Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I'll just comment on this bit:
The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney's PhD thesis. I've read both; Hughston's is more detailed and more clear.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
I once randomly found Hossenfelder's YT channel, it had a video about climate change and someone linked it somewhere, I didn't know who she was. That video seemed fine, it correctly pointed out the urgency of the matter, and while I don't know enough climate science to say much about the veracity of all its content, nothing stuck out as particularly weird to me. So I looked at some other videos from the channel... and boooooy did I quickly discover some serious conspiracy-style nonsense stuff. Real "the cabal of physicists are suppressing the truth" vibes, including "I got this email which I will read to you but I can't tell you who it's from, but it's the ultimate proof" (both not quotes, just how I'd summarize the content...)
Longtime friends of the pod will recognize the trick of turning molehills into mountains. Creationists take a legitimate debate over a detail, like how many millions of years ago did species A and species B diverge, and they blow it up into "evolution is wrong". Hossenfelder and her ilk do the same thing. They start with "pre-publication peer review has limited effectiveness" or "the allocation of funding is sometimes susceptible to fads", and they blow it up into "physicists are a cabal out to suppress The Truth".
One nugget of fact that Hossenfelder in particular exploits is that the specific way we have been investigating the corner of physics we like to call "fundamental" is, possibly, arguably, maybe tapped out. The same poster of sub-sub-atomic particles that you'd have put on your wall 30 or 40 years ago is still good today, with an edit or two in the corner. We found the top quark, we found the Higgs, and so, possibly, arguably, maybe, building an even bigger CERN machine isn't a worthwhile priority right now. Does this spell doom for physics? No, having to reorganize how we do things in one corner of our subject after decades of astonishing success is not "doom".
He's second only to the average sovereign citizen in that field.
has anyone worked out who Hossenfelder's new backer is yet
Belligerents