5 ms·

Superficial toxicity is the enemy of curiosity-driven innovation in science

57 points by wawayanda 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
austin-cheney 3y ago
The article refers to a very specific form of toxic communication commonly known as heckler's veto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto The problem is more pervasive and frequently more subtle than the specific discourse context the article illustrates. A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants. In the world of software this is frequently referred to as Invented Here Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
- progne 3y ago
  > Heckler's veto Often motivated by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants. Is that true, though? "Equivalent initiatives in professional settings" require resources being allocated to projects that bear no relation with company goals. By definition, this means these types of projects require a company to fund a project that is not aligned with the company's purpose. Why would anyone pay for something that they don't need or want or care about? Resource allocation is not silencing or vetoing projects. Just because your employer doesn't pay you to work on your pet project that does not mean you're being censored.
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic. When internal initiatives are killed or directed for purely selfish motivations, such as comfort attainment then it certainly becomes toxic. This is why I believe the scenario is exceedingly pervasive, especially in software, because comfort attainment is typically not just the primary consideration, but the only consideration.
    - rewmie 3y ago
      > That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic. I'm sorry, I didn't understood a word of what you tried to say. I'm even suspecting this is machine-generated word salad.
      - DangitBobby 3y ago
        Translation: there are times when a veto is warranted, but other times the effort to build software custom fit to your problems is worth spending the time to make. More often than vetoing for any valid reason, they do it so they don't have to give up software they are comfortable with.
- RuggedPineapple 3y ago
  I'm rather sympathetic to the issue in general, but it's comical coming from Loeb. He's been steadily pushing into at the very least fringe territory, and at the worst outright pseudoscience and quackery. He's mad people are pointing that out. That's what this all stems from.
  - Kevin09210 3y ago
    That's superficial and bordering on ad-hominem.
    - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
      When your work is as a scientist, and you want to be judged as a scientist, your work being pseudoscience is not superficial. That's like saying pointing out your accountant is facing tax fraud charges isn't germane to his work as your accountant.
      - Kevin09210 3y ago
        What qualifies Loeb's work as pseudoscience (which is different from erroneous science as pointed out in the paper and blog post he reacts to) ? The thematics he chose to explore. He could have worded his paper differently, totally burying the extraterrestrial tech hypothesis he had in mind and there would have been no repercussions. Your opinion is driven by the semantics of the topic at hand and its success relies on the fact it fits into two heavily imbalanced classes. Of course I can go around and tell people they don't have that super rare disease: that doesn't mean I'm not a crank too. Still waiting for you to delve into the details of the argument against Loeb's claims rather than using broad and easy categorization (which etymologically means accusation).
        RuggedPineapple 3y ago
        No one owes you an explanation, you're not 'waiting' for anything. You approve of Loeb's crank turn of late, that's fine, but you don't get to waste the time of others on demand.
api 3y ago
I really love Avi Loeb. The search for potential fragments of an interstellar comet at the bottom of the ocean was a long shot, and that’s what’s so great about it. We need many more scientists who are willing to look at far out ideas while remaining very rational and scientific about it. We have plenty of stick to the tried and true conservative scientists and plenty of cranks. Edit: if we see another object like Oumuamua I would love it if we had a “chase probe” ready. It was going so fast at such a weird trajectory intercepting would have been extremely hard but having something ready to send on a flyby seems reasonable. Some great close up photos and spectroscopy would go a long way.
- dasmascusstuui 3y ago
  [dead]
daoboy 3y ago
The phenomenon is certainly nothing new (see Sayre's Law). People are petty, awful, wonderful, magnificent creatures...and everything in between. The new thing is the tools that enable massive groups to mob together and fulfill their worst impulses. Most institutions have not developed a robust immune system for this novel disease.
- ajross 3y ago
  There's no mob here. Loeb really is a crank, and a while back started making noise (again) about alien origins for these rocks. And this time a bunch of regular/non-crank/conventional scientists listed to his noise and published a paper refuting it before he could get his own research out. That's not censorship, that's just science. Yes, it's important that everyone is able to share their iconoclast ideas. And Loeb did. And it's likewise important for people to be able to tell you you're wrong when you are.
