5 ms·

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find

by beambot 10y ago

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; check your ego at the door. I know nothing about him... but in my book, Lubos Motl can go pound sand.

jessriedel 10y ago
Lubos Motl hasn't been in academia for almost a decade. Almost everyone inside and outside it finds him obnoxious.
magicalist 10y ago
> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. vs all those "I just don't believe in being fake and sugar coating things" folks in every other industry? Not much unique to academia on that front.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Like food critics, some have taken the art of shitting on things to absurd heights. "I find this theory highly disagreeable, it contradicts findings by X and Y et al." Compared with: "I once asked my dog for a theory on the nature of the universe, whereupon which he vomited violently on the floor. This explanation has more truth to it than the one presented in this paper, which I can only presume was written by students who, in their youth, were savagely beaten upside the head by their parents much to the detriment of their intellect."
bsder 10y ago
> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. So you'd rather people quietly knife you in review? Because that's what happens if you penalize people for public rudeness. Personally, I'd rather have a loud critique to my face than a polite one behind my back or, even worse, no engagement at all. I don't need your politeness or friendship when I'm putting forth some new theory. I need accurate, engaged criticism and the number of people who will do that is vanishingly small. And a lot of the ones who will do that have social issues almost by definition.
- ubercore 10y ago
  At least the quote pulled out here isn't useful critique, it's just insulting. I think that's the distinction being drawn here.
- Frondo 10y ago
  Accurate, engaged criticism is great, that stuff belongs everywhere. "I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper" is not accurate, engaged criticism, it's mean-spiritedness under a veneer of toughness. It's easy and fun to be rude and insulting, and when you can get away with it because of the subculture you're writing within, why not, right? Because being a dick is being a dick no matter who or where you are, that's why, and being a dick doesn't advance anything beyond your own momentary joy. Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.
  - quanticle 10y ago
    Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility. I disagree. The blunt people (who come off as "dicks" to the outsiders) are like a community's immune system. They protect the community against the sort of people who take accurate engaged criticism, make one or two changes to fix specific issues, and then resubmit their work, wasting the community's time and resources, driving off the people who are making good-faith efforts to help the community. They're not being dicks "just for fun". They're protecting the time and attention of other community members by saying bluntly what many other people are often thinking. Communities that have too many of these people become closed and ossified. Communities that have none of these people evaporate, as the core contributors just walk away and find better things to do than deal with people who are more interested in getting fame and attention for themselves than making good-faith efforts to advance the project of the community. The trick is to find a good balance.
- shakna 10y ago
  There's the constructive rude: > Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! ...To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 And then there's this: > It's a Category 5 loon. Popular sources are full of anti-Copenhagen crackpot pseudoscience and of exactly this kind of bullshit – claims that the proper Copenhagen quantum mechanics implies superluminal or acausal effects (for the latter, see some largely confused fresh text by Nude Socialist about entangled photons in graves, London, and Beijing: this sort of stuff gets produced every minute, it seems) – but you may still find people who think that the presentation should be even more anti-Copenhagen. http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechani...
BeetleB 10y ago
As others have mentioned, Lubos Motl is no longer in academia. He seemed to have spent more time criticizing others (and not just their works) than on actual physics. His appointment at Harvard was not reviewed. I'm frankly surprised New Scientist bothered to quote him.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  Eh - I meant "not renewed"
empath75 10y ago
He's not exactly a crank, but he's not a working physicist either, afaik.
mmaunder 10y ago
He's engaging in a power fantasy that has a fellow scientist as a student. I'll bet this guy is a lot of fun to have as a professor.
lisper 10y ago
Motl is notorious for this sort of thing. He once called me a "category 5 loon" because something I said in a talk was wrong. But the reason it was wrong is because I was advancing it as a straw-man precisely to show it was wrong. http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-...
- smoyer 10y ago
  That sounds like a great HN handle.
- cgvgffyv 10y ago
  I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk. Also read the comments, where he says: I am watching the talk (final minutes now) and except for the history, meaning of interpretations etc., he actually understands QM more correctly than many people employed as physicists... (The audacity! Someone that actually watches the thing they'll be bitching about!) [0]: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html?m=1#comment-671038548 http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanic...
  - lisper 10y ago
    > I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk. What makes you think I stopped reading? How do you think I knew that he was attacking a straw man (and hence making a fool of himself)? > read the comments Well, that's nice. I feel vindicated. But that doesn't change the fact that he published a totally unwarranted ad hominem attack directed at me based on incomplete information and never retracted it, let alone apologized for it. (Sorry, but a comment doesn't count. Most people don't read the comments.) So I stand by my position that his behavior was unprofessional to say the least.
    - cgvgffyv 10y ago
      > What makes you think I stopped reading? Well his complaints about the talk are after the "loon" bit, and you didn't say anything to the effect of, "well he called me a loon but did explain his position", so I figured.
conistonwater 10y ago
I'm being pedantic, but I downvoted you because you started with the obvious observation "Motl is really really rude" (yeah, he's a real piece of work, check out the rest of his blog for stuff much worse), and then wrote "I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.", which isn't supported by the observation that that one guy is rude. (But the rest of your comment is fine.) Individual people can be really rude with or without it being a cultural problem. There's no need to bring academia up like that—that's a lot of people, decent people, and most of them are really quite nice people and good scientists.
acqq 10y ago
For me, more interesting "gossip-like" detail that Motl enviously mentions is the "money" Verlinde received. Wikipedia has the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde "In June 2011, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded Verlinde the Spinoza Prize, the highest award available to Dutch scientists including a 2.5 million euro grant for future research.[14] The committee cited his work on the Verlinde formula, the Witten–Dijkgraaf–Verlinde–Verlinde equations, the Cardy-Verlinde formula and entropic gravity as the major achievements leading to the award." By the way, my impression is that reading Motl is not a pleasant experience for anybody but himself.
sn9 10y ago
That's pretty much what academia told Motl. He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is. Characterizing him as an example of any sort of trend in academia is both uninformed and deeply insulting.
- timv 10y ago
  > He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is. It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then. They certainly seem to be presenting him as someone worth paying attention to.
  - acqq 10y ago
    > It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then. Is it harder than to understand that they publish an article with the false title and false interpretations?

