This is a link to a complaint by one of the most popular YouTube physicists (the video was published 11 days ago and has had 1.9 million views). She reiterates some of the issues discussed in this review. I can't have too much sympathy for her, though; she is physicalist who, for example, denies the existence of free will, in favor of reductionist determinism.
And she says that "taxpayers" are funding the system, but never acknowledges that various forms of government control of science are (IMO) the source of most of the problems.
Her criticisms of physics are largely correct in my opinion, although I don't think they go far enough. On physicalism, I don't believe there is any other philosophy that is compatible with the practice of science, although science is incapable of deciding whether physicalism is correct in a metaphysical sense (whatever that means). Therefore this is my position on free will, quoted from Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain:
"Our belief in free will expresses the idea that, under the right circumstances, we have the ability to guide our decisions by our higher-level thoughts, beliefs, values, and past experiences, and to exert control over our undesired lower-level impulses. Whenever we make an autonomous decision, we exercise our free will by considering all the available options, pondering them, and choosing the one that we favor. [...] In thinking about free will, we therefore need to sharply distinguish two intuitions about our decisions: their fundamental indeterminacy (a dubious idea) and their autonomy (a respectable notion). Our brain states are clearly not uncaused and do not escape the laws of physics—nothing does. But our decisions are genuinely free whenever they are based on a conscious deliberation that proceeds autonomously, without any impediment, carefully weighting the pros and cons before committing to a course of action. When this occurs, we are correct in speaking of a voluntary decision—even if it is, of course, ultimately caused by our genes, our life history, and the value functions they have inscribed in our neuronal circuits. Because of fluctuations in spontaneous brain activity, our decisions may remain unpredictable, even to us. Yet this unpredictability is not a defining feature of free will; nor should it be confused with absolute indeterminacy. What counts is the autonomous decision making."
If it was a few decades ago, maybe (though I did see similar kinds of complaints being published, they did not seem to get the same kind of resonance that they do today), but at this point I find it hard to believe that things can be *more* in the open without the whole system then imploding.
As an absolute number of individuals it's growing, as a percentage of working scientists it's still very few. If things being more in the open, i.e. truthful, causes the system to implode then perhaps the system should implode. If "[t]he primary and fundamental act of scientific dishonesty is: denial of the pervasive reality of scientific dishonesty" then there are still a very large number of dishonest scientists. "It's just a few bad apples, the scientific method is self correcting!"
A bit polemical, but also well appreciated. I've been in the trenches with a heterodox approach towards research and I feel like I've been screaming in the void for so long, so reading your review was very refreshing.
I am an applied mathematician. I have doggedly and stubbornly been in a position of doing research without faculty obligations. I have been pursuing a polymath approach because of my observation that there is a significant economies of scale effect in regards to mathematical aptitude, that is twice the competence equals 4x the output, etc. For instance I am working on studying how to manage the flow of river networks both in EU and Africa and am appropriately comfortable at approaching both the mathematical physics of the computational fluid dynamics as well as the satellite data fitting and time series projections of weather, which require different fields of math. I think the hyperspecialization is indeed very unfortunate in preventing this ability to tackle complex problems in aggregate.
I don't think I am a genius, rather much of my career has been appropriately combining different areas of math and doing what seems to be the obvious thing. Often in my pursuits it is baffling to me why no one else has done the obvious thing.
And the technocracy too. I never thought about research independence as being so important but now realize how critical it is, after a year of endless frustration of my PI completely disregarding (and even taking personal offense to) my suggestions to do the obvious thing.
Glad I'm not alone 🙂
On a technical note: I don't think anti-realism has anything to do with it. Science is good if it is useful is a fine antirealist paradigm, and if nanorobots are performing tumor surgeries, I'd rather believe in quantum control engineering
My theory for the cause is more sociological: the rise of market concentration and corporatism brought on a mass supply of "Bullshit Jobs", as per the book for David Graeber. As much of white collar employment, marketing, corporate culture, etc is about blabbering a lot but with zero marginal productivity for the firm, they've trojan horsed the intelligentsia with identity politics and third wave feminism in order to justify their existence. Since we are a chattering class it felt natural to make this alliance. Meanwhile the values of the office drone class have been lowering our standards as far as civic duty and concsciousness of our privilege as a class. This was a serious mistake, the integrity of the intelligentsia is truly in critical danger.
The book was polemical, so my review is in kind (and also I like polemics). It's interesting to hear about interdisciplinary thinking in applied mathematics, thank you for sharing.
