merits of their ideas, everyone I have asked has said people won't stick to the debate. I think you pointed it out clearly. People can't debate a topic they truly don't know.
This isn't helping the case: Of all the players involved in this drama in the article, the video it references, and this thread, Professor Dave comes across as the worst. He strikes me as smug, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest. He also seems to have an unpleasant personality, from how he reacts to criticism on the internet.
I agree that he's not the best messenger, but in this case, he's right about Hossenfelder. I think the interviews with the 6 physicists stand alone. For the most part, Dave just lets them talk.
Back in my days of devouring popular physics we had Peter Woit and to some degree Lee Smolin. But people were mostly getting their pop physics from books, not online, so the velocity of contrarianisn was throttled.
I skimmed the 'paper'. It seems incredibly rambling and not any sort of coherent theory. However I graduated with an undergrad physics degree in 1987 and became a software engineer. So I am hardly super qualified to comment.
Once in every now and then a genius comes along and turns everything up side down. But there are 1000s of cranks and blowhards for every Einstein. I don't see anything to make me think Weinstein is an Einstein (the similarlity in name notwithstanding).
At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread.
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
I would have kept it down-weighted. This is a drama that can have no satisfying resolution, and offers little unique insight into the world. The topic itself, mathematical physics, is so rarified that only a few hundred people in the world can understand the facts of the case. What's left is a strange superposition of emotionally resonant stories - one where you empathize with the expert being railroaded by a psuedoscientist and his allies (the TFA), and the other where a brilliant outsider's ideas are ignored and punished by prejudiced insiders (Weinstein's narrative). The peanut gallery weighs in with vim and vigor, rather than just saying "I don't know", and all it does is tell you which story they like in that moment.
As an aside, scientists are highly motivated to take credible outsider ideas seriously because the cost/benefit makes a lot of sense (e.g. Max Planck taking Einstein seriously). The motive to suppress Weinstein doesn't make sense, regardless of the underlying claims. But really, I don't know.
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
Sorry, it's one thing to interview cranks like Chris Langan and Eric Weinstein, bad enough as that is. It's quite another to promote them as brave champions of suppressed truths.
Did you read my comment? I’m not promoting Langan and Weinstein either -
I’m promoting Jaimungals podcast (which was disparaged on this thread) which is an absolutely wonderful for cross-disciplinary exploration of TOEs and cutting edge concepts in physics, AI, biology and consciousness and philosophy
For example this podcast Frederic Schuller, an award-winning theoretical physicist and professor
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down.
If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman.
But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
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 behavior at worst.
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
> She’s inconsistent with her messaging, saying that “she never looked into [Geometric Unity] in any detail” but clearly saying the opposite in an older video. It honestly doesn’t interest me to micro-police how Sabine chooses to express her opinions
And yet the author has done just that, and not in a very transparent way. The second quote the author didn't provide was:
> ... looked closely enough at Weinstein's... Wolfram's ... theories of everything ... to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved ...
> Not interested enough to look any closer ... don't want to waste my time
This is clearly not the opposite, but the same thing. "Closely enough" could hypothetically be as simple as reading the summary and skimming in a few minutes and realizing there isn't a single formula with the solution. That's not a detailed review that could require many hours (or even days?) of work
> several of our most prominent science communicators – nay, science populists – are willing to distort the truth to suit their own interests.
Indeed, a universal human trait even science can't tame!
Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)
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 end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
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 says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
I always thought Weinstein was a creep but he’s a physics crackpot too? Sad that Hossenfelder got involved but it’s so strange to see the spectrum of outsiders and insider-outsiders and outsider-insiders that showed up for that. Never saw a real physicist threaten a lawsuit over criticism but the paranoid and delusional do it all the time.
There are numerous "everything theorists" who appear in a bunch of yt channels/podcasts. Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Langan, Terence Howard, Eric, etc.
Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
i mean he's not a physicist of any sort so i don't think there's anything amiss about this? the "deeply unserious" part is that people can't (refuse to?) recognize that he's not a physicist.
I must, the same way the immune system must assume that anything an IgE antibody can attach to is a potential threat, assume that anyone who unironically uses the word "gaslight" as a verb is wrong.
Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.
I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.
There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:
> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science
But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.
I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.
(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).
But that's the issue, Nguyen is not the institution as a whole so then their concerns are just talking past each other. (And perhaps typical of a professional physicists Nguyen's complaints miss this point.)
I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.
My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.
I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.
It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
Note that I am not saying that what this author is saying is necessarily wrong. But I don’t like the inclusion of the anonymous author, so I made a point of it.