dtx1 3y ago
It seems odd that even legitimate science that is even tangentially related to the UAP Subject is being attack from so many sides. Given the historical context of the CIA infiltrating and spying on UFO groups[0] and what can only be described as an active political fight around the Schumer Amendment [1] it makes me wonder if at least some of this is orchestrated by political/national security Circles [0] https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html [1]https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-rounds-introduce-new-legislation-to-declassify-government-records-related-to-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-and-ufos_modeled-after-jfk-assassination-records-collection-act--as-an-amendment-to-ndaa https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sch...
- api 3y ago
  The most likely reason for bullshit around the UFO issue is to cover up secret aircraft: https://www.military.com/history/why-first-us-jet-fighter-pilot-wore-gorilla-mask-during-test-flights.html https://www.military.com/history/why-first-us-jet-fighter-pi... But that doesn’t mean looking into aliens is silly. The Fermi paradox is genuinely mysterious and one potential answer is “well actually, they are here…” What is necessary is to just ignore all the crazy bullshit in the UFO field including all the new age wackos. Unfortunately even renaming it to UAP didn’t do the trick. There’s a whole grifter infrastructure here. I don’t think you need to involve the CIA. There’s plenty of grassroots insanity here. If there is or was CIA involvement I’d suspect it was gorilla masks for secret aircraft.
  - dtx1 3y ago
    > I don’t think you need to involve the CIA. There’s plenty of grassroots insanity here. Just to be clear, I didn't involve them, the CIA historically has involved themselves in this subject in a most questionable manner. It seems reasonable to assume they would do it again. Though I personally believe they don't have to. The whole debunking-Industry is able to do that alone.
- narrator 3y ago
  The Grusch testimony points to a vast off-budget organization that researches exotic tech. They protect their turf from traditional science.
MichaelRo 3y ago
Maybe it's Schadenfreude? (The experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, or humiliation of another). Although as far as I know that usually requires the others to have wronged you in some way.
perihelions 3y ago
So, the author links to a 32-page arXiv paper that criticizes his own paper, and calls that criticism "toxic" (and "misinformation", too), and contextualizes it with angry Twitter mobs? That's an odd perspective. What exactly does he mean when he says Harvard astronomy department postdocs are being "terrorized" by "aggressive" criticism?
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Presumably that people aren't comparing him the heroes of Contact (1997 American film) but instead are getting increasingly annoyed that he's making crap claims.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sega_sai 3y ago
This guy completely lost it. Nobody in the field treats him seriously because he publishes like 1 first paper a month with all sorts of speculations and shoddy science. Sure when his first claims were distributed about Oumuamua, people were at least somewhat accepting that may be plausible, but then he continued pushing in that direction, as well as trying to be in the media all the time. Realistically I think many scientists just don't care about Loeb. Maybe a small fraction are still interested in disproving his claims.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  I wish more scientists were like this—a little out there while being highly enthusiastic, technical and evidence driven. Evidence will eventually bear out the bad hypotheses. The worse crime is creating fearful career scientists.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  FWIW his blog post struck me as narcissistic in tone. A martyr gazing at the stars, assaulted by the world. And the bit about grad students too terrified to pursue research because of some ostensibly bad criticism on the internet is comical. You cannot become a good academic if all it takes is a little criticism from somewhere to deflate you, if you need constant validation to function. If you do, you will become, like many academics and people in general, a conformist out of fear of losing approval. This is not to valorize contrarians (who still operate in terms of what others think), but to say that an academic must be honest and pursue the truth and be able to defend his arguments against or ignore bad criticism and concede valid criticism. If you cannot survive the meat grinder of criticism, if you lack the spine and the thick skin, you won’t flourish. It’s not for you, at least not until you mature.
javajosh 3y ago
