Says who? This isn't a debate and you're not the debate moderator.
For my money, interesting things about the author are absolutely on topic. They help us put what we're reading in context.
And opinions are okay here too.
It's not as though the author's biases or background are completely irrelevant; but discussing them is unhelpful without additional clarifications on the mistakes, ignorances, or dishonesties alleged.
Imagine a different context: maybe I have a strong opinion as a lay citizen on campaign finance issues. It's all well and good for someone to enter saying "I'm a political operative/lobbyist/etc, and you don't know what you're talking about"; but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't (which would be just as helpful and pertinent if I had turned out to be an expert anyway).
I don't think it's a zero-information statement at all. If S. Weinberg tells me that my physical arguments are wrong but he doesn't have the time to say how/why, then it's certainly a non-zero information statement and I'll scrutinize my line of thoughts thoroughly after that. Dismissing this as a zero information statement would be pretentious from my part. The same goes for you against the expert in political finances.
It seems that there's an underlying assumption in your argument that we're all equal and equally capable of having opinions on anything unless someone comes to us, and spends time thoroughly showing us why we are wrong. Or that we are all correct until proven wrong. This is problematic because 1/ we're not all equal, and acknowledging that we dont know everything is important, 2/ it's unlikely that there's always an expert around willing to spend time educating us everytime we feel the need of commenting on things we dont know, and 3/ we may not comprehend why we are wrong by lack of proper education.
You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.
It's a public discussion of an important matter, and these tend to go best when people present arguments based on their positions. When someone like you fails to do this, then I tend to assume that it is because they lack such.
edit: here is a link from below that is an example of such an argument: https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/large-hadron-collider-f...
The second commenter follows a similar logic. He doesn't seem to engage the point that we don't expect the discovery of something new, he seems to suggest that scientists should build bigger accelerators simply because we can.
But he must know that this is not how science works. Chemists don't just simply perform all imaginable chemical reactions just to completely map the space of chemistry. We allocate scarce resources like time and money to experiments that, according to our best models, may yield promising results. We have ideas for experiments like this in physics, they just happen to not involve a larger accelerator. Scientists are not blind cartographers.
There is no way of predicting which line of work is likely to yield new physics as you suggest there is.
This kind of observation is valuable, I think, even if it's only statistically true. Certain disciplines encourage practitioners to work within conventions and with capabilities that closely match the activity of blogging (or being on Twitter). For other disciplines, tweeting/blogging is very far from the core competencies, so practitioners who do pursue it are more likely to be outliers.
The other, not-so-neutral aspect of this is the narcissism problem. People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.
In the far more conservative physics community, there are (essentially) only two ways of communicating that are acceptable: writing academic papers, or delivering academic talks. Online presence is seen with suspicion.
I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
>People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.
Spot on.
Could you give some specific examples of each, name some names?
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/large-hadron-collider-f...
Then there's this:
> Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world.
Which is Not Even Wrong. It sounds like it was generated by a Markov bot trained on quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Really, there was a golden age of particle physics when it was easier to theorize and find things. Maybe the allocation of money should be different, but that has more to do with politics and how governments make funding decisions. How do they view the benefits of what we learn building an LHC, collecting, and analyzing the data? You can argue about whether those benefits matter to physics... but Tim Berners-Lee had to work somewhere.
May I ask who the other crazy person is?
On the other side how the hell can she justify her salary and grants to taxpayers? Why isn't she doing some biology or something? It's all so incoherent.
I used to read her when she was less crazy. But I really can't stand her anymore ... it's just too much.
It's all very strange. Two of the most popular and active bloggers in HEP are totally crazy and politically extreme (although in opposite extremes). Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.