I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
Anonymity is a great way to criticize published research because it necessarily focuses attention on the content of the critique rather than reputation
Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?
Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?
> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone
Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:
> 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. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.
Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
If I was reaching out to academics and public figures to criticize someone else’s published work, I would use my real name. Otherwise it’s all a game, and we’re just being tools for someone else’s benefit. Anyone can also then just make up a story about who the anonymous author is, and spread any number of disinformation and misinformation takes. Is that good for science or any scientific discourse? I think it creates less drama when people are cool-headed and don’t assume enemies of everyone.
Is there a legitimate fear of mob justice from political opponents, or some type of covert mafia action instead? Sure, but remember that this climate is so polarized that anyone who gets “cancelled” now will instead become a hero for one faction or another. So, you have a real chance of becoming either AOC or MTG in this extremely polarized political climate instead of becoming cancelled.
But I don’t care about politics per se, I just don’t like how extremism has permeated every sphere of life. So how to conduct truth-seeking under these circumstances? It seems to me that the best course of action is to instead have serious discussions, like workshops. It would make sense to also invite your opponents, and other neutral parties from the field, and try to understand whatever the issue is with an open mind.
That said, from what I can tell Hossfender has criticized GU as a theory. But it seems she’s being castigated for not breaking ties with people who are political enemies of some groups.
Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.
When I was still in the physics world, almost every high energy guy I talked to thought string theory was a scam. It seems like everyone that wasn't a string theorist thought it was scam. I don't know enough of the topic to know one way or the other, but it seemed a common idea.
At one point there was a New York Times article which derided a scientist who said that we could send a rocket to the moon.
As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
It depends who you are picking on and in which field. From direct experience some fields are very well organised when it comes to protecting their lack of scientific integrity.
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 she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture
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Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming.
In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.
Touch grass.
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> 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 contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
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 :).
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 pretty much everything, and people would delight being contrarian even about the most mundane of things.
https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared
I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. 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. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.
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> Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?
Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.
Several of her first-or-sole-author minimal length quantum gravity phenomenology papers have more than a hundred citations:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en
and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.
Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".
Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.
There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.
> at least those I read
You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence
> She is pure show
less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.
Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.
Sometimes contrarianism is just sour grapes.
Maybe she is projecting how she did science onto others?
I read her books, FWIW, I quite like them. As with anything, take things with a grain of salt, and I see it more as 'interesting food for thought'.
I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.
It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs
This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.
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.
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.
The important thing is are you a mathematician or physisict? If you are not then you never were understanding or engaging in the first place, just reacting to tone and presentation, could have been she was always bad, you can't say. I don't know enough ohysics and math so I avoid watching people like Sabine.
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
By default, people have moral agency for what they do. Exceptions exist, of course, but “I wanted to make more money” is not one of them.
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I have two friends who are in trade school after studying physics. They're applying physics everyday. They'll make a perfectly adequate living in a few months and meanwhile they're both getting paid to go to school.
I submit Sean Carroll, and his podcast, for contrast.
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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?
Step away from yourself for a while and consider if people really want to watch a video (any video) about your dietary choices.
You're not the only one who has noticed this, no.
Attention is a shit economy and people who spend their time trying to acquire it inevitably become covered in and completely full of...shit.
I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
I stopped being willing to consume any of her content after she made that video about "Academia is terrible and everyone I worked with were poopyheads and that's why I have to make these videos even though I hate it and all my viewers are stupid losers".
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?"
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.
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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?
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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.
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).
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Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless.
His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons.
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
> 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 can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
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 how papers work.
The problem, as I understand it, is that Weinstein simply isn't "doing science". He's "doing big thinkies" and then complaining when the world doesn't snap to attention. That problem has not much at all to do with his specific ideas.
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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 them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”
From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia
https://www.verywellhealth.com/paranoia-5113652
particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman
and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.
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But... they're the ones doing the demonizing... of pretty much everyone who disagrees with them?
"DISC" is literally just shorthand for "people who disagree with me are conspiring."
The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school
From your ref [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/
> we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.
That seems high, but I can't contextualize it based only on these results. What would the figures be for doctors, blacksmiths, farmers, computer programmers, etc.? I guess you're likely to find disproportionate numbers of children who followed in their parents' footsteps in any profession. It's likely not something special to academia.
In any case, there are plenty of other factors that contribute beyond nepotism: early guidance and encouragement, support and understanding of career choices, parental expectations or pressures, genetics, and so on.
> Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.
Ok, this is a bit more suggestive, but it's also plausible to me that the factors I mentioned above are amplified for children of parents working at prestigious universities.
> Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.
This seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me. The results show that children of academic parents go into academia more than others, not that "socioeconomic privilege" predisposes to going into academia. For example, are the children of billionaires (or millionaires) more likely to go into academia than the children of humble academics at non-prestigious universities? I doubt it.
(I only read the abstract so please let me know if these points are addressed in the article)
> 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.
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There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted."
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
>especially when they're selling you their own idea.
That is the heart of every con, isn't it? Tell people what they want to hear.
"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 wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.
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. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
> 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.
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While we try to make things accessible to the public, the determination of what is "good" is ultimately made by experts.
"The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval (as in pre-Newtonian, and increasingly pre-germ theory), and while it's important to maintain political support, it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN.
In fact, it's not reasonable to expect a very smart lay person to do the same. The problem is basically that the information that gets encoded in papers and public datasets is not spanning! There's a shocking amount of fiddly details that don't get transmitted for one reason or another. Say what you want about how things "should" be done, but that's how they are done. If you want things done differently you can encourage that behavior by rubbing cash on the problem.
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> 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, so it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science
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.
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.
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
>But the other common denominator is Nguyen
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
This is supposed to be about science.
Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed.
He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.
Agree. Science communicators should stick to talking about well-established or at least peer reviewed results. They do not need to be peddling fringe crackpottery. I don't think Tim's prose is magnificent, but the work speaks for itself: he wrote a serious technical document which stands alone with no response. Serious, credentialed physicists should platform these types and not grifters.
My path crossed Nguyen many years ago and I can vouch that he is a very smart, nice, ethical, and solid dude who knows his stuff. I’m also a physicist and know enough about the relevant math and physics to evaluate Nguyen v. Weinstein, though I haven’t processed either of their papers deeply. But, fwiw, Tim’s critique is detailed and readable. In particular, what he says about a faulty complexification step makes perfect sense and would spell death for an approach to unification that hinges on detailed accidents of representation theory (as Weinstein’s seems to). To really judge this, I’d have to delve into Weinstein’s baroque-yet-vague theory, which I’m unwilling to do as I’m pretty sure it would be a waste of time.
If Weinstein believed there was an issue with Nguyen’s personality or this was all a misunderstanding, he would not have avoided going on multiple podcasts to clear the air. That Nguyen has a character flaw would immediately be apparent in a long form interview.
Weinstein had that opportunity with Lex Fridman and instead is avoiding it. This is not he behavior of someone with a serious scientific position.
Weinstein has never alleged any kind of issue you’re suggesting, so I don’t think we need to invent any issues for him.
Timothy Nguyen’s way of introducing his grievances does feel heavy handed. Lots of emotionally laden, suspenseful language, that I usually hear from people who have an axe to grind.
But I don’t know him nor have I read material from him or his targets. Maybe he’s right on a few points.
Still, there is a smell about his blog that says “stay away”
I would say the other common denominator is Weinstein, his wealth, and willingness to sue.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein :
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
It all seems very odd.
As entertainment goes, I would personally prefer a good movie or a concert to a jargon filled paper.
apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
> apparently Wheeler nicked some idea
According to Weinstein?
It's the classic frame of "Haha, I was only joking. Unless I wasn't and you want to take me seriously." Eric comes across as having a wounded ego that he protects at any cost.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” ― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
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"
> Eric Weinstein is the Steven Seagal of Physics
he reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Both are clearly smart (raw IQ) but are deranged, they speak in convoluted sentences that are intentionally overcomplicated and that make no sense and
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I highly recommend watching this debate (I use the term very loosely here) between Weinstein and Sean Carroll - and particularly this exchange about 37 minutes in: https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269
Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper:
On the first page:
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.
And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section:
> As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located.
> The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research. This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology.
And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.
[1] https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf
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 it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
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.
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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.
Sabine's early video's seemed pretty sincere, and had a lot of valid points.
But later, I think the pressure of creating constant content, and moving into non-expert areas, has gotten just as pop-sci as anybody else.
Still think she is on another level from Eric who will throw out any crazy idea he can if someone will listen.
For anyone who doesn't already know, the term for the phenomenon is 'audience capture'
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
I think "just as pop-sci" is a bit generous. https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1956336194352230570 explains it better than I can.
I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp.
Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
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She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
I think it’s Elite Overproduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Being a contrarian is often an intellectually dishonest way to seek power. Goes all the way back to the serpent in Adam and Eve.
Pointing out that something is bullshit is valuable in science, even if you don't have a better theory.
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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 burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
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She has done nothing of the sort and this kind of narrative is exactly the self-victimization that science-academic industry tells itself to insulate its own thinking. Sabine does not have that much power or influence.
