Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Hey, remember Sabine Hossenfelder? The transphobe who makes YouTube videos? She published a physics paper! Well, OK, she posted a thing to the arXiv for the first time since January 2024. I read it, because Iāve been checking the quant-ph feed on a daily basis for years now, and reading anything else is even more depressing. Itās vague, meandering glorp that tries to pretty up a worldview that amounts to renouncing explanation and saying everything happens because Amon-Ra wills it. Two features are worth commenting upon. The acknowledgments say,
āTee hee, I shut off my higher brain functionsā is a statement that should remain in the porn for those who have a fetish for that.
And what literature does Hossenfelder cite? Well, thereās herself, of course, and Tim Palmer (one of those guys who did respectable work in his own field and then decided to kook out about quantum mechanics). And ā¦ Eric Weinstein! The very special boy who dallied for a decade before writing a paper on his revolutionary theory and then left his equations in his other pants. Yes, Hossenfelder has gone from hosting a blog post that dismantled āGeometric Unityā to citing it as a perfectly ordinary theory.
If sheās not taking Thielbux, sheās missing an opportunity.
I am still staying away from YouTube, so I am happily cut off from the bulk of her content. But when she teases a video with the phrase
I reserve the right to say āyikesā.
Oh, and she has podcasted with sex pest Lawrence Krauss, multiple times (āWhatās New in Science With Sabine and Lawrenceā).
Usually you get tech creeps insisting that they couldāve done physics. Isnāt it kind of uncanny when a physicist insists on their capacity for tech creeping? Edit: also thanks for the explainer!
Community sneer from this orange-site comment:
That passage of Hossenfelderās jumped out at me, too. Itās a laughably bad take about the implications of Bellās theorem that ignores how just about every interpretation of quantum mechanics has responded to Bell-inequality violations, and it attempts to sanewash superdeterminism.
Not her first time doing thatā¦
Reading up a bit more on āsuperdeterminismā I guess it explain a bit more why she made that video attempting to debunk free will Compatibilism as a cooky idea cooked up by new cooky philosophers (Not realising itās about as ancient as western philosophy itself).
For the āestheticsā of presenting superdeterminism as a āpure-common-senseā the no free will just sells it better.
EDIT: From memory maybe it was about āHard Compatibilismā (free will requires determinism) which might not be explicitly so old, though I would say a natural consequence of most Compatibilist positions.
I saw like a couple articles and a talk about Bellās theorem 5 years ago and I immediately clocked this as a vast, vast oversimplification
Thanks, this was an awful skim. It feels like she doesnāt understand why we expect gravity to propagate like a wave at the speed of light; itās not just an assumption of Einstein but has its own independent measurement and corroboration. Also, the focus on geometry feels anachronistic; a century ago she could have proposed a geometric explanation for why nuclei stay bound together and completely overlooked gluons. To be fair, she also cites GRW but I guess she doesnāt know that GRW canāt be made relativistic. Maybe she chose GRW because itās not yet falsified rather than for its potential to explain (relativistic) gravity. The point at which I get off the train is a meme that sounds like a Weinstein whistle:
To channel dril a bit: thereās no inherent geometry to spacetime, you fool. You trusted your eyeballs too much. Your brain evolved to map 2D and 3D so you stuck yourself into a little Euclidean video game like Decartes reading his own books. We observe experimental data that agrees with the presumption of 3D space. We already know that time is perceptual and that experimentally both SR and GR are required to navigate spacetime; why should space not be perceptual? On these grounds, even fucking MOND has a better basis than Geometric Unity, because MOND wonāt flip out if reality is not 3D but 3.0000000000009095ā¦D while Weinstein canāt explain anything that isnāt based on a Rubikās-cube symmetry metaphor.
She doesnāt even mention dark matter. What a sad pile of slop. At least I learned the word for goldstinos while grabbing bluelinks.
She wrote a whole book about how physicists have deluded themselves by pursuing mathematical ābeautyā, and now sheās advocating āeverything is geometryā.
taking a bad paper too seriously
Hossenfelder starts her āSummaryā section thusly:
This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:
Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.
I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, itās a bad implementation of that premise. She doesnāt have a model; she has a pathological āfixā to a problem of her own making.
Eric āmy new theory of physics has not maths in itā Weinstein?
Eric āI will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite meā Weinstein:
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinsteinās bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelderās comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravityā¦ It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrneās edition of Euclid.
Youāve got to be shitting me.
Edit: maybe all these weirdos in the techfash groupchat are experimenting with the wrong nootropics and gave themselves brain damage. They all seem to be unravelling simultaneously.
I think they are feeling like they are riding the wave. The unstoppable wave of āachtually we are rightā and they learned nothing from the expert drug users and dont know the wave is about to reach the high water mark.
May we live to see the day!
See, no math in any of those talks.