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Bogdanov affair
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mappu 10y ago>"The Bogdanoffs' work is significantly more incoherent than just about anything else being published. But the increasingly low standard of coherence in the whole field is what allowed them to think they were doing something sensible and publish it." There's a certain beauty in an entire field losing coherency. I feel like this quote could be about javascript libraries too. For instance http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/ has all the right jargon and could be mistaken for a serious project.
- koolba 10y ago> For instance http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/ has all the right jargon and could be mistaken for a serious project. That's hilarious. I like the counter showing the size as you add features: "0 bytes uncompressed, 25 bytes gzipped"
- wut42 10y agoI wa
- cynicaldevil 10y agoI remember my friend mentioning this when I told him I had just started web development and wanted to learn a new framework. I even selected the features I thought I should have, hit the download button, and was surprised to see an empty folder in my downloads *facepalm"
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoSee also: "Show human readable sizes"
- dorfsmay 10y agoIs there some Godwin's law corollary 34 that any online crititique on a venue with devs will end turning into a critique of javascript?
- throwanem 10y agoThere really should be!
- dorfsmay 10y agoLet's make it a thing: https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/779682343611011072 https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/779682343611011072 PS: Today I learned that Godwin introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics!
- ethbro 10y ago... did you just compare the modern JavaScript framework landscape to Nazis? ;)
- trhway 10y agoactually it is you who did it.
- sangnoir 10y agoI've mostly seen this on HN - but I don't visit a lot of forums. Looks like PHP is out and Javascript is in; lots of people have an axe to grind with Javascript (e.g. gp - the segue is almost comical). I can imagine an article on a new dental procedure, with the first comment "Root canal is painful, just like javascript ha ha amirite" I would be interested in finding out the proportion of HN threads that end up having 'javascript' mentioned when the original discussion was not remotely related.
- PieterH 10y agoI've been using VJS for years and can testify to its performance and ease of use. It literally took no effort to install and use.
- yodsanklai 10y agoThey often appear on French TV shows to promote their popular science books. It's pretty sad because their book suck. I feel sorry for the persons that buy them. Still, I find the Bogdanoff fascinating. I don't think they are imposters. They just have their very own confused way of understanding science. And I have to admit they're quite entertaining and likable. I used to watch them on TV when I was a kid more than 30 years ago. They hosted some kind of sci-fi show.
- philippeback 10y agoOld times, with space saucers. Watched too.
- caub 10y agovanillajs makes more sense than at least half of JS libraries
- guessmyname 10y ago> For instance http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/ [...] <rant> I wish employers would take this serious during interviews, every time I say that I know vanilla JavaScript they cringe as if knowing the core features of a language instead of a popular framework was a bad thing. I understand that SPA grew to become a standard among JavaScript developers but it really doesn't provides much innovation so to me learning a framework is like incentivizing the proliferation of these type of projects. JavaScript developers are obsessed with JSON and want to JSONify everything, the only thing that I like about modern frameworks is MVVM but most of the other things are just over-complicated solutions.
- groovy2shoes 10y agoThe rant will never end. I join you in solidarity.
- JadeNB 10y ago> There's a certain beauty in an entire field losing coherency. To be fair, Woit is hardly a neutral commenter on physical matters related to string theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string... . Of course, that doesn't make him wrong. For discussion of this whole issue, I feel more comfortable trusting Baez than Wiki. He seems to reach much the same conclusions: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html . (There's enough similarity in language that I don't know that he wasn't involved in writing the Wiki article, though a casual look at the history (and the fact that I don't know his Wikipedia username …) doesn't show it.)
- mappu 10y agoA perhaps better example: Nobody was able to verify Mochizuki's proof of the abc conjecture, because the first step was to spend a decade inventing an entirely new branch of mathematics. There are a lot of semi-coherent proofs for famous conjectures that appear from time to time on the arxiv, with absolutely unknown quality. P ?= NP is a popular topic.
- phtrivier 10y agoPopular culture sidenote : in France, the Bogdanov's brothers are now the standard butt of jokes related to: - aesthetic surgery (in a close race with actresses Emanuelle Beart and Angelina Jolie) - aliens (or people looking like, claiming to have met, or communicate with aliens) - chins (a rather popular comedian has based about 12% of all his jokes about silly puns with Bogdanov's brothers and the word 'menton') - lots of other stufff - mad scientists - and, I suppose, cosmologists (although it is probably a challenge to make a cosmologist joke in front of a regular audience.) For whatever it's worth, next time you have to make a standup routine in France.
