I only have a master in (engineering) physics but working with statistical modeling and AI I’ve come to appreciate the “all models are wrong but some models are useful”-mindset, and I’ve started applying that to physical “laws” as well: I no longer see them as some divine truths waiting to be discovered, but more like models of the world that will always be wrong but sometimes useful.
From that point of view what’s happening in physics today is no surprise, but it is a bit depressing: we’ve probably passed the level of complexity where models are useful and are now adding detail that make them less so. I guess you can see it as a form of overfitting, like when less scrupulous AI researchers use the test set for validation.
I understand that her critizism goes beyond the models that are usefull, but address the problem that there is a whole industry (wasting money and human resources) of inventing and promoting models that do not solve any urgent 'gap' and/or are not even practically testable.
Rejoice in the fact that this is only one specific area of physics, and that physics in general is making faster progress than it ever has before, particularly in quantum optics and quantum fundamentals
Interesting analogy with overfitting, though I would say this is more of an underfitting problem? i.e. we have enough 'training data' to know places where our current model fails (inconsistencies as author puts it, such as dark matter). Therefore our inductive biases must be too strong/incorrect, and relaxing them to increase expressivity would be the typical ML approach here.
The author's point that we must not add complexity to solve "non-problems" is very consistent with the ML analogy, though again this would mainly be to avoid adding too much inductive bias and underfitting as well.
Overfitted models do serve a purpose here though - particle physics has reached a point where you can't build models and theories on direct observation so instead the community is throwing a huge number of falsifiable overfitted models with the expectation that all but one or two will actually be confirmed experimentally. It's certainly a time consuming, expensive, non-ideal approach, but valid. The authors argument seems to be that this approach is too expensive and slow, and it's time to revisit original assumptions to develop a new approach.
I used this quote in the heading of my dissertation on uncertainty in deep learning, and I think its simultaneously true for lots of fields. In ML research we celebrate these enormous models that do everything (GATO, Flamingo, CoCa, etc.) since it feels like we're getting close to something real or universal. I imagine particle physicists feel something similar about expanding the standard model (SUSY(?), quantum gravity),
So in the sense that people get excited about science (see AI lately), I think these models are useful, even if they are pretty mis-specified in the grand scheme of things. I can't speak to Sabine's specific frustrations, but it sounds a little bit like Gary Marcus's concerns about neural networks. In my day-to-day I definitely value a useful model over an exact one.
I rather think that we're past our ability to make useful yet comprehensible (to us) models in physics. The only avenue is to make useful and incomprehensible models. Using machine learning for that is one way. String theory might be on the boundary where it's borderline comprehensible (for a few select people), but at the cost of being only borderline useful (maybe).
Re the first paragraph: It's good you think that because that literally is what we teach and should believe. People who believe otherwise are mistaken. Even so called fundamental physics is studied within an approximation almost always.
The moment you say "photon" you're making an approximation (usually monochromatic and plane wave without sources, in the infrared region, and so on). Physicists who think otherwise simply do not understand what they are doing.
Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her writing, but it looks like much of it is specifically about Twitter interactions: about unhappy, defective people on Twitter (smart physicists, even) drawing other people into their miasma.
These are people using Twitter with good intentions: smart people who login simply intending to have interesting discussions about philosophical topics. Professionals interacting with other professionals, or writing about their field of expertise. They don't seek out to waste time and serotonin on unpleasant social drama, but it finds them anyway.
> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it?
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
It is hard to use twitter and not be drawn into negativity and conflict. I think that is mainly because it not only recommends tweets by people you follow. You quickly end up getting exposed to lots of content other people „liked“. Which more often than not is written by people with several mental illnesses, people in tough financial or social situations or successes like Nature papers, Conference acceptances and so on. There is very little room for „normal content“.
I’ve managed to promote one of my articles successfully there with ~1 million impressions, but otherwise using the platform has been a net negative.
Because spreading negativity is easy, and clearing it up is hard. Clearing it up is hard, but worth it, but Twitter’s structure makes that hard type of work even harder by having character limits and measuring value by popularity.
I don't know why exactly, but Reddit seems to promote negativity much less so. It seems to me that unpleasant comments get buried by the algorithm and the people's votes.
I find that different social networks are more "conductive" for different types feelings or states. I think a lot of it has to do a person's natural negativity bias[0] but is further amplified by the given social network. Some tend towards conducting negativity towards self. Some tend to point the finger at others. I think as we better recognize and map these bizzare (and profitable) incentive structures over time we'll be able to build apps and networks that through various tricks and shortcuts more naturally conduct positivity, love, open mindedness, a desire to unite people, etc.
I suspect in that world you'll still have a lot of networks trend negative but it would be pretty cool to get to a point where there is a choice. Sort of like ad blockers.
I know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way.
Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it.
Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
Twitter's recommendation system doesn't only try to draw your attention. Tweets and their replies form a tree, and the system wants those trees to grow as much as possible.
It turns out the human brain is especially vulnerable to things such as political takes, violence, or simply stuff it perceives as dumb or useless. And there's FOMO as well. Twitter exploits those weaknesses to provoke a response.