by beambot 10y ago

jessriedel 10y ago

Lubos Motl hasn't been in academia for almost a decade. Almost everyone inside and outside it finds him obnoxious.

magicalist 10y ago

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. vs all those "I just don't believe in being fake and sugar coating things" folks in every other industry? Not much unique to academia on that front.

astrodust 10y ago
Like food critics, some have taken the art of shitting on things to absurd heights. "I find this theory highly disagreeable, it contradicts findings by X and Y et al." Compared with: "I once asked my dog for a theory on the nature of the universe, whereupon which he vomited violently on the floor. This explanation has more truth to it than the one presented in this paper, which I can only presume was written by students who, in their youth, were savagely beaten upside the head by their parents much to the detriment of their intellect."

bsder 10y ago

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. So you'd rather people quietly knife you in review? Because that's what happens if you penalize people for public rudeness. Personally, I'd rather have a loud critique to my face than a polite one behind my back or, even worse, no engagement at all. I don't need your politeness or friendship when I'm putting forth some new theory. I need accurate, engaged criticism and the number of people who will do that is vanishingly small. And a lot of the ones who will do that have social issues almost by definition.

ubercore 10y ago
At least the quote pulled out here isn't useful critique, it's just insulting. I think that's the distinction being drawn here.
Frondo 10y ago
Accurate, engaged criticism is great, that stuff belongs everywhere. "I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper" is not accurate, engaged criticism, it's mean-spiritedness under a veneer of toughness. It's easy and fun to be rude and insulting, and when you can get away with it because of the subculture you're writing within, why not, right? Because being a dick is being a dick no matter who or where you are, that's why, and being a dick doesn't advance anything beyond your own momentary joy. Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.
- quanticle 10y ago
  Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility. I disagree. The blunt people (who come off as "dicks" to the outsiders) are like a community's immune system. They protect the community against the sort of people who take accurate engaged criticism, make one or two changes to fix specific issues, and then resubmit their work, wasting the community's time and resources, driving off the people who are making good-faith efforts to help the community. They're not being dicks "just for fun". They're protecting the time and attention of other community members by saying bluntly what many other people are often thinking. Communities that have too many of these people become closed and ossified. Communities that have none of these people evaporate, as the core contributors just walk away and find better things to do than deal with people who are more interested in getting fame and attention for themselves than making good-faith efforts to advance the project of the community. The trick is to find a good balance.
shakna 10y ago
There's the constructive rude: > Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! ...To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 And then there's this: > It's a Category 5 loon. Popular sources are full of anti-Copenhagen crackpot pseudoscience and of exactly this kind of bullshit – claims that the proper Copenhagen quantum mechanics implies superluminal or acausal effects (for the latter, see some largely confused fresh text by Nude Socialist about entangled photons in graves, London, and Beijing: this sort of stuff gets produced every minute, it seems) – but you may still find people who think that the presentation should be even more anti-Copenhagen. http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechani...

