Sabine Hossenfelder: Difference between revisions
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|content=What we need is a multi-decade [[Labor Shortages|âlabor shortageâ]] in STEM that brings technical employers howling in pain about employee wage demands. Family demands. Maternal demands. | |||
The answer is simple: in STEM the wrong people are in pain. It should be our beloved administrators & employers. | |||
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|content=This is the elephant in the lab. | |||
A secret reason (which we collected anonymously multiple times at NBER/ASCB) for delaying tenure decisions beyond healthy fertility is departmental fear of committing to top women in research for fear they will find motherhood more fulfilling. | |||
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|content=Nearly half of US female scientists leave full-time science after first child | |||
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|content=You can blame the Principal Investigators who told us this (both male & female). You can blame the universities. You can blame the messenger. But we need to talk about getting STEM moms a LOT more money for help in the house & make more allowances for staying home for 5-10 years. | |||
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|content=And yes, Dads can be more present. But before you go too far down that road, consider that some of the STEM women we spoke to said that they would have WANTED to be at home, particularly with little children (<7) and what they really wanted was a way back to research afterwards. | |||
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Revision as of 07:13, 2 January 2026
2019
Iâve been talking about unmeetable âEmbedded Growth Obligationsâ or E.G.O.s as the reason why all our expert communities are under unbearable pressure to distort across our institutions. The physics community is *very* trustworthy on the experiment-theory level. Yet even here:
Particle physicists surprised to find I am not their cheer-leader
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/02/particle-physicists-surprised-to-find-i.html?spref=tw
This allows us to use Fundamental Physics as a reference for deception.
These folks are our BEST. They arenât lying about their experiments. They arenât lying about agreement w theory. They arenât wrong about expecting another accelerator imho.
Yet the EGOs make even them fib.
I may disagree with @skdh on whether we should build another multi-billion dollar accelerator. But she is exactly correct that there is no longer any new physics beyond the Standard Model expected to be found. She is telling truths above her pay-grade in the eyes of our leaders.
This is why we need to rescue our experts & institutions. We need to stop asking them to lie to us about their needs for growth. If even high energy physics canât escape its inability to meet growth expectations, then all expert communities are suspect.
These are our very best.
This is the elephant in the lab.
A secret reason (which we collected anonymously multiple times at NBER/ASCB) for delaying tenure decisions beyond healthy fertility is departmental fear of committing to top women in research for fear they will find motherhood more fulfilling.
Nearly half of US female scientists leave full-time science after first child
You can blame the Principal Investigators who told us this (both male & female). You can blame the universities. You can blame the messenger. But we need to talk about getting STEM moms a LOT more money for help in the house & make more allowances for staying home for 5-10 years.
And yes, Dads can be more present. But before you go too far down that road, consider that some of the STEM women we spoke to said that they would have WANTED to be at home, particularly with little children (<7) and what they really wanted was a way back to research afterwards.
What we need is a multi-decade âlabor shortageâ in STEM that brings technical employers howling in pain about employee wage demands. Family demands. Maternal demands. The answer is simple: in STEM the wrong people are in pain. It should be our beloved administrators & employers.
1/ Sabine Hossenfelder has done an impressive job collecting and rebutting the arguments for building a new particle accelerator. I find them partially convincing. Let me give the big reasons that no one ever mentions as they are not in her list.
Nonsense arguments for building a bigger particle collider that I am tired of hearing (The Ultimate Collection)
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html
2/
I) The physics community gave us both the hydrogen bomb and the Einsteinian speed limit. Humans who acquire the Bomb never lose the ability to make them and they only get cheaper with technology. Further, the speed limit of 'c' traps us on three rocks: Earth, Moon and Mars.
3/
The combination of these twin gifts likely doom humanity over the long run unless we can, somehow, get around the speed of light 'c'. For that we will need to make physics a *top* priority unless we want to pretend we are going to become wise, colonize Titan, etc..etc..