- DonHopkins 10y ago>Baez, who made a comparison between the two affairs, later retracted, saying that the brothers "have lost too much face for [withdrawing the work as a hoax] to be a plausible course of action". It looks like they had a lot of plastic surgery to repair the effects of losing too much face. [1] [1] https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/161214861633094104/ https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/161214861633094104/
- nyolfen 10y ago>chins I linked the article to a friend and she made a crack about Carlos II
- 77pt77 10y ago> aesthetic surgery http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.446201.1314593283!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_750/alg-split-bogdanoff-brothers-jpg.jpg http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.446201.131459328...
- kardashian007 10y agoLeno meets Max Headroom
- skrebbel 10y agoDoes anyone here understand why people do this to themselves? Is it some sort of disorder, like anorexia?
- junke 10y ago> Since 1979, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have been widely known in France as television-show hosts. They recently had their own parodical song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbXj2OGXFjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbXj2OGXFjI This is about their supposedly abnormally long chin (people regularly joke about Bogdanov being aliens).
- Fiahil 10y agoBut why? How could we, as a society, let that happen?
- SFJulie 10y agoTL DR; France is the country where Cargo Cult science is born, and that what was Feynman has been warning against, because it it was beginning to contaminate US at his time (has finished by now) It is called academism: when you respect the look&feel of science more than science itself. Some very well known moralists that have been making some real scientific breakthrough such as Pasteur, Cuvier have used this to publish pseudo science based on their scientific credit France has hence created some very disturbing pseudo-science backed by academy Pasteur was a convinced puritan. When the league of virtue came to him to shut down the sinners who where drinking alcohol, he backed a totally un-scientific study to claim absinth was a poison. The prohobition in USA is based on a similar lobbying. Cuvier who was friend of Linné, after going to a pub by seeing one poor girl from south african born with a dysmorphia made a very nice theory from one sample stating that the «black» where closers to the gorillas than the «whites». Giving racism a «scientific credit». Than in the early XXth helped by politics, scientific academy claimed that all about crimes could be solved with science, hence the birth of scientific police and «scientific methods to investigate» (CSI) including: using graphology, numerology, the face of the people (based on Cuvier) and extended to say stuff like the facial trait of jews that were more akin to be criminals, polygraphs and shits. One of our greatest and first she PhD, Marie Curie (who was born polish) was at the opposite of Bogdanov constantly under the fire of criticism of «our scientific institutions» for being too free. (She divorced, had an affair, and above all CLAIMED to be able to do science by herself). Thus French scientific academy have asked the Royal Academy of Stockholm to not give her the Nobel prize in 1906. Stupidity that they happily ignored. French science had always a tendency to prefer the appearance of science over its content (reading Molière is very informative on the topic), and until recently USA developed itself greatly by abhorring this model (read quicksilver from Stephenson as a good picture) greatly inspired by the «erudition» held by the church. But after the WWII amazingly USA have been all the more looking like France in its worst part they have been bashing France. I think the biography of Feynman and the part on the introduction of Fundamental Math is instructive. It is the fundation of the cargo cult story. Or the book of Pr Gleick on dynamic systems where it is described why Mandelbrot prefered to give up on polytechnique (french Ivy league) or even the Sokal scandal can depict a pretty accurate picture of the slow convergence of US academism towards french one. America's greatness in knowledge is being held down by this: conformism, and giving more credit to institution than they ought to have.
- wott 10y agoI had no idea they were "famous" on English Wikipedia.
- agumonkey 10y agoI'm still processing the presence of this on HN's FP.
- guessmyname 10y agoSaturday and Sunday posts always come with certain randomness, even the comments tend to be less serious during the weekends.
- angry_octet 10y agoIt is interesting to contrast the discussions of 'impostor syndrome' with actual impostors. When I hear various snake-oil spiels (blockchain springs to mind) or just a self-hype I often wonder if the person has self-awareness of their being a phony.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- freerobby 10y agoThis got me real good: > One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis, MIT's Roman Jackiw... was intrigued by the thesis, although it contained many points he did not understand. Jackiw defended the thesis: > "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."
