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Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist. Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smar

Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist. Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smart people are all spending their careers on pointless work. Those naysayers could be right, obviously! (Even as experts we have to recognize the possibility, and to the many laymen looking on from outside it's even harder to judge.) But if you read Peter Woit's dismissive rants and accept them as gospel truth, just remember that in doing that you're choosing to believe that hundreds (thousands?) of dedicated, passionate, deeply knowledgeable physicists are either painfully deluded or deliberately running some sort of collective scam. You're choosing to believe that either none of us have bothered to read Woit's objections or that we've all failed to accept them even though they're right. I'm not sure what our motivation for that is supposed to be. I promise you: people who go into fundamental physics aren't in it because it's an easy road to a steady paycheck! We do this because we're driven to understand the building blocks of the universe. If I were to become convinced that my current approach to trying to understand the universe was fundamentally a dead end, I'd be wasting my life if I continued to study it! I'd be throwing away everything I've trained for, everything in science that I care about. And I have no idea what Woit thinks I'm getting in return. So your call. Either Woit's right and we're all knowingly wasting our lives, or the situation isn't as cut and dried as Woit claims it is.

bsaul 8y ago
I think you forgot one case : it’s psychologically extremely hard to abandon something you’ve been working on / believing in for a huge part of your life, and start over from scratch, no matter how smart you are ( i’d say the smartest you are, the hardest it is to believe you’re completely wrong) . So teachers could be tempted to hang on to the narrowest hope their work still has meaning and keep taking new phds and this could last for a very long time.
- xelxebar 8y ago
  Which is probably why it's hard to convince String Theory haters to re-evaluate their opinions, i.e. non-testable explanations. One, the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions is just plain false. The predictions are just out of reach of current technology. Two, we should probably be more suspicious of explanations that rely on folk (interpretations of) psychological effects. How strong is the Sunken Cost fallacy? Is it sufficient to overcome the motivation to shift subfields? At what rate should we expect theorists transisioning out of String Theory, under the assumption that Woit is right? Three, String Theory has been very useful already. It's development has provided us with novel tools for mathematical tools for studying a plethora of applied quantum phenomena. Disclaimer: I'm not a String Theorist.
- FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
  The sunk cost fallacy?
paraschopra 8y ago
Yours is a fantastic, spot-on comment. It's easy to get swayed by controversial, non-mainstream opinions, especially when you're not knowledgable about the field. One trick that I'm forcing myself to use is to take evidence of what people do v/s what they say. String theorists may not be vocal in countering the objections raised, or they may simply consider getting into a debate a waste of time. But the fact that hundreds of smart people are choosing to spend time on something is _some_ evidence that the project is not completely misguided. Of course, the positive evidence has to be balanced with the evidence of group thinking and sunk cost fallacy.

bsaul 8y ago

I think you forgot one case : it’s psychologically extremely hard to abandon something you’ve been working on / believing in for a huge part of your life, and start over from scratch, no matter how smart you are ( i’d say the smartest you are, the hardest it is to believe you’re completely wrong) . So teachers could be tempted to hang on to the narrowest hope their work still has meaning and keep taking new phds and this could last for a very long time.

xelxebar 8y ago
Which is probably why it's hard to convince String Theory haters to re-evaluate their opinions, i.e. non-testable explanations. One, the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions is just plain false. The predictions are just out of reach of current technology. Two, we should probably be more suspicious of explanations that rely on folk (interpretations of) psychological effects. How strong is the Sunken Cost fallacy? Is it sufficient to overcome the motivation to shift subfields? At what rate should we expect theorists transisioning out of String Theory, under the assumption that Woit is right? Three, String Theory has been very useful already. It's development has provided us with novel tools for mathematical tools for studying a plethora of applied quantum phenomena. Disclaimer: I'm not a String Theorist.
FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
The sunk cost fallacy?

paraschopra 8y ago

Yours is a fantastic, spot-on comment. It's easy to get swayed by controversial, non-mainstream opinions, especially when you're not knowledgable about the field. One trick that I'm forcing myself to use is to take evidence of what people do v/s what they say. String theorists may not be vocal in countering the objections raised, or they may simply consider getting into a debate a waste of time. But the fact that hundreds of smart people are choosing to spend time on something is _some_ evidence that the project is not completely misguided. Of course, the positive evidence has to be balanced with the evidence of group thinking and sunk cost fallacy.