4/
II) Theoretical physics practically created the modern economy:
Chemistry
Semiconductors/Transistors
World Wide Web
Electrification
Wireless
Nuclear Power/Weapons
Molecular Biology
These are not simply taxpayer dollars. They began as physics dollars. We are being absurd.
End/
III) We are at the end of this thread...but also at the end of what may be the last chapter of physics. The three main equations (Dirac, Einstein, Yang Mills) are provably, in some sense, the best possible. No one would walk out just before learning the end of our story.
I) "We gotta get FTL"
II) "Might be unexpected bonuses"
III) *appeals to emotion*
I) Not exactly FTL...but that is fair from what I wrote. I was using shorthand. Guilty.
II) No. We have obligations to this community. We don't allow them to fully participate so they have economic rights that we are abusing. This is a foreign idea to most.
III) No: Meaning.
Curious... I just reviewed the 'Dirac Sea' issue last night.
@EricRWeinstein , could you 'lightly' outline the 'provably the best possible' claim? w/o definitions for dark matter/ energy/ fluid, etc. how can we be near the end of the 'story'? thx
Briefly: A) Dirac operator actually generates K-theory.
B) Einstein theory from Hilbert Lagrangian is simplest possible Lagrangian in pseudo-riemannian geometry (just scalar curvature).
C) YangMills Lagrangian simplest in Ehresmannian geometry (just norm square of curvature).
You should answer his call because he clearly doesnât have my number. Heâs a few digits off.
We oddly now live in a Hossenfelder era of Theoretical physics. Sabine is almost distinguished by a near total unwillingness/inability to sit quietly through the hype machines in Theoretical physics that feed the demands of lay people, journalists & physicists. But is she right?
In my new video, I explain why I am not a fan of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
My take is that she is usually right. Not only that, many in the community rail against her when *they* know she is making sense.
But where sheâs wrong could be very significant. I would love to *try* to defend the role of beauty in physics (tarnished by string theory) from her.
That said, I think sheâs much harder to beat as she gains confidence in her ability to stand for science. Itâs an impressive act of conscience & bravery to go it alone like this, and I wish the physics community saw it for what it is. I may disagree at times, but my hat is off.
2022
Keep your mouth shut or lose job security.
Sometimes @skdh drives me nuts. Usually, itâs in a good way. Can no one with money or power fix this situation? No? Of course not. You want science slaves. Howâs that working in virology?
Somebody get our scientists wealth & freedom.
Of course the vast majority of people who work in the foundations of physics want me to stop pointing out they are working on pseudoscience. Of course I know that this means I will never get a permanent position.
I spent a lot of time in beautiful homes and second homes of older research scientists as a grad student.
We should be embarrassed how far into precariousness we pushed Generation X & Millennials. Our entire economy is now bet on bargain science provided way below market.#Enough
Instantly stop all progress in the worldâs most successful scientific community using only two words inducing permanent paralytic failure that cannot be questioned.
Iâll go first: âQuantum Gravityâ
you're confusing the symptom with the disease
Hi Sabine!
I donât follow your statement here. How am I confused?
I just meant the cause of the problem is that theoretical physicists don't understand the responsibility they carry when experimental tests take longer and longer. That they got stuck on (a particular idea of) quantum gravity is the effect, but not the cause.
Hmm. As you know Iâm historically a big supporter of your courage & insight as critic. Perhaps you know something here that I do not as a nonphysicist. Open to that.
But I disagree. The Q-Gravity Mass Delusion is quite different in character. It is highly specific in its effect.
It is tied to all sorts of weirdness involving top physics and math people, bizarre funders, forgotten research institutes, aerospace companies, post Manhattan Project government secrecy, the golden age of General Relativity andâŚwords fail meâŚoutright quackery.
GUTs are a good test case. I believe you are in error going after Beauty when it comes to Grand Unified Theory. Your critique to Neil Degrasse Tyson recently applied to Georgi and Glashow Basic SU(5)âŚbut not to Pati-Salaam SU(4) x SU(2) x SU(2) for example.
I caution that you not fall into the trap of using Beauty as critique.