- grondilu 10y ago> "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask." Wow. Talk about low standards.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fermigier 10y agoFor many years (in the 1980s), the Bogdanoffs claimed (for instance, in the back covers of their popular science books) to be "authentic geniuses", with combined IQs > 400 and two (2) PhD's each. This was, obviously now, not true, at least for the "PhD" part of the claim, so at one point they had to try to pass PhDs for real. It took them quite a bit of time and effort, and this effort, as I had been told at the time the "affair" was unraveling by mathematicians who had been involved in this process, was to call famous scientists of their time over the phone asking them questions about the subject of their thesis (after all they were some sort of journalists so at least they knew how to ask questions), and transcribe the answers. Unfortunately they only understood the words of these conversations but not their meanings, which explains why their thesis can look like some genuine science if you look at the sentence level, but doesn't make any sense when you try to find any meaning in it. Some recent discussion about the affair (in French): http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/2015/07/02/les-bogdanov-condamnes-au-profit-du-cnrs/ http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/2015/07/02/les-bogdanov-... What's doubling truly sad in this story, IMHO, is that: 1) While the are obviously not the scientific geniuses they claim to be, they are even not good science popularisers, they are actually really bad. 2) There are still people, and not only people attracted by pseudoscience or the bizarre aspects of their personality, that take them seriously. I remember, for instance, that that have been interviewed in recent years on France Info (national public french information radio) about the Higgs boson discovery or their recent books.
- agumonkey 10y agoThey're weird beasts, not taken seriously anymore by academics, and not taken seriously by tv audience, that just want a bit of smart stuff on stage to feel educated for 5 minutes. Before they divert the interviews in jokes and music. One more thing, being a science populariser requires a special ability to bridge different mindsets, it's not easy, for instance Cedric Villani is not good at that, his tv appearances goes quickly into silent misunderstandings. A guy like MIT's ex W. Lewin is better at this IMO.
- baby 10y ago> not taken seriously by tv audience last time I checked, most people still think they are legit in France.
- v4nn4 10y agoGrichka thesis : https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00001502/document https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00001502/document Igor thesis : https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00001503v1/document https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00001503v1/document
- latexx 10y agoWow, a thesis on theoretical physics and topology written in Microsoft Word and not LaTeX? Dead giveaway.
- chm 10y agoUnacceptable. Proper formatting is a prerequisite. It's not about being elitist - it's about readability and efficient communication. The equations in these "theses" are so badly formatted I would have taken off marks if an undergrad gave me something similar. It's fine if you have a handful of equations in your text. But for a PhD in maths? Unacceptable.
- baby 10y agoEven their sentences don't make sense, they just pile up complex words together. There is not one sane line written.
- dfsegoat 10y agoAlmost sounds a bit like Elizabeth Holmes...
- fzn 10y agoAs an aside, they did a marketing video for the commodore Amiga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRNAndfFEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRNAndfFEY :)
- revelation 10y agoI come away from reading this Wikipedia article still unclear if their thesis and papers are nonsense. I figure it's bad news for the field of big bang physics when you can't falsify nonsense. I thought that was the point of the whole science thing.
- agumonkey 10y agoThis quote is clear though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair#cite_ref-le-monde_14-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair#cite_ref-le-mo... I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics.[14]
- dcgudeman 10y agoWow I just googled these guys. Not that it should matter but this is how they look: http://imgur.com/0X0myNJ http://imgur.com/0X0myNJ I could be wrong but it looks like they have had a lot of plastic surgery...
- palunon 10y agoIndeed : http://i.imgur.com/VBFjHik.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VBFjHik.jpg
- asveikau 10y agoTwo things I notice... First: before the surgeries, they have facial features that would be common in Russia but would stand out in a crowd of western europeans. It is a bit sad if this part contributes to the comment that they look weird. I think it does. Second: at some point they start to seem obsessed with some twisted idea of looking youthful and in deep denial of their age. For example, the same faces with shorter, grayer hair would look better.
- musgravepeter 10y agoIn some ill-defined dual space of a Bogdanov manifold there is the Sokal affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- agumonkey 10y agoFunny, coincidentally read about Schon's scandal, read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal which list this thread's link too.