String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?
You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill.
Nothing wrong with learning and being influenced. However, many posters on HN are very confident that string theory is a dead end. It makes me question if they’ve done cutting edge string theory or it is just some random software engineers who watched Sabina on YouTube.
The degree of confidence matters here.
In the age of infinite bullshit generators, the even more useful skill is being able to say "I don't know." Or "I'm not qualified to have a useful opinion on this so I'm just not going to say anything." I could write a bunch of stuff about my personal opinions on string theory and waste everyone's time, or I could just shut up and not be a human stoichastic parrot.
I watch three YouTube videos.
The Lambda-CDM model seems to be a dead end, but instead of recognising that, picking themselves up, and moving on, the Lambda-CDM Model Industrial Complex simply papered over the gaping holes with magical thinking.
Sciencism.
This isn't a great argument. Researchers who do not think string theory is good are not going to spend years on it. There are plenty of experts that dismiss string theory. I have no skin in the game, and don't care either way, fwiw.
I agree but I think it’s a little hopeful to believe AI will save string theory
I also just keep parroting that the Earth is not flat and a bunch of other things I've been told and then never questioned, since it seems to make sense.
When the flath-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though. So I'll just keep parroting various things without properly understanding them.
C'est la vie.
> When the flat-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though.
How do I say this in the most gentle way I can...?
Your brain is broke. No, seriously. If you can help it, try not to argue with anyone about anything, ever. You have a demonstrated inability to think clearly.
Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible.
Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.
Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.
A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.
Or the just read Woit, uh, 20 years ago now, “not even wrong”.
Sabine has been at the forefront and has the goods: https://youtu.be/1mgxuVVUz40
And for the inevitable critics of Sabine...maybe Leonard Susskind is good enough for you: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok
The error with this approach is that every single physics theory gets exactly the same criticisms.
You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction.
In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it (number made up for illustration, and there is probably some variations, but you get the gist). You took one theory and found few physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it. You conclude, incorrectly, that it means this theory is fundamentally differently treated as any other theories.
(on top of that, it is unfortunate that Hossenfelder later screw up her image by doing way too much mistakes that someone reliable would not do)
> It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.
> String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
Not only are LLMs perfect machines with all the intelligence of humanity without any of our problems, they are also everything else. I wait to get my hands on one of those LLMs people on hn seem to be using. I want to believe too. Let me into the religion of the perfect thinking machine gods.
Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.
No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.
I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia.
ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?
And that's the reason she's wrong?
You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).
No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc).
Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.
You said
> No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.
This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe.
Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it.
I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.
Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.
The "untestable" meme is just a thought terminating cliche. It's as if you believe no researchers ever considered the brilliant insight that the framework is difficult to test. History is littered with plenty of examples of a novel discovery, understanding, or technology yielding new opportunities for experimental design.
It's also a glib dismissal of the unexpected mathematical elegance of string theory that makes it so compelling. Worse, it completely ignores the material contributions to applied physics that string theory has made possible which is obviously worth "spending your life's work on" - as if people need to justify the value of their life's work to disinterested onlookers lest they be demeaned.
This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.
They were testable, no?
Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either?
(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun).
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
Sometimes theories need engineering to catch up to become testable.
Well, we can test it, but you'll need to give me a ton of money in order for me to test it.
even if its not particularly relevant to the physical world around us, it still explored cool math