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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

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• PaulHoule 1y ago
  I always thought Weinstein was a creep but he’s a physics crackpot too? Sad that Hossenfelder got involved but it’s so strange to see the spectrum of outsiders and insider-outsiders and outsider-insiders that showed up for that. Never saw a real physicist threaten a lawsuit over criticism but the paranoid and delusional do it all the time.
• FrustratedMonky 1y ago
  Sabine's early video's seemed pretty sincere, and had a lot of valid points. But later, I think the pressure of creating constant content, and moving into non-expert areas, has gotten just as pop-sci as anybody else. Still think she is on another level from Eric who will throw out any crazy idea he can if someone will listen.
  • depr 1y ago
    I think "just as pop-sci" is a bit generous. https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1956336194352230570 https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1956336194352230570 explains it better than I can.
    • FrustratedMonky 1y ago
      I think that list applies more to Eric. He is definitely in the 'conspiracy of nefarious forces are aligned against me' camp. Sabine, I think she was just referring to how institutions can become calcified around certain ideas. The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote).
      • tux3 1y ago
        Max Planck is the source of the famous quote. "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
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      • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
        > Science progresses one funeral at a time
      • analog31 1y ago
        >>> The old concept that 'new' ideas need to wait for the founders of old ideas to die off. (can't remember exact quote). I think Paul Feyerabend debunked that idea. Disclosure: Old physicist.
  • tombert 1y ago
    Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented). I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science. I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly. Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
    • boxed 1y ago
      > Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
      • tombert 1y ago
        Probably, kind of funny that the irony is completely lost on her. I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD. A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
  • jordanpg 1y ago
    She has gone way beyond this. She is actively undermining the entire academic scientific enterprise, even as she makes money popularizing it. It's unclear why she does this. She portrays herself as speaking truth to power, but -- much like certain actors in US public life these days -- is simply doing the easy work of tearing things down, without doing the hard work of building things.
    • throwawaymaths 1y ago
      the scientific enterprise has undermined itself already. Look at how we lost decades of research in alzheimer's as a good example. This problem is WAY worse than even sabines says. If a scientist publishes something sketchy, even sometimes just a little bit, they might wind up sinking years of research of other people who are honest truthseeking researchers just chasing the sketchy results. These good people then burn out or flip to the dark side, only leaving rotten people. It's like a fucking market of lemons, except if becoming lemons were viral.
      • kelipso 1y ago
        As oppose to industry that blows hundreds of billions of dollars on hype bubbles every couple of years.
        • throwawaymaths 1y ago
          Yeah, that's a problem too. Keynes: By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
  • indy 1y ago
    Sadly this is a common path for many people on Youtube. Once they reach a certain level of popularity the original topic of their channel becomes a vehicle for "content creation" which they try to maximize for "engagement". The quality of the original content always nosedives.
  • thomassmith65 1y ago
    For anyone who doesn't already know, the term for the phenomenon is 'audience capture' https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
  • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    You must be one of the aliens trying to deceive humanity.
• jordanpg 1y ago
  Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA "Professor Dave" interviews 6 physicists regarding Hossenfelder including one guy whose name you particle physicists in particular might recognize.
  • elashri 1y ago
    Oh, This is the first time I have seen Michael peskin. I have known him through his famous QFT book. I did not even know he is still alive. Feels good putting a face to the author of one the books that made you struggle but also enjoyed.
  • the__alchemist 1y ago
    This isn't helping the case: Of all the players involved in this drama in the article, the video it references, and this thread, Professor Dave comes across as the worst. He strikes me as smug, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest. He also seems to have an unpleasant personality, from how he reacts to criticism on the internet. Dave is a bully.
    • jordanpg 1y ago
      I agree that he's not the best messenger, but in this case, he's right about Hossenfelder. I think the interviews with the 6 physicists stand alone. For the most part, Dave just lets them talk.
• arduanika 1y ago
  Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless. His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons. https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-episode-interview-with-tim-nguyen-on-geometric-unity https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis... Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
  • PaulHoule 1y ago
    The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc. In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school
    • jurking_hoff 1y ago
      > but was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office on grounds of being a perpetual motion machine The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.