My problem with anti-realism is I think it handicaps the progress of scientific theory. To take it to its reductio ad absurdum conclusion, what if we just used neural nets for everything? They would make good predictions, which is the gold standard in anti-realism, but it would be impossible to build a theory from that. I'm sure you've seen this in CFD; I think the CFD models where they try to bake physics like conservation laws into the model itself are very interesting and kind of a halfway-point between a theoretical, realist paradigm and an anti-realist one. I will have more to say on data-driven scientific discovery in the future after I have thought about it more.
One more point in antirealism: I like to think of continental philosophy as poetry for nerds. Just like theologians may debate details of scripture, continental philosophy is just playing around with ideas to see how they taste in an aesthetic sense. Both mass culture and scripture is too boring and basic so an evening of Deleuze wordplay is just a way to goof off.
We can consider SJWs as like new world fundamentalist Christians, at best midwits who take the Frankfurt School way too literally. It's really quite a face palm.
Quantum mechanics is uncomfortable in the sense that it separates reality from measurement. At some point there is something named “measurement” that is the point where the Microsystem behaviour escalates to the macro reality of the observer (and a barrier of randomness exists between us and the underlying reality).
Physicists and philosophers hate quantum measurement but almost for a century all the heroic anti quantum efforts have failed. It is incredibly unfair to say they “embraced” anti realism.
Did you read the Oliver Consa paper I linked in the first paragraph? If quantum physics was ever overturned decades of Nobel prizes would be rendered worthless. Physics has gotten itself into such a degenerate state that it is impossible to make actual progress from within the system. All you're allowed to do is pile on more math to fix the old math; what needs to be done is rebuild the entire structure on actual mechanics (no virtual particles need apply) and then rewrite the math to be a direct expression of the mechanics, rather than taking the math as the ground truth (it isn't, any more so than an image classifier is the ground truth for what a dog is).
They don’t have anything better, and in operational and predictive terms, the theory is impressive. The computers and smartphones we use are based on it…
This is a link to a complaint by one of the most popular YouTube physicists (the video was published 11 days ago and has had 1.9 million views). She reiterates some of the issues discussed in this review. I can't have too much sympathy for her, though; she is physicalist who, for example, denies the existence of free will, in favor of reductionist determinism.
And she says that "taxpayers" are funding the system, but never acknowledges that various forms of government control of science are (IMO) the source of most of the problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
Her criticisms of physics are largely correct in my opinion, although I don't think they go far enough. On physicalism, I don't believe there is any other philosophy that is compatible with the practice of science, although science is incapable of deciding whether physicalism is correct in a metaphysical sense (whatever that means). Therefore this is my position on free will, quoted from Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain:
"Our belief in free will expresses the idea that, under the right circumstances, we have the ability to guide our decisions by our higher-level thoughts, beliefs, values, and past experiences, and to exert control over our undesired lower-level impulses. Whenever we make an autonomous decision, we exercise our free will by considering all the available options, pondering them, and choosing the one that we favor. [...] In thinking about free will, we therefore need to sharply distinguish two intuitions about our decisions: their fundamental indeterminacy (a dubious idea) and their autonomy (a respectable notion). Our brain states are clearly not uncaused and do not escape the laws of physics—nothing does. But our decisions are genuinely free whenever they are based on a conscious deliberation that proceeds autonomously, without any impediment, carefully weighting the pros and cons before committing to a course of action. When this occurs, we are correct in speaking of a voluntary decision—even if it is, of course, ultimately caused by our genes, our life history, and the value functions they have inscribed in our neuronal circuits. Because of fluctuations in spontaneous brain activity, our decisions may remain unpredictable, even to us. Yet this unpredictability is not a defining feature of free will; nor should it be confused with absolute indeterminacy. What counts is the autonomous decision making."
Science sure knows how to use language so it is difficult if not impossible to understand what they are asserting.
Indeed, that's why seeing
> Of course scarcely anyone
working in science would tell you this
makes me question the honesty of the blogger.
If it was a few decades ago, maybe (though I did see similar kinds of complaints being published, they did not seem to get the same kind of resonance that they do today), but at this point I find it hard to believe that things can be *more* in the open without the whole system then imploding.
As an absolute number of individuals it's growing, as a percentage of working scientists it's still very few. If things being more in the open, i.e. truthful, causes the system to implode then perhaps the system should implode. If "[t]he primary and fundamental act of scientific dishonesty is: denial of the pervasive reality of scientific dishonesty" then there are still a very large number of dishonest scientists. "It's just a few bad apples, the scientific method is self correcting!"
