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I don't think the contention here is whether she's right or wrong. Phrasing like 'undermine' and 'cast shade' seems to imply malicious intent, which is going
by robonerd 5y ago
I don't think the contention here is whether she's right or wrong. Phrasing like 'undermine' and 'cast shade' seems to imply malicious intent, which is going too far. Being wrong isn't the same as being wrong with malicious intent.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoThe fact that she chooses to bring forward here doubts via youtube, books, and blogs (i.e. the things she earns money with) instead of/in addition to a well written paper on arxiv (i.e. like everyone else who wants to partake in a honest physics discussion*) lets me question her intent. (She has papers to some of the things she complains about, which normally get answered by rebuttals. This is normal scientific discourse. A blog with locked comments is not.)
- robonerd 5y agoMaybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't think that would make her intentions malicious.
- pa7x1 5y agoShe abuses an information asymmetry and social conventions. Scientific discourse is usually conducted in academic papers, for better or worse this is how the community conducts itself. When she criticizes others work or the usefulness of the fields outside this channel she is addressing as a singular voice the general public. Which gives her voice an outsized presence with a public that is not prepared to engage on equal terms on that discourse or prepare any rebuttal. Meanwhile the rest of the physics community looks dumbfounded because she is escaping the typical means of discourse and ratting them out to the general public, that can´t really make an informed judgement. Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science she believes shouldn't get funding.
- robonerd 5y agoIf she earnestly believes that particle physicists are lying to the public to get funding, then there's nothing malicious about going to the public and saying this. It makes her essentially a whistleblower, and there's nothing malicious about that. Even if she happens to be wrong, that still isn't malicious intent. If she's lying, then that's different. But I haven't seen any convincing evidence that she's lying. It's clear a lot of people don't like what she's saying, feel threatened by what she's saying, and think she's wrong. But that doesn't make her malicious.
- Dylan16807 5y agoWhistleblowing (real or false) is a type of undermining. It's also a step beyond casting shade. You're too focused on whether there is "malicious intent" to see that your description fits just fine with the initial words you were objecting to.