BeetleB 10y ago

As others have mentioned, Lubos Motl is no longer in academia. He seemed to have spent more time criticizing others (and not just their works) than on actual physics. His appointment at Harvard was not reviewed. I'm frankly surprised New Scientist bothered to quote him.

BeetleB 10y ago
Eh - I meant "not renewed"

empath75 10y ago

He's not exactly a crank, but he's not a working physicist either, afaik.

mmaunder 10y ago

He's engaging in a power fantasy that has a fellow scientist as a student. I'll bet this guy is a lot of fun to have as a professor.

lisper 10y ago

Motl is notorious for this sort of thing. He once called me a "category 5 loon" because something I said in a talk was wrong. But the reason it was wrong is because I was advancing it as a straw-man precisely to show it was wrong. http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-...

smoyer 10y ago
That sounds like a great HN handle.
cgvgffyv 10y ago
I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk. Also read the comments, where he says: I am watching the talk (final minutes now) and except for the history, meaning of interpretations etc., he actually understands QM more correctly than many people employed as physicists... (The audacity! Someone that actually watches the thing they'll be bitching about!) [0]: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.html?m=1#comment-671038548 http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanic...
- lisper 10y ago
  > I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk. What makes you think I stopped reading? How do you think I knew that he was attacking a straw man (and hence making a fool of himself)? > read the comments Well, that's nice. I feel vindicated. But that doesn't change the fact that he published a totally unwarranted ad hominem attack directed at me based on incomplete information and never retracted it, let alone apologized for it. (Sorry, but a comment doesn't count. Most people don't read the comments.) So I stand by my position that his behavior was unprofessional to say the least.
  - cgvgffyv 10y ago
    > What makes you think I stopped reading? Well his complaints about the talk are after the "loon" bit, and you didn't say anything to the effect of, "well he called me a loon but did explain his position", so I figured.

conistonwater 10y ago

I'm being pedantic, but I downvoted you because you started with the obvious observation "Motl is really really rude" (yeah, he's a real piece of work, check out the rest of his blog for stuff much worse), and then wrote "I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.", which isn't supported by the observation that that one guy is rude. (But the rest of your comment is fine.) Individual people can be really rude with or without it being a cultural problem. There's no need to bring academia up like that—that's a lot of people, decent people, and most of them are really quite nice people and good scientists.

acqq 10y ago

For me, more interesting "gossip-like" detail that Motl enviously mentions is the "money" Verlinde received. Wikipedia has the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde "In June 2011, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded Verlinde the Spinoza Prize, the highest award available to Dutch scientists including a 2.5 million euro grant for future research.[14] The committee cited his work on the Verlinde formula, the Witten–Dijkgraaf–Verlinde–Verlinde equations, the Cardy-Verlinde formula and entropic gravity as the major achievements leading to the award." By the way, my impression is that reading Motl is not a pleasant experience for anybody but himself.

sn9 10y ago

That's pretty much what academia told Motl. He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is. Characterizing him as an example of any sort of trend in academia is both uninformed and deeply insulting.

timv 10y ago
> He hasn't been a working physicist for a long time precisely because of how unnecessarily and uncharacteristically nasty he is. It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then. They certainly seem to be presenting him as someone worth paying attention to.
- acqq 10y ago
  > It's hard to understand why New Scientist decided to quote him then. Is it harder than to understand that they publish an article with the false title and false interpretations?