A bit polemical, but also well appreciated. I've been in the trenches with a heterodox approach towards research and I feel like I've been screaming in the void for so long, so reading your review was very refreshing.
I am an applied mathematician. I have doggedly and stubbornly been in a position of doing research without faculty obligations. I have been pursuing a polymath approach because of my observation that there is a significant economies of scale effect in regards to mathematical aptitude, that is twice the competence equals 4x the output, etc. For instance I am working on studying how to manage the flow of river networks both in EU and Africa and am appropriately comfortable at approaching both the mathematical physics of the computational fluid dynamics as well as the satellite data fitting and time series projections of weather, which require different fields of math. I think the hyperspecialization is indeed very unfortunate in preventing this ability to tackle complex problems in aggregate.
I don't think I am a genius, rather much of my career has been appropriately combining different areas of math and doing what seems to be the obvious thing. Often in my pursuits it is baffling to me why no one else has done the obvious thing.
And the technocracy too. I never thought about research independence as being so important but now realize how critical it is, after a year of endless frustration of my PI completely disregarding (and even taking personal offense to) my suggestions to do the obvious thing.
Glad I'm not alone 🙂
On a technical note: I don't think anti-realism has anything to do with it. Science is good if it is useful is a fine antirealist paradigm, and if nanorobots are performing tumor surgeries, I'd rather believe in quantum control engineering
My theory for the cause is more sociological: the rise of market concentration and corporatism brought on a mass supply of "Bullshit Jobs", as per the book for David Graeber. As much of white collar employment, marketing, corporate culture, etc is about blabbering a lot but with zero marginal productivity for the firm, they've trojan horsed the intelligentsia with identity politics and third wave feminism in order to justify their existence. Since we are a chattering class it felt natural to make this alliance. Meanwhile the values of the office drone class have been lowering our standards as far as civic duty and concsciousness of our privilege as a class. This was a serious mistake, the integrity of the intelligentsia is truly in critical danger.
The book was polemical, so my review is in kind (and also I like polemics). It's interesting to hear about interdisciplinary thinking in applied mathematics, thank you for sharing.
My problem with anti-realism is I think it handicaps the progress of scientific theory. To take it to its reductio ad absurdum conclusion, what if we just used neural nets for everything? They would make good predictions, which is the gold standard in anti-realism, but it would be impossible to build a theory from that. I'm sure you've seen this in CFD; I think the CFD models where they try to bake physics like conservation laws into the model itself are very interesting and kind of a halfway-point between a theoretical, realist paradigm and an anti-realist one. I will have more to say on data-driven scientific discovery in the future after I have thought about it more.
One more point in antirealism: I like to think of continental philosophy as poetry for nerds. Just like theologians may debate details of scripture, continental philosophy is just playing around with ideas to see how they taste in an aesthetic sense. Both mass culture and scripture is too boring and basic so an evening of Deleuze wordplay is just a way to goof off.
We can consider SJWs as like new world fundamentalist Christians, at best midwits who take the Frankfurt School way too literally. It's really quite a face palm.
Quantum mechanics is uncomfortable in the sense that it separates reality from measurement. At some point there is something named “measurement” that is the point where the Microsystem behaviour escalates to the macro reality of the observer (and a barrier of randomness exists between us and the underlying reality).
Physicists and philosophers hate quantum measurement but almost for a century all the heroic anti quantum efforts have failed. It is incredibly unfair to say they “embraced” anti realism.
Did you read the Oliver Consa paper I linked in the first paragraph? If quantum physics was ever overturned decades of Nobel prizes would be rendered worthless. Physics has gotten itself into such a degenerate state that it is impossible to make actual progress from within the system. All you're allowed to do is pile on more math to fix the old math; what needs to be done is rebuild the entire structure on actual mechanics (no virtual particles need apply) and then rewrite the math to be a direct expression of the mechanics, rather than taking the math as the ground truth (it isn't, any more so than an image classifier is the ground truth for what a dog is).
Don’t see it as you do. Most accept and parrot The Physics. Quantum/Math is God.
They wallow in its incomprehensibility: like Feynman saying “if you think you understand it that means you don’t”.
They don’t have anything better, and in operational and predictive terms, the theory is impressive. The computers and smartphones we use are based on it…
I do not disagree with anything you’ve said here…