The abuse of Beauty in String Theory and Quantum Gravity more generally is valid as a target.
Critiquing the use of beauty, by contrast is a suicide mission. And I donât want to see you on it. As a friend.
Beauty *is* a light in the darkness as experiment becomes less accessible. Perhaps our best one.
But not all lights in the darkness are natural daylight leading to the exits from Platoâs cave.
2023
Now I feel completely alone.
I want our wanting out of this story. I have a huge dog in this fight. I spend every day fighting my own human desire for GU to be proven correct.
I believe this is how String Theorists stopped being scientists.
I just want our data & the physics.
If biological aliens were here from others star systems in crafts that defy the current physics of the standard model and, more importantly, general relativity, I would be one of the few people who would have a guess on day one as to how they must have gotten here. Itâs tempting.
I donât think biological interstellar alien visitors using GR and the SM make much sense. So I try to have a war *inside* my own mind as to what is true. I have a genuine âNeed to Knowâ as to whether this is BS NatSec space opera disinformation theater. Because to me, it is data.
What just happened isnât data. Itâs that a sober individual just pushed one of the many longstanding highly conserved NHI narratives collected from *many* diverse sober NatSec informants over the sworn testimony line. And it gets a LOT crazier from here. But itâs not science yet.
As Iâve been saying, there is so much deliberate NatSec BS out here that our own scientists are being propagandized. Weâre drilling holes in our own scientistsâ lifeboat. Last time we saw this it was virologists/immunologists/epidemiologists being gaslit. Now itâs physicists.
Let me be very careful in what I am about to say. We have at least the appearance and optics of scientific self-sabotage. And wanting things to be true is how science dies.
I fight like hell to promote my theory. But Iâd sign on to another to know the truth if I was wrong.
We may be looking at the birth of a new UFO religion. Or a moment of contact. Or a long running Disinformation campaign. Etc.
To go beyond GR, letâs be scientists & get NatSec out of our data first. Where is our data pruned of space opera disinformation and cultic religiosity?
What I want to know:
Why was the Mansfield Amendment passed?
Why did NSF fake a labor shortage in our MARKET economy destroying American STEM labor markets?
What stopped the Golden Age Of General Relativity?
Why was the SSC really cancelled?
StringTheory & STAGNATION: WTF?
What the hell was the 1957 Behnson funded UNC Chapel Hill conference actually about?
Why are we not stopping to QUESTION quantum gravity after 70 years of public *FAILURE* inspired by Babson-Behnson patronage of RIAS, the Institute of Field Physics and the precursor to Lockheed?
This is the 50th year of stagnation in the Standard Model Lagrangian. It is AS IF we are deliberately trying to forget how to do actual physics. Everyone who has succeeded in Particle Theory in standard terms is now over 70. This is insane. In 25 years there will be no one left.
Why are we not admitting that quantum gravity is killing physics and is the public respectable face of 1950s anti-gravity mania that lives on to murder all new theories in their cradle?
Quantum Gravity is fake and works to stop actual physics.
There. I said it. Now letâs talk.
If you want to know whether there are biological interstellar visitors here observing us, the short answer is âAlmost *certainly* not if they are using our current stagnant non-progressing theories of physics.â
Letâs finally get serious about this whacky subject? Thanks. đ
I swear I didn't write my tweet to make you feel alone and I'm genuinely sorry if that was the result. That said, I think it's better to acknowledge one's hopes and desires than to pretend they don't exist and thereby overestimate one's own rationality.
@skdh I acknowledge my desires as you see from what I wrote. But a stagnant community always wants outcomes. It wants SUSY. Or Strings. Or some g-2 muon anomaly. Etc.
I want too. But what I want is mostly just a desire to get the BS out of physics so we can get back to succeeding.
2024
After seeing my friend @skdh say what is wrong with theoretical physics, I asked her what would theoretical physics done right look like. Specifically, which general approaches and which theorists she was most excited about.
Her answer is in the quote tweet.
The question was not a gotcha question so I will try to answer it myself below.
