But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it.
Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category.
Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.
At least from what i read - she's basically saying that there is such a derth of new data and plausible ways to get it in the near/medium term, that theoretical particle physicists have basically been creating abstract theories which while may or may not be true, are increasingly detached from the emperical world. To the point where they are no longer predictive theories and there are so many free parameters that you can post-hoc fit it to any data you might collect. Hence the real world applicability is akin to speculating how many angels could fit on a pin head.
Now this may or may not be true. I don't have the background to know. But this is not a science argument, it is a philosophical argument. Fundamentally its asking are theoretical particle physicists engaging in science or are they engaging in some combination of math and metaphysics. Is arxiv really the place to have such philosophical debates?
> There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions.
Like i'm really not sure how you can argue that religion and metaphysics are distinct. The main difference is just how much cultural baggage is attached.
Ultimately after reading that article (and having not watched the video it is responding to) my conclusion is not that Sabine misunderstands the simulation theory (she may or may not, but nothing there convinced me she did) but that the author of the article misunderstands what the word "science" means. Like the term "pseudoscience" may be unfair, as that has specific connotations, but its clearly a metaphysical theory not a scientific theory.
If anything, the simulation hypothesis seems to be an attempt to partially shed light on those traditional metaphysical questions. I would say the hypothesis is not tangential but directly bears on metaphysics.
I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.