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• padjo 1y ago
  > Weinstein released his Geometric Unity paper on April 1, debuting it on Joe Rogan’s podcast We live in deeply unserious times.
  • almostgotcaught 1y ago
    i mean he's not a physicist of any sort so i don't think there's anything amiss about this? the "deeply unserious" part is that people can't (refuse to?) recognize that he's not a physicist.
  • dachworker 1y ago
    He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
• boxed 1y ago
  The connection between Eric and Sabine seems a bit... weak in this article. It sounds like 90% guilt by association, and 10% substance.
• dang 1y ago
  At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread. I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again. This is not a criticism of the author—we know what people have to do on the internet. But it's in keeping with what we're optimizing this site for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... (Submitted title was "Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder a Crisis of Credibility")
  • nilslindemann 1y ago
    Thank you, Mr. Defender of Curiosity on Hacker News.
  • simpaticoder 1y ago
    I would have kept it down-weighted. This is a drama that can have no satisfying resolution, and offers little unique insight into the world. The topic itself, mathematical physics, is so rarified that only a few hundred people in the world can understand the facts of the case. What's left is a strange superposition of emotionally resonant stories - one where you empathize with the expert being railroaded by a psuedoscientist and his allies (the TFA), and the other where a brilliant outsider's ideas are ignored and punished by prejudiced insiders (Weinstein's narrative). The peanut gallery weighs in with vim and vigor, rather than just saying "I don't know", and all it does is tell you which story they like in that moment. As an aside, scientists are highly motivated to take credible outsider ideas seriously because the cost/benefit makes a lot of sense (e.g. Max Planck taking Einstein seriously). The motive to suppress Weinstein doesn't make sense, regardless of the underlying claims. But really, I don't know.
• calf 1y ago
  The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us. (Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
  • seanhunter 1y ago
    There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing). Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/ https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/ [1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
    • calf 1y ago
      But that's the issue, Nguyen is not the institution as a whole so then their concerns are just talking past each other. (And perhaps typical of a professional physicists Nguyen's complaints miss this point.)
• throw7 1y ago
  "GU continues to be entertained by Hossenfelder". Last I knew she had a video critical of GU and Weinstein.
• brightsid3 1y ago
  [flagged]
• dachworker 1y ago
  ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
  • janalsncm 1y ago
    Maybe at some point, but as of now it’s much more applied and empirical. Aside from money, there’s nothing stopping you from training a new architecture or loss function and sharing the weights for everyone to use. Very recently some researchers at a Chinese lab invented a new optimizer Muon Clip which they claim is better for certain types of LLM training. I don’t think there are enough AdamW fanboys out there for it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
    • ACCount37 1y ago
      Applied ML is truly blessed by being incredibly empirical. So many crackpots get filtered by "oh, if your new theory is so good and powerful, then show a small scale system built on it". This hard filters 99% of crackpots, and the remaining 1% usually builds something that performs within a measurement error of existing systems. Grand Theories Of Everything don't have such a filter. There is no easy demonstration to perform, no simple experiment to run that would show whether string theory has merit. So we get very questionable theories, and then a lot of even more questionable theories, and then crackpots and madmen as far as eye can see. The curse on physics isn't that it has crackpots. It's that the remaining unsolved problems are incredibly hard, the space of solutions is vast, and there isn't enough experimental data coming in to quickly weed out the obviously wrong ones.
      • janalsncm 1y ago
        Very well said. I also think the goal of crackpots isn’t to create something useful but to have their names next to Maxwell, Einstein, and Hawking. Household names of geniuses. Their individual accomplishments are less important. > the remaining 1% usually builds something that performs within a measurement error of existing systems Another point that people miss when they wax poetic about how neural nets are like brains or whatnot: we didn’t pick transformers because they were the most elegant method. We use them because they work really well on the hardware we have. It’s why RNNs fell out of favor, they’re way too slow to train. Transformers made training on the whole internet possible. Maybe RNNs can be salvaged, but my guess is they’ll be approximately as good as transformers but slower to train.
• qoez 1y ago
  Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)
  • crispyambulance 1y ago
    There are other motivations besides money for cranks. In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires. I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
    • qoez 1y ago
      The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that. > obscurantist Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
      • hermitcrab 1y ago
        >Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.
• NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video. From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit. So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember. That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
  • cycomanic 1y ago
    >From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit. But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest. Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
    • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
      > But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think. > Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho: - just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world - just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel - not falsifiable is bad science - not making predictions is bad science - hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy (that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
• wturner 1y ago
  Reading this makes me feel that smart muckrakers are a heavily undervalued resource online.
• nis0s 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research. My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity. I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink. It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    Sabine is in no way neutral. She’s made the journey over the last couple of years to the kinda “academia is terrible, string theory is a scam” grift that her buddy Weinstein did.
    • ecshafer 1y ago
      When I was still in the physics world, almost every high energy guy I talked to thought string theory was a scam. It seems like everyone that wasn't a string theorist thought it was scam. I don't know enough of the topic to know one way or the other, but it seemed a common idea.
      • BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        I don’t know the same people, so I can’t really speak to common sentiments in the industry. I think the issue with the way that Sabine goes about it is that she uses string theory as a cudgel against the entirety of academia. She kind of frames it as though string theory is the only game in town, and as though they’re all deliberate liars or stupid. To me, it reads the same way any us-versus-them grifter message does, which is unfortunate because a couple years ago I would watch all her videos. That was back when she would just explain physics concepts and trash talk quantum computing.
    • nis0s 1y ago
      At one point there was a New York Times article which derided a scientist who said that we could send a rocket to the moon. As such I don’t care about contrarians, fountainheads, or mouth pieces. Either you build something, or use knowledge that’s not directly related to build something, or you don’t.
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it. Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators. I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU. There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example: > claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
  • jacksnipe 1y ago
    The author has previously published an article with a detailed analysis of the math of GU, and why it doesn't work: https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
  • xoa 1y ago
    >Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it. I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens. I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
• cycomanic 1y ago
  I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics. At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B"). At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious. From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
  • hughredline 1y ago
    I had a similar trajectory, but I would add that she lost me when she started sucking up to public figures and corporate interests I despise. People like musk and bezos and ai hype et al. Made me realize I was projecting some aspects of her interest in rational thought all wrong.
    • antithesizer 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
        Sabine is european, we kinda have some experience with alternatives to capitalism here, so... Yeah. That's not a valid criticism, on anyone. Just because you get points online for saying capitalism bad doesn't mean it's not the best out of everything we've tried so far...
• lepicz 1y ago
  if anyone wants to go through it: https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric_Unity-Draft-April-1st-2021.pdf https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric... possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw and that's like 95% of available documentation :)
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    I skimmed the 'paper'. It seems incredibly rambling and not any sort of coherent theory. However I graduated with an undergrad physics degree in 1987 and became a software engineer. So I am hardly super qualified to comment. Once in every now and then a genius comes along and turns everything up side down. But there are 1000s of cranks and blowhards for every Einstein. I don't see anything to make me think Weinstein is an Einstein (the similarlity in name notwithstanding).
• nurettin 1y ago
  There are numerous "everything theorists" who appear in a bunch of yt channels/podcasts. Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Langan, Terence Howard, Eric, etc. Sabine's grift is artificial controversy rather than some unified theory, but at least she is willing to discuss it and cares about her public image.
• gwd 1y ago
  There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc. One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate. But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across? If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
  • glenstein 1y ago
    >But the other common denominator is Nguyen You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility. I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
  • WhitneyLand 1y ago
    This is supposed to be about science. Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed. He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.
• mvdtnz 1y ago
  Back in my days of devouring popular physics we had Peter Woit and to some degree Lee Smolin. But people were mostly getting their pop physics from books, not online, so the velocity of contrarianisn was throttled.
• amai 1y ago
  Weinstein = Wannabe Einstein
• krunck 1y ago
  "Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case." Touché.