If the end-goal is to convince the reader of the veracity of your claim that the BeLaU spherules are of alien manufacture, this piece does not help, and harms a little. It does not help because you spend no time refuting the refutation. You imply that a refutation that doesn't take as long as the original claim isn't worth as much. But that is false. Coming up with one counter-example need not take as long as articulating the theorem. The harm, as I see it, comes from engaging with the mob. I believe that an honest scientist convinced of evidence of alien tech will know in their bones what an uphill battle it will be to convince anyone of this, and the fact that making such a claim will inevitably come with certain (unfair) labels and attacks. To make such claims and then get angry about those labels being applied doesn't make sense, to the extent that the anger itself reads as evidence of some kind of fraud. Is it possible for a scientist to be naive enough to not realize what this claim would mean for his reputation and career? Maybe. But the more likely scenario is simple fraud and attention seeking, and the anger another layer of performance.
jonathrg 3y ago
Important context: this is Avi Loeb, the guy who insisted that Oumuamua might be aliens. Here's a nice exposé on him and his shoddy work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI
- RuggedPineapple 3y ago
  Just as more context, his body of work overall is exceptional. He's been a Harvard professor for 30 years, he didn't get that position by accident. He's taken the Linus Pauling career path the last few years though, which is unfortunate. But the bulk of the mans career he's published good research and good books, people shouldn't reflexively junk those parts of his work just because he's gone loopy now.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    That's partially fair, but it is not really helpful to estimates of the reliability of his current work to point out that in the past, before he got all loopy, his work was reliable. The fact that he's gone all loopy recently is absolutely the most important context for deciding if you want to take his word on faith or not.
    - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
      Nobody, and let me be clear, absolutely nobody should take Loeb's word for anything at all. His schtick for the last half decade or so is a dressed up 'God of the Gaps' argument, where everything he can't explain is aliens and if someone is able to show better explanations it's not science working but people bullying him. Which is completely fair. He's done it to himself. No quarrels from me. But there's also a understandable urge to toss everything and that's an overreaction. Pauling being a crank is his late career doesn't mean he didn't deserve the Nobel for his earlier career, and likewise Loeb is/was very important to modern cosmology, you just have to ignore most of what he's published since 2017 or so.
- oddmiral 3y ago
  > Oumuamua might be aliens Yes, it has few properties which are unusual for natural objects, so it can be an alien artifact. Probability is very low, but non-zero. > Here's a nice exposé on him and his shoddy work I have no time for this audiobook.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
mycologos 3y ago
Knowing nothing about the technical merits of the two groups, it looks like the repeated interaction between Loeb's camp and their critics has been: 1) Loeb makes a bold claim about some phenomenon and attaches extraterrestrial life to it. He chooses to do this in a way that will attract media attention, like a press release. 2) The press release gets picked up by media, because Loeb is a notorious Harvard professor. At least some of the media will phrase it as "scientists say...". 3) Other scientists, perhaps at universities whose press releases are mostly ignored by media, see this and say "hey, I'm a scientist too, we do not say that". They try to engage Loeb and over time escalate their criticisms from "civil and private discussions" to "public and somewhat insulting". They might feel justified in doing this because they see Loeb's mass-media communication as being at approximately the same level of technical detail; at a certain point, a technical argument is not going to attract attention or understanding of the seriousness of the claim being made, but a blunt criticism will ("this guy is nuts and does not represent his field"). 4) Loeb describes 3) as a bunch of overly conservative cranks holding back scientists and directly analogizes himself to Galileo, predictably frustrating his critics further. Like I said, I can't say anything useful about the technical details. But it seems like an important detail here is that Loeb has repeatedly chosen to try and fight this out using public opinion, and his opponents have found themselves somewhat awkwardly picking up and using similar weapons for maybe the first time in their careers, and are not enjoying it. This seems to happen a lot in modern science!
- blablabla123 3y ago
  Science doesn't really fund itself and "the public" is regularly questioning the expenses for it. The best example of what is wrong with this is the communication about Human made Global Warming and how it's possible that there are still people which deny it. Or take more crude examples like Vaccination skeptics or flat earthers. Results and methods are rarely published in understandable language. Actually the Funding for studying the Higgs Boson famously got secured by making a really simple explanation. Obviously Loeb might have gone a bit over the top given the odds of his theory but as you mention if reaching out to the public was more common nobody might have blinked an eye.
jacknews 3y ago
tall poppy syndrome. Some of his claims are, um, out there. But indeed, all those just trying to pull him down are quite cowardly.