I will say that I find her answer at turns both expected and shocking. There is very little going on, but there is not nothing. And if she is not excited by anything, thatâs an amazing state of affairs.
Here is my response to the same question below. Which many may not expect or accept.
Eric, I am still saying the same thing I said in "Lost in Math" because the situation is still the same.
Q1: Not sure whether you are asking for strategies or topics. For what strategies are concerned: necessity, consistency, phenomenology. For what topics are concerned: Quantum measurements, quantum gravity, dark matter. So yes, dark matter... but don't invent unnecessary details, hence my misgiving about the figure. The entire figure is basically screaming that theorists are inventing loads of unnecessarily contrived and useless theories.
Q2: can't think of anyone, sorry
A) The three most promising lines of attack in fundamental physics. This is likely to confuse people who think in terms of âthe strong communityâ, âthe amplitudes programâ, âthe LQG communityâ. These are the âTeam Sportsâ branches of attack. And team players really only recognize other teams which is a MASSIVE bias. That is why String Theorists view Loop Quantum Gravity as their hand chosen rigal. It is a team that they believe doesnât challenge them; a partner to dunk on if you will.
For my money, the true rivals are not teams. They are NOT communities.
I). Spinorial/Clifford/Exceptional physics. This is almost never broken out.
The idea here is that many of us believe that there is way more information in Spinorial physics of the particle spectrum of the Standard Model than has been used. In particular the D5 Dynkin diagram GUT is the missed off-ramp.
In this generalized setting, Peter Woit of @notevenwrong, Roger Penrose, Myself, Garrett Lisi, and the exceptional algebra researchers focused on extending the octonionic tradition of the Turkish school are all clustered. In this school, almost everyone will be largely *wrong* in my opinion. But the right answer is most likely to come from this branch IMO.
II) Classical Differential Geometric Field Theory. It is amazing to me how over-focused we seem on the quantum. The star of the show is not now, and never was the quantum.
Let me put it in provocative terms: Classical Physics is where the real action has always been. Pun intended.
The quantum is real. Itâs mysterious. Itâs mind blowing. And as a result it provides jobs and something to talk about when the classical theory is stagnant. But the dream of quantum theories that are born quantum never materialized. We still quantize classical theories, for all our posturing about needing to take classical limits of quantum theories.
Witten in particular popularized the notion that the incompatiblity between General Relativity and the Standard Model is a Classical vs Quantum problem. Heâs wrong.
The Classical GR theory is already incompatible with the Classical Standard Model. The incompatibility is already classical: NOT Quantum.
The G_{mu, nu} operator concept of Einstein (and Grossman) is NOT gauge compatible. But the Standard Model IS a gauge theory. We have wasted 40 years in my opinion pretending that the GR vs SM split is a call to quantize gravity. We got there by pretended that GR is a kind of gauge theory which it obviously isnât. And we pretend that you donât quantize classical theories but take classical limits of quantum theories. Who this is supposed to fool is beyond me. The weak? The insecure? The egoic?
Once you have the classical arena (the manifolds) the field content (the bundles, groups and representations) and the action, the game is largely already determined theoretically when you are quantizing a classical theory. The quantum theory is used to figure out what its real world consequences are. The world is quantum after all.
So why does the Classical theory get sent to a diminished role? This is going to be brutal: itâs the political economy of Physics. Itâs because the number of people who have contributed to the Lagrangians is tiny. Einstein/Grossman, Maxwell/Yang and Dirac tower over our theories. Thatâs spin 2, spin 1 and spin 1/2 right there. The Higgs sector pulls in Glashow, Englert, Weinberg, etc. But I believe this is temporary and will be absorbed back into the other sectors before too long. It is the ungainly sector after all that still feels contrived. Real, but contrived.
And I believe that a lot of the toy work in low dimensions will turn out to be closer to GR than people imagine. Right now it looks closer to the Standard Model due to history.
III) Non spacetime SUSY.
I believe the reason we can neither find Supersymmetry nor get rid of it is that we misinstantiated it. There are no Squarks or Gluinos. Right idea, wrong off-ramp. This goes back to Salam and Strathdee.
