JakeZ1979

@sharghzadeh Islam is trash

Tech CEO Aravind Srinivas slammed after saying AI layoffs are fine because people hate their jobs anyway trib.al/xrTEF46

A sign of how unwell contemporary science has become: The well-respected physicist commentator Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh has lost her academic affiliation because she dared to criticise a physicist's research. She delivers a damning condemnation: "A lot of research and the foundations of Physics is now pseudo-science. It hasn't followed the scientific method for decades." youtu.be/ZO5u3V6LJuM?si… She recounts a recent incident where a physicist contacted her, upset that she had judged their research as "100% bullshit", demanded she remove the relevant video, and then complained to people he believed were her supervisors when she refused. As a result of complaints (including from members of the community upset about her criticism of their research and academic conduct in general), her former academic institution—the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy— has discontinued her affiliation. Sabine is financially independent thanks to her audience support, so she is unbothered by the loss of affiliation or attempts to pressure her; however, she is concerned that many physicists fail to recognize the fundamental problems with their field. The broader issue in theoretical high-energy physics and foundations of physics is not new: critics like David Lindley ("the end of physics") and John Horgan ("the end of science") have pointed it out, yet the production of low-value "garbage" papers continues daily, gets published, funded, and hyped in the media. Many experts acknowledge the problems privately but stay silent publicly to protect their reputations and funding; an exception is physicist Will Kinney, who publicly criticized inflation model-building as mostly useless mathematical exercises with no realistic expectation of correctness. She strongly endorses Jesper Grimstrup's book "The Ant Mill," which describes the crisis in theoretical high-energy physics: no major breakthroughs in ~50 years, a lack of genuinely new ideas, and strong social pressures toward tribalism and groupthink that discourage independent thinking. She says intelligent people are wasting their time and taxpayer money on unproductive work due to ingrained groupthink; physicists are often shocked by external criticism and refuse to accept responsibility, blaming the critic instead. Hallmarks of pseudoscience in this area include: it looks like science from the inside (with courses, conferences, and jargon), but involves inventing mathematical "stories" or fictions about non-existent laws, new particles, forces, gravities, the beginning of the universe, multiverses, or extra dimensions—with what she says is zero empirical evidence. She compares this to naturopathy or other 'pseudoscientific' fields for brainwashing, rejection of challenging views, and overconfidence in one's intelligence; the main difference is that quack medical claims can directly harm people, while quack physics papers mainly waste money and resources. She highlights the core scientific failure: Science progresses by learning from mistakes and refining what counts as a "worthy" hypothesis. Post-1970s theoretical physics has not done this; instead, it continues guessing "nice" mathematics without basis, producing thousands of falsifiable but ultimately falsified predictions. Pre-1970s physics successfully solved real problems and made correct predictions (e.g., neutrino masses, Higgs boson); since then, the method of generating hypotheses via mathematical beauty or speculation has failed to yield confirmed breakthroughs, yet the community refuses to update its standards. The scientific method is misunderstood: it is not just "make a hypothesis and test it." Disciplines learn quality standards from past failures (e.g., random doomsday predictions are dismissed as unscientific because we know they waste time). Theoretical physics has stopped learning in this way for foundational questions. Many subfields (e.g., high-temperature superconductors, quantum information) are doing "normal science" productively, but the problem is concentrated in areas that invent superfluous, evidence-free hypotheses with no pressing data or consistency issues to solve. Example with dark matter: Solid evidence exists for it, and simple models suffice, but researchers unnecessarily complicate it with new "dark sectors," fifth forces, etc., that add extra assumptions and soon get ruled out—violating principles of parsimony. She compares it to the replication crisis in psychology (p-value hacking and irreproducible results), noting that psychology at least attempted reforms, while physics has doubled down on piling up unfruitful guesses (extra dimensions, multiverses, etc.). She proposes a solution: Journals and reviewers should adopt stricter guidelines—e.g., only publish papers where hypotheses use the minimal necessary assumptions and actually solve a real consistency or explanatory problem, rather than mathematical fiction. This could eliminate ~99% of the issue quickly, though journals resist due to incentives around publication volume and citations. The field has turned into a self-perpetuating system of producing and rewarding mathematical fiction instead of evidence-driven progress. Public exposure and pressure for reform are needed, even if it makes people uncomfortable. This is quite an important and challenging vent from Ms Hossenfelder. Good luck to her in her new independent role. @EricRWeinstein

To give the IQ deniers some credit, i have tested 150 software job applicants last week with an IQ test and a coding exercise. The correlation factor between IQ and coding exercise pass rate is only 0.1. There's public studies out there with similar results. (@nntaleb would be really happy about this if he hadn't blocked me)