57 points by wawayanda 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

The article refers to a very specific form of toxic communication commonly known as heckler's veto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto The problem is more pervasive and frequently more subtle than the specific discourse context the article illustrates. A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants. In the world of software this is frequently referred to as Invented Here Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

progne 3y ago
> Heckler's veto Often motivated by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome.
rewmie 3y ago
> A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants. Is that true, though? "Equivalent initiatives in professional settings" require resources being allocated to projects that bear no relation with company goals. By definition, this means these types of projects require a company to fund a project that is not aligned with the company's purpose. Why would anyone pay for something that they don't need or want or care about? Resource allocation is not silencing or vetoing projects. Just because your employer doesn't pay you to work on your pet project that does not mean you're being censored.
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic. When internal initiatives are killed or directed for purely selfish motivations, such as comfort attainment then it certainly becomes toxic. This is why I believe the scenario is exceedingly pervasive, especially in software, because comfort attainment is typically not just the primary consideration, but the only consideration.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic. I'm sorry, I didn't understood a word of what you tried to say. I'm even suspecting this is machine-generated word salad.
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      Translation: there are times when a veto is warranted, but other times the effort to build software custom fit to your problems is worth spending the time to make. More often than vetoing for any valid reason, they do it so they don't have to give up software they are comfortable with.
RuggedPineapple 3y ago
I'm rather sympathetic to the issue in general, but it's comical coming from Loeb. He's been steadily pushing into at the very least fringe territory, and at the worst outright pseudoscience and quackery. He's mad people are pointing that out. That's what this all stems from.
- Kevin09210 3y ago
  That's superficial and bordering on ad-hominem.
  - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
    When your work is as a scientist, and you want to be judged as a scientist, your work being pseudoscience is not superficial. That's like saying pointing out your accountant is facing tax fraud charges isn't germane to his work as your accountant.
    - Kevin09210 3y ago
      What qualifies Loeb's work as pseudoscience (which is different from erroneous science as pointed out in the paper and blog post he reacts to) ? The thematics he chose to explore. He could have worded his paper differently, totally burying the extraterrestrial tech hypothesis he had in mind and there would have been no repercussions. Your opinion is driven by the semantics of the topic at hand and its success relies on the fact it fits into two heavily imbalanced classes. Of course I can go around and tell people they don't have that super rare disease: that doesn't mean I'm not a crank too. Still waiting for you to delve into the details of the argument against Loeb's claims rather than using broad and easy categorization (which etymologically means accusation).
      - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
        No one owes you an explanation, you're not 'waiting' for anything. You approve of Loeb's crank turn of late, that's fine, but you don't get to waste the time of others on demand.

api 3y ago

I really love Avi Loeb. The search for potential fragments of an interstellar comet at the bottom of the ocean was a long shot, and that’s what’s so great about it. We need many more scientists who are willing to look at far out ideas while remaining very rational and scientific about it. We have plenty of stick to the tried and true conservative scientists and plenty of cranks. Edit: if we see another object like Oumuamua I would love it if we had a “chase probe” ready. It was going so fast at such a weird trajectory intercepting would have been extremely hard but having something ready to send on a flyby seems reasonable. Some great close up photos and spectroscopy would go a long way.

dasmascusstuui 3y ago
[dead]

daoboy 3y ago

The phenomenon is certainly nothing new (see Sayre's Law). People are petty, awful, wonderful, magnificent creatures...and everything in between. The new thing is the tools that enable massive groups to mob together and fulfill their worst impulses. Most institutions have not developed a robust immune system for this novel disease.

ajross 3y ago
There's no mob here. Loeb really is a crank, and a while back started making noise (again) about alien origins for these rocks. And this time a bunch of regular/non-crank/conventional scientists listed to his noise and published a paper refuting it before he could get his own research out. That's not censorship, that's just science. Yes, it's important that everyone is able to share their iconoclast ideas. And Loeb did. And it's likewise important for people to be able to tell you you're wrong when you are.