At worst it's a simple reply. Maybe a emoji tagging a friend, who then tags another friend, and so on. At best it will be a huge tree of people arguing with each other, a tree that can grow infinitely on paper.
What you see on Twitter also can’t be taken as representative of (say) physicists in general, because only a small minority of physicists is active on Twitter. “Being active on Twitter” likely correlates with a set of personality traits that aren’t representative of the population at large.
It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS. I'm glad sometimes, someone is pointing it out. When i do it myself, i get bombarded with hate. Sigh. even when it's not science, when it's about programming (my profession). And the one thing i learned is: PEOPLE WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND. You can even come with proof and people wont change. They will just ignore u after you've proven it, and keep saying you're wrong. Of course, not everyone is like this, but most of the time it's the "experts" who are like this. Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack. Anyway.. life is life, people are people, we live in a society. Frustrating as it is, just remember to enjoy life from time to time, that's what's truly important.
I think you get bombarded with hate because of the larger problem of extreme polarization on social media. All subtlety is lost, you are associated with the one anti-science group, opposed to the one pro-science group.
When you open a conversation with as sweeping a statement as the one you presented in your first sentence, you realistically only have about a minute or two to persuade the person you are addressing that you will be able to justify it.
People do change their mind, but almost never because of adversarial debate. So, "come with proof" seldom works.
Unfortunately, you (and I) also never change our minds because of adversarial debate. It's easy to tell other people "you should change your mind", but it's hard to think "I should change my mind".
In my opinion :) it should be a badge of pride to be willing (and demonstrably able) to change ones mind about important matters.
> It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS
Well, at least in computer science (ML) it's not what I see. It's very much empirically driven and with a heavy engineering vibe. A little bit more science would often help imho, but papers without strong result are hard to publish, even if they improve our understanding of something. It sometimes feels a bit like a large corporate research lab, which is only a small part of science. We do not only create, we want to understand!
Science and everything else humans do is social and cliquey.
There's nothing that brings a group with some power over others together more than being able to agree that someone outside the group should be sidelined or punished.
That may be too relativist. The outlines of her critiques of particle physics do not stick in the same way, I think, against astronomy and astrophysics (witness questions being answered by Webb), or against computational climate science (witness new ability to quantitatively attribute part of given storm to global warming), or against machine learning research (lots of hype but lots of value like predicting protein structure).
So saying “well everyone can poo-poo everyone else not in their field” is still true of course, but I think her specific critiques of particle physics are biting (and provoke responses) because her experience allows those critiques to be more accurate and more trenchant.
HN guidelines suggest that you should put the title of the page in the submission title, so there is nothing wrong with it from that standpoint. Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.
> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired
You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
FWIW, Hossenfelder sounds a bit like a crackpot contrarian in this article, but her book "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray" is incredibly nuanced and well-argued.
Sabine seems to be promoting a twist on Newton's flaming laser sword, also known as Alder's razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
What cannot be disproven by experiment, is not worth funding
Well, high energy physics does seem to be kind of stuck. The cosmology and big collider crowd don't seem to get much in the way of new results for the amount of effort expended. How are the string theorists doing?
The interesting experimental results in recent years mostly seem to come from very low energy physics. Down around absolute zero, many interesting effects have been demonstrated.
A bit of a meta comment, but a lot of people are calling Hossenfelder "crack potty" or "ranty" and I just don't get that at all reading this post or the many before. She seems upset yes from the abuse she's received, but that seems understandable. I don't understand how people feel she is so combative unless you already disagree with her.
I've never really followed Sabine Hossenfelder but I think I prefer Peter Woit's skeptical takes over hers. It is kind of weird how they both agree more than disagree about the current state of high energy physics, but she seems to see the need to attack him over the details (and where I think Woit gets it more right than she does).
That started off like it was going to have useful suggestions, but then devolved into "me against particle physicists", and became a bit of a self-promotion-cum-pre-defence.
To me it sounds like she is similar to a food/book/movie critic, but instead for particle physics.
Sounds like a good thing. It might shake things up and result in actual progress/change.
(not saying there is not actual progress, but think of it more like swaying some physicists to take a more adventurous road. Who knows where it will lead.)
This is a surprisingly bad headline for an article, giving absolutely no context about what I am supposed to take an interest in as a reader.
This is about a physicist claiming she is being ostracised because she has professional views about particle physics that run counter to the accepted mainstream. She also explains the ideas behind her views (which comes down to "particle physics are no longer useful") and how she is being made the target of particle physicists rage.
Given how particle physics is an area in which expensive machinery is needed (the LHC doesn't come cheap), I wonder how much of this conflict is about the allocation of scientific funding.
As someone who has no skin in the game at all, I find her way of presenting criticism very contrarian argumentative and snarky. She might be completely right, but I can definitely understand the reluctance to hear her out on merit of style.
