Daniel Green

This December, I will be trying another experiment: Each day I will post 1 under-appreciated paper/result (my definition/no rules). I will also be posting my choices on blue sky (dangreen.bsky.social). I am curious to see which site has more interesting feedback/discussion

@theory_dad The quote specific does 2 things: it compares science to art, and suggests the reason to pursue knowledge is because it makes the country worth defending. Those things would be true at any funding level (100M, 1B, 100B). I don't see how this is an argument against the FY27 PBR.

@theory_dad The problem is that the argument says nothing about how much funding is needed and why. Economists actually have good arguments and we should use theirs (eg federalreserve.gov/newsevents/spe…).

In the context of the FY27 PBR it helps to go back to Robert Wilson’s famous testimony to Congress about funding for the NAL(Fermilab) in FY1970 and ask the natural question,why are there some people so hell-bent on tearing down so much of what makes this country worth defending?

@YuDai_Tsai Eg the dumb thing about the government pushing AI in universities and labs, is that the whole point of gov funding is to help areas not well funded by industry. No industry in human history has been better funded without the government than AI.

@YuDai_Tsai But if you point is that the government trying to micromanage what we do with our research funds is a bad idea, then I agree, and so do the economists. This is just the kind of thing that politicians think up and don't know enough to understand why it makes not sense

@YuDai_Tsai Science is extremely well funded relative to other areas (eg art, history, etc) because the impact on industry has been measured to be enormous. That includes the technology and training (PhDs). Scientists who argue for science without the economics will hurt us in the long run.

@YuDai_Tsai Economists know why science is funded at the current level and argue we need more funding. They also know that the value of the PhDs in industry is important and is not about specific technical skills. See this speech from the chair of the fed from 2013 (issues.org/bernanke-resea…)

Come to @UCSDPhysics. We will continue to have human grad students.

@Geo_papic @BillSimmons Having a question about a 60 game threshold at the exact 60 min mark is next level podcasting skills (or amazing luck)

You'd think that if I ranked my greatest analytical accomplishments of the past 2 years, it would be some macro call. FALSE. It is being included by the Great @BillSimmons in his latest pod... starting at 60m mark. The "Marko P." is ME. #LifeGoals podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@vincentchu See their answer. I like how they make a big deal about how 80% of students need to take calculus for their degree but only 60% will need calculus later. I don't know how you can look at that 60% number and think 'it's fine that lots of students have a below 5th grade math level'

@nu_phases Which STEM majors don’t require competence in calculus? Mind blowing 🤯

Want to understand how we got to a point where a large fraction of UCSD students struggled with 7+2=6+[] (1st grade level)? Just look at the proposed solutions You can't make up 12 years of math with a few "evidence based" courses. Eliminating calculus is just accepting failure

See the opinion piece here: insidehighered.com/opinion/views/…

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok But if you look at my lists, you will see that I am wiling to support areas where I have no skin in the game, but I see real progress. Can you give some examples where, you have nothing invested, where you think money should have gone and would have produced results?

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok Eg Cosmology is an area that has seen massive theoretical and observational growth. People working in this area are directly in contact with "reality" and "fundamental physics". But the you and the group you complain about both have undersold this as not being fundamental.

This is such an absurd claim it's actually pretty funny. A few years ago I went over 31 examples of breakthroughs from the past 40 years (excluding Nobel prizes) x.com/nu_phases/stat… But 50+ years really opens up some all time great results:

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok If you want to complain about modern funding and sociology (who gets money or jobs) that's totally fair game. Ask Boltzmann how fair the landscape was in the late 19th century. But don't deny that Boltzmann made fundamental contributions to physics.

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok If you want to complain about QG, please go ahead. It's nowhere on my list. However, even the reframing that QG is well-defined as an effective theory is a novel development (also not clear in the 60s-70s). But part of the problem is your reframing QG = all fundamental physics.

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok For example, I would hope that the inventional statistical mechanics counts as a profound change to the foundations of physics, but it didn't change the equations of motion of any individual object and is just an effective description, not a new microscopic law.

@ericweinstein @skdh @grok Our current understanding of the Universe we observe is not the SM + GR Lagrangians. If the claim is that the Lagrangian hasn't changed in 50 years, then I disagree. But I also reject that we measure progress only by terms in the Lagrangian.