dtx1 3y ago

It seems odd that even legitimate science that is even tangentially related to the UAP Subject is being attack from so many sides. Given the historical context of the CIA infiltrating and spying on UFO groups[0] and what can only be described as an active political fight around the Schumer Amendment [1] it makes me wonder if at least some of this is orchestrated by political/national security Circles [0] https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html [1]https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-rounds-introduce-new-legislation-to-declassify-government-records-related-to-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-and-ufos_modeled-after-jfk-assassination-records-collection-act--as-an-amendment-to-ndaa https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sch...

api 3y ago
The most likely reason for bullshit around the UFO issue is to cover up secret aircraft: https://www.military.com/history/why-first-us-jet-fighter-pilot-wore-gorilla-mask-during-test-flights.html https://www.military.com/history/why-first-us-jet-fighter-pi... But that doesn’t mean looking into aliens is silly. The Fermi paradox is genuinely mysterious and one potential answer is “well actually, they are here…” What is necessary is to just ignore all the crazy bullshit in the UFO field including all the new age wackos. Unfortunately even renaming it to UAP didn’t do the trick. There’s a whole grifter infrastructure here. I don’t think you need to involve the CIA. There’s plenty of grassroots insanity here. If there is or was CIA involvement I’d suspect it was gorilla masks for secret aircraft.
- dtx1 3y ago
  > I don’t think you need to involve the CIA. There’s plenty of grassroots insanity here. Just to be clear, I didn't involve them, the CIA historically has involved themselves in this subject in a most questionable manner. It seems reasonable to assume they would do it again. Though I personally believe they don't have to. The whole debunking-Industry is able to do that alone.
narrator 3y ago
The Grusch testimony points to a vast off-budget organization that researches exotic tech. They protect their turf from traditional science.

MichaelRo 3y ago

Maybe it's Schadenfreude? (The experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, or humiliation of another). Although as far as I know that usually requires the others to have wronged you in some way.

perihelions 3y ago

So, the author links to a 32-page arXiv paper that criticizes his own paper, and calls that criticism "toxic" (and "misinformation", too), and contextualizes it with angry Twitter mobs? That's an odd perspective. What exactly does he mean when he says Harvard astronomy department postdocs are being "terrorized" by "aggressive" criticism?

SiempreViernes 3y ago
Presumably that people aren't comparing him the heroes of Contact (1997 American film) but instead are getting increasingly annoyed that he's making crap claims.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sega_sai 3y ago

This guy completely lost it. Nobody in the field treats him seriously because he publishes like 1 first paper a month with all sorts of speculations and shoddy science. Sure when his first claims were distributed about Oumuamua, people were at least somewhat accepting that may be plausible, but then he continued pushing in that direction, as well as trying to be in the media all the time. Realistically I think many scientists just don't care about Loeb. Maybe a small fraction are still interested in disproving his claims.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
I wish more scientists were like this—a little out there while being highly enthusiastic, technical and evidence driven. Evidence will eventually bear out the bad hypotheses. The worse crime is creating fearful career scientists.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
FWIW his blog post struck me as narcissistic in tone. A martyr gazing at the stars, assaulted by the world. And the bit about grad students too terrified to pursue research because of some ostensibly bad criticism on the internet is comical. You cannot become a good academic if all it takes is a little criticism from somewhere to deflate you, if you need constant validation to function. If you do, you will become, like many academics and people in general, a conformist out of fear of losing approval. This is not to valorize contrarians (who still operate in terms of what others think), but to say that an academic must be honest and pursue the truth and be able to defend his arguments against or ignore bad criticism and concede valid criticism. If you cannot survive the meat grinder of criticism, if you lack the spine and the thick skin, you won’t flourish. It’s not for you, at least not until you mature.