  • pdonis 1y ago
    > Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. Actually this isn't true, at least as far as anything the public needs to care about is concerned. There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that. The model can use whatever intricate math it wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments. The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
    • MengerSponge 1y ago
      While we try to make things accessible to the public, the determination of what is "good" is ultimately made by experts. "The public" has a level of science literacy that is somewhat medieval (as in pre-Newtonian, and increasingly pre-germ theory), and while it's important to maintain political support, it's not reasonable to expect Joe Schmoe to be able to track the latest experimental results from CERN. In fact, it's not reasonable to expect a very smart lay person to do the same. The problem is basically that the information that gets encoded in papers and public datasets is not spanning! There's a shocking amount of fiddly details that don't get transmitted for one reason or another. Say what you want about how things "should" be done, but that's how they are done. If you want things done differently you can encourage that behavior by rubbing cash on the problem.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  All the best scientists release their work on Joe Rogan and threaten to sue anyone who criticizes their work.
  • estearum 1y ago
    Saying otherwise means you're part of the DISC, of course.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein : "In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"." It all seems very odd.
  • kelseyfrog 1y ago
    It's the classic frame of "Haha, I was only joking. Unless I wasn't and you want to take me seriously." Eric comes across as having a wounded ego that he protects at any cost.
  • janalsncm 1y ago
    As entertainment goes, I would personally prefer a good movie or a concert to a jargon filled paper.
  • mxmilkiib 1y ago
    apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning (I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
    • griffzhowl 1y ago
      > apparently Wheeler nicked some idea According to Weinstein?
• czzprr 1y ago
  I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down. If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman. But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
• throwmeaway222 1y ago
  Hossenfelder is absolutely the BS detector and takedown machine that physics needs :)
• os2warpman 1y ago
  I must, the same way the immune system must assume that anything an IgE antibody can attach to is a potential threat, assume that anyone who unironically uses the word "gaslight" as a verb is wrong.
• SquibblesRedux 1y ago
  At the risk of sounding dismissive -- this is all drama that amounts to nothing more than Internet entertainment. Legitimate claims of harm should be heard in court. Legitimate scientific debate should be hashed out at conferences or in peer-reviewed journals. Drama posted to an audience of 8 billion people, hosted in personal blogs and on YouTube videos, seems like soap opera entertainment at best and childish behavior at worst. Just my humble opinion as a bystander looking in.
  • ozgung 1y ago
    In this blog post: podcast: 22 times video: 13 times blog: 6 times rogan: 5 times youtube: 4 times clubhouse: 4 times paper: 14 times conference: 0 times journal: 0 times These physicists love podcasts.
• antognini 1y ago
  As a counterbalance to the "renegade" character of these kinds of podcasts I do recommend Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. He does a good job representing the "establishment" position in physics, so to speak. A good episode to start with is "The Crisis in Physics" in which he (unusually?) argues that there is no real crisis in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
  • ajs1998 1y ago
    I absolutely love Sean Carroll's podcast. He's so good at explaining things in terms most people can understand, but also not afraid to get into the weeds and spend an hour building up to a point. Also not afraid of politics or how he will be seen by taking a political stance. He seems like a great guy on top of being an excellent communicator.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” ― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
• shavvxh 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • lowbrowder 1y ago
    Many high profile engineers who revolutionized industry agree!
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  I waded through some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM Carroll comes across as very reasonable. Weinstein comes across _very_ badly. The only positive thing I can think to say about him, is that he kept the equally awful Peirs Morgan quiet for a while.
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    There are some great comments below this video. "The phrase "Fake it until you make it" has become "Weinstein until you Einstein"" "My reactions as a physicist were every time Sean Carroll explains something: "I could not think of a simpler way to explain this" every time Eric Weinstein explains something: "I could not think of a more complicated way to explain this"" "Eric Weinstein is the Steven Seagal of Physics"
    • 400thecat 1y ago
      > Eric Weinstein is the Steven Seagal of Physics he reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Both are clearly smart (raw IQ) but are deranged, they speak in convoluted sentences that are intentionally overcomplicated and that make no sense and
      • hermitcrab 1y ago
        Russel Brand is the master of this. He will never use 1 word then he can use 10. And he talks so fast that it is hard to parse. By the time you can say 'hang on, that's BS' he has already moved on. He is also an extreme example of audience capture, moving from left-wing comedian to right-wing christian.
      • eviks 1y ago
        Doesn't making nonsense be the opposite of smart?