[+] [-] bjornsing|3 years ago|reply
From that point of view what’s happening in physics today is no surprise, but it is a bit depressing: we’ve probably passed the level of complexity where models are useful and are now adding detail that make them less so. I guess you can see it as a form of overfitting, like when less scrupulous AI researchers use the test set for validation.
[+] [-] fjfaase|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sweezyjeezy|3 years ago|reply
The author's point that we must not add complexity to solve "non-problems" is very consistent with the ML analogy, though again this would mainly be to avoid adding too much inductive bias and underfitting as well.
[+] [-] klik99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deorder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nealeratzlaff|3 years ago|reply
So in the sense that people get excited about science (see AI lately), I think these models are useful, even if they are pretty mis-specified in the grand scheme of things. I can't speak to Sabine's specific frustrations, but it sounds a little bit like Gary Marcus's concerns about neural networks. In my day-to-day I definitely value a useful model over an exact one.
[+] [-] jhrmnn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xialvjun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
The moment you say "photon" you're making an approximation (usually monochromatic and plane wave without sources, in the infrared region, and so on). Physicists who think otherwise simply do not understand what they are doing.
[+] [-] perihelions|3 years ago|reply
These are people using Twitter with good intentions: smart people who login simply intending to have interesting discussions about philosophical topics. Professionals interacting with other professionals, or writing about their field of expertise. They don't seek out to waste time and serotonin on unpleasant social drama, but it finds them anyway.
[+] [-] ageitgey|3 years ago|reply
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
[+] [-] orbifold|3 years ago|reply
I’ve managed to promote one of my articles successfully there with ~1 million impressions, but otherwise using the platform has been a net negative.
[+] [-] mw888|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warpech|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f0e4c2f7|3 years ago|reply
I suspect in that world you'll still have a lot of networks trend negative but it would be pretty cool to get to a point where there is a choice. Sort of like ad blockers.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it.
Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
[+] [-] pasquinelli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl95|3 years ago|reply
It turns out the human brain is especially vulnerable to things such as political takes, violence, or simply stuff it perceives as dumb or useless. And there's FOMO as well. Twitter exploits those weaknesses to provoke a response.
At worst it's a simple reply. Maybe a emoji tagging a friend, who then tags another friend, and so on. At best it will be a huge tree of people arguing with each other, a tree that can grow infinitely on paper.
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|3 years ago|reply
Fast forward to today and we have a whole culture built around it, even though the limit is long gone.
[+] [-] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2021|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ki_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wussboy|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, you (and I) also never change our minds because of adversarial debate. It's easy to tell other people "you should change your mind", but it's hard to think "I should change my mind".
In my opinion :) it should be a badge of pride to be willing (and demonstrably able) to change ones mind about important matters.
[+] [-] sva_|3 years ago|reply
In science it's also their grant funding and reputation, that is at stake.
[+] [-] LeanderK|3 years ago|reply
Well, at least in computer science (ML) it's not what I see. It's very much empirically driven and with a heavy engineering vibe. A little bit more science would often help imho, but papers without strong result are hard to publish, even if they improve our understanding of something. It sometimes feels a bit like a large corporate research lab, which is only a small part of science. We do not only create, we want to understand!
[+] [-] outsomnia|3 years ago|reply
There's nothing that brings a group with some power over others together more than being able to agree that someone outside the group should be sidelined or punished.
[+] [-] an1sotropy|3 years ago|reply
So saying “well everyone can poo-poo everyone else not in their field” is still true of course, but I think her specific critiques of particle physics are biting (and provoke responses) because her experience allows those critiques to be more accurate and more trenchant.
[+] [-] nraynaud|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] largbae|3 years ago|reply
None of the above information is in the blogpost or HN post title, which is annoying.
[+] [-] sva_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conorcleary|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|3 years ago|reply
You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
[+] [-] stdbrouw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
The interesting experimental results in recent years mostly seem to come from very low energy physics. Down around absolute zero, many interesting effects have been demonstrated.
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13070
I've never really followed Sabine Hossenfelder but I think I prefer Peter Woit's skeptical takes over hers. It is kind of weird how they both agree more than disagree about the current state of high energy physics, but she seems to see the need to attack him over the details (and where I think Woit gets it more right than she does).
[+] [-] ajdegol|3 years ago|reply
I'd like to hear more about these suggestions.
[+] [-] nomercy400|3 years ago|reply
Sounds like a good thing. It might shake things up and result in actual progress/change.
(not saying there is not actual progress, but think of it more like swaying some physicists to take a more adventurous road. Who knows where it will lead.)
[+] [-] d--b|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31651086
[+] [-] klik99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DocTomoe|3 years ago|reply
This is about a physicist claiming she is being ostracised because she has professional views about particle physics that run counter to the accepted mainstream. She also explains the ideas behind her views (which comes down to "particle physics are no longer useful") and how she is being made the target of particle physicists rage.
Given how particle physics is an area in which expensive machinery is needed (the LHC doesn't come cheap), I wonder how much of this conflict is about the allocation of scientific funding.
[+] [-] dataflow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] shmde|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mola|3 years ago|reply