javajosh 3y ago

If the end-goal is to convince the reader of the veracity of your claim that the BeLaU spherules are of alien manufacture, this piece does not help, and harms a little. It does not help because you spend no time refuting the refutation. You imply that a refutation that doesn't take as long as the original claim isn't worth as much. But that is false. Coming up with one counter-example need not take as long as articulating the theorem. The harm, as I see it, comes from engaging with the mob. I believe that an honest scientist convinced of evidence of alien tech will know in their bones what an uphill battle it will be to convince anyone of this, and the fact that making such a claim will inevitably come with certain (unfair) labels and attacks. To make such claims and then get angry about those labels being applied doesn't make sense, to the extent that the anger itself reads as evidence of some kind of fraud. Is it possible for a scientist to be naive enough to not realize what this claim would mean for his reputation and career? Maybe. But the more likely scenario is simple fraud and attention seeking, and the anger another layer of performance.

jonathrg 3y ago

Important context: this is Avi Loeb, the guy who insisted that Oumuamua might be aliens. Here's a nice exposé on him and his shoddy work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

RuggedPineapple 3y ago
Just as more context, his body of work overall is exceptional. He's been a Harvard professor for 30 years, he didn't get that position by accident. He's taken the Linus Pauling career path the last few years though, which is unfortunate. But the bulk of the mans career he's published good research and good books, people shouldn't reflexively junk those parts of his work just because he's gone loopy now.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  That's partially fair, but it is not really helpful to estimates of the reliability of his current work to point out that in the past, before he got all loopy, his work was reliable. The fact that he's gone all loopy recently is absolutely the most important context for deciding if you want to take his word on faith or not.
  - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
    Nobody, and let me be clear, absolutely nobody should take Loeb's word for anything at all. His schtick for the last half decade or so is a dressed up 'God of the Gaps' argument, where everything he can't explain is aliens and if someone is able to show better explanations it's not science working but people bullying him. Which is completely fair. He's done it to himself. No quarrels from me. But there's also a understandable urge to toss everything and that's an overreaction. Pauling being a crank is his late career doesn't mean he didn't deserve the Nobel for his earlier career, and likewise Loeb is/was very important to modern cosmology, you just have to ignore most of what he's published since 2017 or so.
oddmiral 3y ago
> Oumuamua might be aliens Yes, it has few properties which are unusual for natural objects, so it can be an alien artifact. Probability is very low, but non-zero. > Here's a nice exposé on him and his shoddy work I have no time for this audiobook.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

mycologos 3y ago

Knowing nothing about the technical merits of the two groups, it looks like the repeated interaction between Loeb's camp and their critics has been: 1) Loeb makes a bold claim about some phenomenon and attaches extraterrestrial life to it. He chooses to do this in a way that will attract media attention, like a press release. 2) The press release gets picked up by media, because Loeb is a notorious Harvard professor. At least some of the media will phrase it as "scientists say...". 3) Other scientists, perhaps at universities whose press releases are mostly ignored by media, see this and say "hey, I'm a scientist too, we do not say that". They try to engage Loeb and over time escalate their criticisms from "civil and private discussions" to "public and somewhat insulting". They might feel justified in doing this because they see Loeb's mass-media communication as being at approximately the same level of technical detail; at a certain point, a technical argument is not going to attract attention or understanding of the seriousness of the claim being made, but a blunt criticism will ("this guy is nuts and does not represent his field"). 4) Loeb describes 3) as a bunch of overly conservative cranks holding back scientists and directly analogizes himself to Galileo, predictably frustrating his critics further. Like I said, I can't say anything useful about the technical details. But it seems like an important detail here is that Loeb has repeatedly chosen to try and fight this out using public opinion, and his opponents have found themselves somewhat awkwardly picking up and using similar weapons for maybe the first time in their careers, and are not enjoying it. This seems to happen a lot in modern science!

blablabla123 3y ago
Science doesn't really fund itself and "the public" is regularly questioning the expenses for it. The best example of what is wrong with this is the communication about Human made Global Warming and how it's possible that there are still people which deny it. Or take more crude examples like Vaccination skeptics or flat earthers. Results and methods are rarely published in understandable language. Actually the Funding for studying the Higgs Boson famously got secured by making a really simple explanation. Obviously Loeb might have gone a bit over the top given the odds of his theory but as you mention if reaching out to the public was more common nobody might have blinked an eye.

jacknews 3y ago

tall poppy syndrome. Some of his claims are, um, out there. But indeed, all those just trying to pull him down are quite cowardly.