  • freetime2 1y ago
    I highly recommend watching this debate (I use the term very loosely here) between Weinstein and Sean Carroll - and particularly this exchange about 37 minutes in: https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269 https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269 Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper: On the first page: > The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author. And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section: > As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located. > The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research. This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology. And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex. [1] https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf
• AIorNot 1y ago
  It seems like this thread has become a referendum on Sabine - who along with Lex is the more popular of the podcasters mentioned But I think that’s a pity and we need to acknowledge the great value they all these podcasts bring instead of just complaining about audience capture and various biases of one - we’re all human - if Einstein or Newton had or was on a podcast we’d be criticizing it just the same IMHO. Human nature being what it is. Also we should be following a wider variety of communicators and voices rather than simply crowing one king and ignoring and unfollowing the rest based on one incident or political leaning - what shame it is when people set up their own echo chamber for their particular worldview - it’s the worst aspect of social media - trapping people into one perspective alone I also specifically want to promote Curt Juimangals podcast TOE here despite the disparaging remarks in post (which are concerning but represent one point of view) - he deserves better and wider distribution than just this hacker news post https://youtube.com/@theoriesofeverything?si=n0x7wHcDx3V_Be70 https://youtube.com/@theoriesofeverything?si=n0x7wHcDx3V_Be7... His theories of everything is a treasure trove of content with interviews with everyone from Chomsky, to Hinton along with the physics community including folks like Nobel laureate Penrose Sure he interviews folks who are marginal and outsiders like Wolfram and folks like the Mensa IQ guy who claims that his TOE proves God etc but everybody is usually given their space to present with a very technical perspective that interviews like Lex’s podcast miss This specific issue in this case is a concerning one in that I do think Weinstein s throwing his weight around to suppress as he can, but honestly it doesn’t seem to be working for given all publicity critiquing him either
  • timmytokyo 1y ago
    Sorry, it's one thing to interview cranks like Chris Langan and Eric Weinstein, bad enough as that is. It's quite another to promote them as brave champions of suppressed truths.
    • AIorNot 1y ago
      Did you read my comment? I’m not promoting Langan and Weinstein either - I’m promoting Jaimungals podcast (which was disparaged on this thread) which is an absolutely wonderful for cross-disciplinary exploration of TOEs and cutting edge concepts in physics, AI, biology and consciousness and philosophy For example this podcast Frederic Schuller, an award-winning theoretical physicist and professor https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg?si=2PwkFzH4OJ2r8eMT https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg?si=2PwkFzH4OJ2r8eMT And this with Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes https://youtu.be/gEK4-XtMwro?si=bYAHDO4iWh9WRV8J https://youtu.be/gEK4-XtMwro?si=bYAHDO4iWh9WRV8J
• chermi 1y ago
  How do dumbasses that think they're doing "cutting edge quantum physics" talking to an LLM fit in to this?
  • nobody9999 1y ago
    It's Vibe Physics![0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY
• jimkri 1y ago
  > Attack the Person, Not the Science This article and this quote are something I have also noticed recently. I've been working on researching AI and trying to visualize more data structures to help connect ideas, and I want to bounce ideas off of people to make sure I'm truly comprehending things. I've been trying to have conversations to talk more in depth, but I haven't been able to get anyone to read a research paper. That doesn't stop anyone from telling me something about what I have been researching without reading the research or comprehending it. Everyone feels empowered with AI. But when asked to debate the merits of their ideas, everyone I have asked has said people won't stick to the debate. I think you pointed it out clearly. People can't debate a topic they truly don't know.
• eviks 1y ago
  > She’s inconsistent with her messaging, saying that “she never looked into [Geometric Unity] in any detail” but clearly saying the opposite in an older video. It honestly doesn’t interest me to micro-police how Sabine chooses to express her opinions And yet the author has done just that, and not in a very transparent way. The second quote the author didn't provide was: > ... looked closely enough at Weinstein's... Wolfram's ... theories of everything ... to be able to tell you that they have not convincingly solved ... > Not interested enough to look any closer ... don't want to waste my time This is clearly not the opposite, but the same thing. "Closely enough" could hypothetically be as simple as reading the summary and skimming in a few minutes and realizing there isn't a single formula with the solution. That's not a detailed review that could require many hours (or even days?) of work > several of our most prominent science communicators – nay, science populists – are willing to distort the truth to suit their own interests. Indeed, a universal human trait even science can't tame!