Geoff Penington

In 1993 the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. Estimated cost: $8 billion. An exodus of physicists left to Wall Street, bringing fancy maths and dubious risk management. 15 years later the global financial crisis cost ~$20 trillion. This is why you don't defund physics!

Sadly this seems to have been an overly steelmanned version of his point of view. He’s just very confused

In particular, this seems unrelated to the comparatively very standard claim that there is no top-down doubly holographic construction with good scale separation, which is what I had initially assumed he was talking about

Unfortunately I can’t reply to this since stringking blocked me. I think this is indeed the most reasonable interpretation of his claims. Presumably that means he doesn’t believe in the stringy picture of double-trace deformations described in eg arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/010…

@Renet29304 Sadly I also seem to have been blocked for trying to explain to him that double trace deformations are not in the swampland. Ah well. I also hope he’s ok. He’s clearly a smart guy and at his best can be quite funny. Unfortunately academia can cause people a lot of pain :(

I hope he's ok.

oh no i am blocked by stringking..

@stringking42069 @HaoGeng19 (I’m assuming here that “your paper” meant the “Apologia for islands” paper. If it meant something else please clarify.)

@stringking42069 @HaoGeng19 I’m very confused. Why are you bringing up a paper about ways to not create massive gravitons when this discussion is about ways to create massive gravitons?

Is the massive graviton in the room with us right now? #fuqislands #fuqdoubleholography #fuqmassivegravity

@stringking42069 @HaoGeng19 Sure. And I asked a closely related question about QFT that you still haven’t attempted to answer.

@quantum_geoff @HaoGeng19 Wut. The original question was about gravity. Well aware that your paper claimed gravity dual of the deformation gave you the non grav bath u wanted. Just completely unsupported by any explicit stringy example. CFT bros have also studies relevant and marginal defs for ages.

@stringking42069 @HaoGeng19 I asked a question about quantum field theory. Why are you talking about gravity?

@HaoGeng19 @quantum_geoff Siiiiigggghhhh U bros should learn some string theory. Just take the most basic vanilla story for getting EFTs with gravity. Newton’s constant in the EFT scales with 1/vol extra. now u want to have an eft where vol = infty on one part and finite on another part. SUS AF 😘

@stringking42069 @Cosmalano @atheorist Be strong stringking, if you believe in string theory, just work hard and ignore noises. Caring so much about yapping noises will drive you to madness

@stringking42069 @HaoGeng19 Please do explain the decades of work on the UV issues involved in coupling a relevant deformation of N=4 SYM to a relevant deformation of a second QFT such that the full coupling is marginal or relevant :)

@HaoGeng19 It’s very simple to do if you dont mind neglecting decades upon decades of work on how UV completion actually works. 😘

Are you up for a challenge? openai.com/parameter-golf

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

Notably, I saw many reddit threads insisting this was some sort of nefarious plot by OpenAI to maintain engagement. But lo and behold it was just an RL accident - never attribute to malice what can be attributed to the whims of the egregores.

There are so many ways to give money and avoid any of the nonprofit pathologies you want to. It is pure cope to pretend that these very smart people can't figure that out. Some good ideas I've seen around include: - Prizes for vaccine development - Purchase some high-social-value patents and release them to the public - Direct cash transfers - Scholarships for people to study specific questions you think are important - Advance market commitments for important high-value tech innovations (drought resistant crops, cheap desalinsation whatever) - direct funding of open-source infrastructure - Hire a right wing person to think of more ideas than the ones I'm coming up with off the cuff

@CburgesCliff This only makes sense because, as we know from QCD, 3=infinity. And so after that it becomes transfinite induction which is some weird made-up mathematician nonsense

This is why in physics we stop inductive proofs after n=3

@stringking42069 Graviton mass is just a feature of the state not the theory.

the value of this technology will mostly not be captured by its inventors, the labs, or even the chipmakers, but rather will be captured by the consumers as surplus. these are highly competitive markets without any natural monopolistic effects like many other technologies before it, machine intelligence democratizes abilities previously only available to the wealthy, in this case by commoditizing the services of the white collar elite who mostly live in rich countries it’s not that there are no programmers, it’s that really anybody can make software now now so the “rents” of the “human capital” of knowing how to write JavaScript for example should shrink dramatically this will reduce the inequality between countries: services that previously required lots of human capital now require chatbot subscriptions at worst, or may even be given away for free you can receive medical advice worthy of a $1000/hr American specialist doctor likely for free while living under a thatched roof in eg Papua New Guinea somewhere while I think Americans have plenty of reason to be excited by AI, I would be more excited as someone in a poor country

Penington exemplifies alot of what is fuqqed up in hep-th scene. Zero integrity, zero interest in the deep subjects like strings. Just in it to profitmax and make bank. Its utterly sickening.

@baberuth974 @stringking42069 Nah that was Anthropic. I haven’t been there since 2024. I’m working on models that will probably be used to drone strike Greenland

@quantum_geoff @stringking42069 Dude youre working on models used to drone strike civilians in Iran

Very good piece. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how serious a situation this is