Sadly this is a common path for many people on Youtube. Once they reach a certain level of popularity the original topic of their channel becomes a vehicle for "content creation" which they try to maximize for "engagement". The quality of the original content always nosedives.
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).
I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.
I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.
Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that
There's a term for that: Engineer's Disease.
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
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You must be one of the aliens trying to deceive humanity.
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
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> "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
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Reading this makes me feel that smart muckrakers are a heavily undervalued resource online.
> Attack the Person, Not the Science
This article and this quote are something I have also noticed recently.
I've been working on researching AI and trying to visualize more data structures to help connect ideas, and I want to bounce ideas off of people to make sure I'm truly comprehending things. I've been trying to have conversations to talk more in depth, but I haven't been able to get anyone to read a research paper. That doesn't stop anyone from telling me something about what I have been researching without reading the research or comprehending it. Everyone feels empowered with AI. But when asked to debate the merits of their ideas, everyone I have asked has said people won't stick to the debate. I think you pointed it out clearly. People can't debate a topic they truly don't know.
"GU continues to be entertained by Hossenfelder". Last I knew she had a video critical of GU and Weinstein.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA
"Professor Dave" interviews 6 physicists regarding Hossenfelder including one guy whose name you particle physicists in particular might recognize.
Oh, This is the first time I have seen Michael peskin. I have known him through his famous QFT book. I did not even know he is still alive.
Feels good putting a face to the author of one the books that made you struggle but also enjoyed.
This isn't helping the case: Of all the players involved in this drama in the article, the video it references, and this thread, Professor Dave comes across as the worst. He strikes me as smug, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest. He also seems to have an unpleasant personality, from how he reacts to criticism on the internet.
Dave is a bully.
I agree that he's not the best messenger, but in this case, he's right about Hossenfelder. I think the interviews with the 6 physicists stand alone. For the most part, Dave just lets them talk.
Back in my days of devouring popular physics we had Peter Woit and to some degree Lee Smolin. But people were mostly getting their pop physics from books, not online, so the velocity of contrarianisn was throttled.
if anyone wants to go through it:
https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...
possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw
and that's like 95% of available documentation :)
I skimmed the 'paper'. It seems incredibly rambling and not any sort of coherent theory. However I graduated with an undergrad physics degree in 1987 and became a software engineer. So I am hardly super qualified to comment.
Once in every now and then a genius comes along and turns everything up side down. But there are 1000s of cranks and blowhards for every Einstein. I don't see anything to make me think Weinstein is an Einstein (the similarlity in name notwithstanding).
The connection between Eric and Sabine seems a bit... weak in this article. It sounds like 90% guilt by association, and 10% substance.
At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread.
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
This is not a criticism of the author—we know what people have to do on the internet. But it's in keeping with what we're optimizing this site for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
(Submitted title was "Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder a Crisis of Credibility")
I would have kept it down-weighted. This is a drama that can have no satisfying resolution, and offers little unique insight into the world. The topic itself, mathematical physics, is so rarified that only a few hundred people in the world can understand the facts of the case. What's left is a strange superposition of emotionally resonant stories - one where you empathize with the expert being railroaded by a psuedoscientist and his allies (the TFA), and the other where a brilliant outsider's ideas are ignored and punished by prejudiced insiders (Weinstein's narrative). The peanut gallery weighs in with vim and vigor, rather than just saying "I don't know", and all it does is tell you which story they like in that moment.
As an aside, scientists are highly motivated to take credible outsider ideas seriously because the cost/benefit makes a lot of sense (e.g. Max Planck taking Einstein seriously). The motive to suppress Weinstein doesn't make sense, regardless of the underlying claims. But really, I don't know.
Thank you, Mr. Defender of Curiosity on Hacker News.
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
Sorry, it's one thing to interview cranks like Chris Langan and Eric Weinstein, bad enough as that is. It's quite another to promote them as brave champions of suppressed truths.
Did you read my comment? I’m not promoting Langan and Weinstein either -
I’m promoting Jaimungals podcast (which was disparaged on this thread) which is an absolutely wonderful for cross-disciplinary exploration of TOEs and cutting edge concepts in physics, AI, biology and consciousness and philosophy
For example this podcast Frederic Schuller, an award-winning theoretical physicist and professor
https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg?si=2PwkFzH4OJ2r8eMT
And this with Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes https://youtu.be/gEK4-XtMwro?si=bYAHDO4iWh9WRV8J
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How do dumbasses that think they're doing "cutting edge quantum physics" talking to an LLM fit in to this?
It's Vibe Physics![0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down. If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman. But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
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 behavior at worst.
