For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice
But they failed. Gödel's incompleteness theorm is now a widely accepted part of mathematical canon.
In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.
Touch grass.
And if we take that as fact, that means Zuck's culpability is nigh unprecedented in private enterprise. The mega-scale profiteering of Apple & Microsoft & Amazon distort markets and elbow out competition but that doesn't compare to the personal misery and destabilization and resulting downstream poverty and violence caused by social media. Purveyors of booze and cigarettes are closer, but those things never threatened democracy or global order. Fossil fuel companies may contribute to climate change, but no one can saddle them with full moral responsibility for selling a product that's the lifeblood of the world. Weapons manufacturers didn't start the wars or cause the instability.
So Zuck and his algorithmic friends - what to make of them? The mind boggles.
There was a time when it was a mixed bag with some bad stuff but some connecting of friends and letting people find new ones. Then the algorithmic timelines and other stuff came. Since then I think it has become a strong net negative.
On balance it’s the worst thing tech has built. Worse, I think, than crypto gambling. It might be worse than the mass surveillance stuff in terms of, as you say, mental destabilization and social harm.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en
and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.
Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".
Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.
There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.
> at least those I read
You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence
> She is pure show
less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.
Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
We are not perfect creatures and sometimes do immoral things, for various reasons. But we did those things, nobody else did them.
That also suggests a practical guideline: whatever your rationale for taking action, anticipate living with that rationale for years and years. If you can’t see it looking the same 10 years from now, perhaps that is a strong clue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.
Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)
The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.
One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time
and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)
She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.
I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.
It's very pleasant to see someone else saying it, too. Thank you.
People like musk and bezos and ai hype et al.
Made me realize I was projecting some aspects of her interest in rational thought all wrong.
When she took a firm stance in favor of capitalism I unfollowed.
America is the heart of a dying empire that is increasingly abandoning the majority of its citizens. I don't understand the European desire to gut social programs and emulate the US when the post-Reagan era has led to massive wealth concentration and reduced quality of life for most people.
Europe also has a lot of experience with fascism and y'all seem to be willing to ride that bus as many times as you can.
A contradiction! Some system.
Having a slightly more dynamic entrepreneurial scene, where one is allowed to fail for instance, would be nice.
In my view, the way forward and the example to follow is Switzerland, not the US.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
That being said, I thought the idolatrous fawning over Musk about 10 years ago, by the same people who now hate him, was obnoxious and sickening even then. Which goes to show: simply wait 5 minutes for the mob's little gods and petty messiahs to fall from grace, before they move onto the next celebrity to worship.
I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.
It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.
I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to others. Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
It happens for a reason. There's something deeply satisfying about being a contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
E.g. I've probably talked about various aspects and extensions to the ISIS routing protocol with in-field experts for more hours than I could think to add together... but the bulk of my practical understanding really comes from the (comparatively) small amount of time I spent building custom implementations, debugging other implementations, and deploying ISIS in various locations. I probably couldn't have done the latter nearly as well without the former, but the latter is where I went from suggesting protocol changes that sounded reasonable to making critiques that were actually actionable
Similarly, I know I know BGP more than your average person, enough to sound like the protocol experts, but I lack most all of the practical working and experimentation knowledge. If you asked me what I think should be changed about BGP I'd probably rattle off a decent list, and it'd probably sound pretty convincing, yet I doubt I would even agree with half of it if I had the other half of the mental model built (or I told it to someone who specialized in BGP). That kind of step doesn't (and usually can't) come from working deeply in a different area (even if similar) and "talking the talk" about the other area.
That said, what makes social media addicting, especially in areas where specialists like to coalesce (HN is one such place, IMO) is you can get a TON of that kind of conversation, data, and readings about anything. Then it makes you overconfident because you got that style of interaction without even doing anything remotely related to that area.
All of this reminds me I've spent far too much time on HN... and I'm entering 12 days of PTO. Time to set noprocast to something ridiculous :).
https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared
I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.
Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...
But I agree social media has also made this dynamic more pervasive as well as distorted it in many ways
I don't see how you can make this claim. Putting aside the fact that these two groups were diverse, contrarian they were not. (Socrates, known for posing questions to fellow Athenians and his students, wasn't a contrarian. He was interested in arriving at the truth and challenging the Sophists, the quintessential bullshitters, who were interested in power.)
If anything, modernism tends to be more contrarian, and even when not by intention, then at least by construction. Think of the philosophical positions that fall under this label. Skeptical denial and making weird assumptions is sort of characteristic.
That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
Some or most of what these people discuss might be true, often because it’s low stakes or obvious. This builds trust and leads people to believe that the person is a universally trustworthy source.
Then they drift into topics where they are incorrect, don’t understand the subject matter, or have been misled by other grifters but they deliver the message just the same as everything else. To the uninformed parts of the audience it feels every bit as accurate and genuine as all of their other content.
This is a very common pattern in the health and fitness world. Andrew Huberman is the current most famous example of someone who has some narrow scientific knowledge but has shared a lot of incorrect and misleading content outside of his domain. He’s the guy who claimed he had to stop wearing Bluetooth headphones because he believed the radio waves were hearing his skin up and he didn’t like it, for reference. He’s been caught out recently as his fan base has started to realize he’s not the genius about every topic that he presents himself as.
But I'd like to avoid other associations people now have with Sabine Hossenfelder; does anyone know of a similar quality video on the topic?
Her (expletive-laden) message was essentially: "Weinstein is my friend. Yes, his theory is bullshit, but so is all of theoretical physics." Seriously, aren't you one of them? You would rather throw your entire academic field under the bus to defend your friend? (And mind you, what a great way to defend your friend, calling his theory bullshit.)
This blog post is incredibly illuminating and explains a lot. It's a prime example of "Don't expect someone to understand something when their YouTube paychecks depend on them not understanding it", a.k.a. audience capture.
It's also an important reminder of the precarious situation laypeople are in - being unable to tell what's true and what's bs, and often relying on social cues like how confident someone sounds. We are all laypeople in most fields and are subject to easy manipulation by various confident-sounding grifters and LLMs.
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.