Sebastian Whitaker

On Entanglement Islands, Gravity, and a Constraint We May Be Ignoring There’s been significant interest in the idea of “entanglement islands” as a resolution to the black hole information paradox.

@JoelMCurzon I love twitter 😂😂😂

No comment.

@LatFilosof Overrated 😂😂 Joking of course.

My nephew is the greatest conceivable being.

@SwipeWright This is amazing @SwipeWright Kudos to you!

ANNOUNCEMENT: WE’RE SAVING SCIENCE! We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But that’s not really true. Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear. And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense. This isn’t exactly new. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship. Two decades later, @ConceptualJames, @HPluckrose , and @peterboghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and queer performativity. Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory. The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing. And today, the problem is even worse. We now have serious SCIENCE journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.” But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults. That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children. And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.” That is untenable. So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society (@Theory_Society), and I decided to do something about it. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it. A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks. Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention? If yes, it gets published. And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue. That’s how science is supposed to work. Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen. That’s what we’ve done. Now it’s time for academics to use it. Read our announcement on the @WSJ below. 🔗wsj.com/opinion/a-way-…

@Samuel_Gregson Absolute nonsense as usual 😂

Wtf is this guy waffling about?

@SwipeWright Oh well. I can’t wait to read this insightful and illuminating thesis 😂🤣

This person just got a PhD in human sexuality for a thesis about "How Queer Witches Heal Without Western Psychology" and why "magic" should be a "public health priority." From the abstract: "What can queer pagan liminal healing practices teach therapists and other practitioners? Investigating the dichotomies of clinical versus spiritual and history versus present, as well as the inherent liminality between queer memory and queer futurity, aid us in understanding the many subaltern patterns of queer witch healing that are created in the absence of support from mental health fields of practice."

@SwipeWright @mtracey You’re all fools. Everyone knows what ‘Epstein’ was. Engineered Persona Serving Transnational Espionage & Intelligence Networks It’s all making sense now 🤣🤣

@mtracey My patience for this Weinsteinian pseudo-deep vagueness is growing pretty thin.

This guy just babbles incoherent nonsense, and somehow gets dummies on the internet to think he's imparting something awe-inspiringly profound

@darkprof It’s probably one of the largest cultural misunderstandings that exist. Especially amongst religious people.

It’s depressing to learn how many believe that the Big Bang Theory asserts that the universe came from nothing.

@LatFilosof It’s so patently stupid and demonstrates how little they understand about what the big bang was. Memes like this just come across as cringey.

Please, I beg of you, stop this using this silly strawman. I have never once come across an atheist who believes a literal nothing can cause anything, or even exist for that matter. But there is a HUGE gap between something existing and God being that something. I'm tired boss

@michaeljknowles You do realise that Meyer is talking nonsense. There is absolutely zero serious people that are disputing evolution by natural selection. It’s the entire basis of biology, medicine and agriculture. This is just purely ignorant on your end.

When I was a kid, only dummies denied Darwinian evolution. Increasingly, denying Darwin is the standard position of all the smartest people I know. youtube.com/watch?v=i8J3BG…

From $100 to $600 is a 500% rise. From $600 to $100 is an 83% savings. This is elementary math, most all people in the room know it and should be embarrassed to their bones to go along with this North Korean style theatre

@RealMattFradd No it’s not. This is nonsense. There’s not a single serious person who believes the “consensus is shifting on evolution”. It is the entire basis of modern biology, medicine and agriculture. As well as being one of the most substantiated and supported scientific theories ever.

The consensus is shifting on evolution

@LatFilosof @DrJavierDeLaHe1 Until that structure is identified, knowing more isolated mechanisms on Earth doesn’t straightforwardly translate into a probability distribution over planets. The bottleneck isn’t data, it’s the absence of a theory that tells us what kind of data would even constrain the problem

@LatFilosof @DrJavierDeLaHe1 That’s true. It’s not just that we lack detailed knowledge of abiogenesis chemistry, it’s that we don’t yet understand which features of that chemistry actually control the transition from non-life to life in a way that scales across environments.

It's not insane. It took nearly 2 billion years to go from microbes to cells with nuclei. That's just one hard step of many before intelligence comes about. We simply don't know just how improbable we are. For all we the probability is so low it only happened once in the universe

@LatFilosof @DrJavierDeLaHe1 …translating micro-level processes into macro-level frequencies, and until that mapping exists, numerical claims about likelihood are better understood as expressions of ignorance than as estimates of reality.

@LatFilosof @DrJavierDeLaHe1 …scale and appeals to historical contingency, are underdetermined without a generative model linking abiogenesis and intelligence to underlying physical and chemical constraints. The real issue isn’t that the probabilities are inscrutable, but that we lack a theory capable…

@paleochristcon …recognise them without appealing to something external. The argument assumes moral facts require external grounding. It’s not obvious they do. They may instead emerge from constraints on systems of interacting agents, more like fixed points than decrees.

@paleochristcon In that sense, what we call “moral facts” might be less like decrees and more like fixed points in a space of possible interactions. I see that the disagreement is partly about where those fixed points come from, and partly about whether we’re prepared to...

I dont see you saying "Yes let's debate this" Lol. Hahahahahaha.