Just my humble opinion as a bystander looking in.
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.
All the best scientists release their work on Joe Rogan and threaten to sue anyone who criticizes their work.
Saying otherwise means you're part of the DISC, of course.
> She’s inconsistent with her messaging, saying that “she never looked into [Geometric Unity] in any detail” but clearly saying the opposite in an older video. It honestly doesn’t interest me to micro-police how Sabine chooses to express her opinions
And yet the author has done just that, and not in a very transparent way. The second quote the author didn't provide was:
> ... looked closely enough at Weinstein's... Wolfram's ... theories of everything ... to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved ... > Not interested enough to look any closer ... don't want to waste my time
This is clearly not the opposite, but the same thing. "Closely enough" could hypothetically be as simple as reading the summary and skimming in a few minutes and realizing there isn't a single formula with the solution. That's not a detailed review that could require many hours (or even days?) of work
> several of our most prominent science communicators – nay, science populists – are willing to distort the truth to suit their own interests.
Indeed, a universal human trait even science can't tame!
Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)
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 end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
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 says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
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I always thought Weinstein was a creep but he’s a physics crackpot too? Sad that Hossenfelder got involved but it’s so strange to see the spectrum of outsiders and insider-outsiders and outsider-insiders that showed up for that. Never saw a real physicist threaten a lawsuit over criticism but the paranoid and delusional do it all the time.
There are numerous "everything theorists" who appear in a bunch of yt channels/podcasts. Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Langan, Terence Howard, Eric, etc.
Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
> Weinstein released his Geometric Unity paper on April 1, debuting it on Joe Rogan’s podcast
We live in deeply unserious times.
He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
i mean he's not a physicist of any sort so i don't think there's anything amiss about this? the "deeply unserious" part is that people can't (refuse to?) recognize that he's not a physicist.
I must, the same way the immune system must assume that anything an IgE antibody can attach to is a potential threat, assume that anyone who unironically uses the word "gaslight" as a verb is wrong.
Weinstein = Wannabe Einstein
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Many high profile engineers who revolutionized industry agree!
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Hossenfelder is absolutely the BS detector and takedown machine that physics needs :)
Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.
I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.
There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:
> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science
But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
The author has previously published an article with a detailed analysis of the math of GU, and why it doesn't work: https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.
I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.
I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.
(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).
Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/
[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
But that's the issue, Nguyen is not the institution as a whole so then their concerns are just talking past each other. (And perhaps typical of a professional physicists Nguyen's complaints miss this point.)
I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.
My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.
I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.
It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
Anonymity is a red herring here, since the original GU critique has a named and significant co-author (the author of this post).
Note that I am not saying that what this author is saying is necessarily wrong. But I don’t like the inclusion of the anonymous author, so I made a point of it.
I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
Anonymity is a great way to criticize published research because it necessarily focuses attention on the content of the critique rather than reputation
Is nis0s your real name? Why not?
Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?
Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?
> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone
Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:
> 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. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.
Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
If I was reaching out to academics and public figures to criticize someone else’s published work, I would use my real name. Otherwise it’s all a game, and we’re just being tools for someone else’s benefit. Anyone can also then just make up a story about who the anonymous author is, and spread any number of disinformation and misinformation takes. Is that good for science or any scientific discourse? I think it creates less drama when people are cool-headed and don’t assume enemies of everyone.
Is there a legitimate fear of mob justice from political opponents, or some type of covert mafia action instead? Sure, but remember that this climate is so polarized that anyone who gets “cancelled” now will instead become a hero for one faction or another. So, you have a real chance of becoming either AOC or MTG in this extremely polarized political climate instead of becoming cancelled.
But I don’t care about politics per se, I just don’t like how extremism has permeated every sphere of life. So how to conduct truth-seeking under these circumstances? It seems to me that the best course of action is to instead have serious discussions, like workshops. It would make sense to also invite your opponents, and other neutral parties from the field, and try to understand whatever the issue is with an open mind.
That said, from what I can tell Hossfender has criticized GU as a theory. But it seems she’s being castigated for not breaking ties with people who are political enemies of some groups.
Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.
When I was still in the physics world, almost every high energy guy I talked to thought string theory was a scam. It seems like everyone that wasn't a string theorist thought it was scam. I don't know enough of the topic to know one way or the other, but it seemed a common idea.
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At one point there was a New York Times article which derided a scientist who said that we could send a rocket to the moon.
As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
She's trying to get into the populist Sagan, Greene, Kaku, Tyson type pundit game.
It depends who you are picking on and in which field. From direct experience some fields are very well organised when it comes to protecting their lack of scientific integrity.
Gotta bag those conference expenses!