Many of you will be shocked by my IV. Which is perhaps why I asked for threeâŚ
IV) I would choose String Theory or the Amplitudes / Double Copy approach.
At least the String people are energized by the fact that the math is real even when the physics is fake. And at least the double copy people have a mystery connecting GR to the SM.
B) As to who I find interesting. Anyone going it alone to follow a hunch, but who knows what GR and the SM are. Mavericks, not cranks.
Woit, Lisi, Deutsche, Wolfram, myself and Barbour are all outside of purely traditional structures. Oppenheim and others are in such structures but still mavericks. I wish Sabine had a theory that I knew of. But I am not aware of one.
The observation I would make is that being a professor is a double edged sword. Outside the Professorate it is almost impossible to function from isolation and deprivation. Inside, you get captured by a constant set of pressures to conform to things you know are sapping your vitality. And you go into angry denial âI do whatever I want as a professor! I just happen to believe in this large program which is known not to work but gives me grants and summer stipend.â
Right now, I would bring those mavericks together with the most open of the professorate and steelman/catalog where those individual programs are in their trajectories. Duh.
There are really fewer than 10 of them. This is absolutely obvious. It is cheap and would take almost no resources. It does not happen simply for reasons of political economy. There is no other reason not to do it.
As for who excites me most (myself excluded):
Nima Arkani Hamed
Frank Wilczek
Peter Woit
John Baez
Ed Witten
Luis Alvarez Gaume
Dan Freed
Jose Figueroa OâFarril
And two others I will leave nameless for a top 10.
âââ
So that is my take. It wasnât a gotcha.
If all we can do is bemoan the state of physics, we need to change our focus.
Yes I expect to be savaged. For some reason, saying anything positive creates anger. Bring it.
Thanks for your time. As always. đ
And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics...
âAnything but Physicsâ has tremendous predictive power.
We can discuss Spin Foam.
Or Boltzmann Brains.
Or 3D Chern-Simons.
Or Strings.
Or Alien warp drives.
Or Quantum computing.
Or Calabi-Yau manifolds.
Or Machine Learning.
Or Tenure/PeerReview/Grants.
Etc Etc
But not physics.
2025
Many of you are asking me to comment on this video.
I was trying very hard not to do so.
@skdh has not been treated properly by the physics community in my opinion. We are generally in agreement and I recommend her.
She is now bigger by herself than all of @bgreeneâs World Science Festival. And I believe that she has to think through these comments at her new scale.
Bottom Line: @skdh is far more in the right than her critics will acknowledge. But she is now at a new scale and these remarks are misleading in my opinion.
Fundamental Physics is, to me, what Mars and Rockets are to @elonmusk: manâs only hope for long term survival.
My belief is that @skdh is now so negative based on her egregious treatment at the hands of her community that her righteous position is actually endangering physics itself in the era of @DOGE.
I would consider debating her as a friend to give a more positive view.
Her and my tormentors in physics are our enemies basically because they are precarious. And precarious scientists are dangerous. Should we starve them or pay them?
@skdh and I agree that there are a lot of shitty physics folks behaving badly. Sabine is closer to saying cut off the bad scientists. I am closer to saying âWe have a Fauci problem in physics. Get rid of the means by which our âFaucisâ control us by making their colleagues precarious. Wealth is the solution to the ethics crisis in physics. The physics community that brought you the wealth of the modern world cannot be controlled by our Fauciâs. Honor the community by freeing them from economic tyranny and the problem gets solved in a positive manner.â
I despise the cowardly enemies of science, and of Sabine. In my opinion they are bullies and cowards really only because they were wrongly made precarious.
We desperately need our physicists. Free them. Pay them. Free them from our Fauciâs.
I would be happy to debate Sabine (and @bgreene, @seanmcarroll, @michiokaku and others) on this. Itâs literally life and death to me in the long term [See my pinned tweet.] and Sabine is wildly too negative here. Happy to defend this.
đ
I want to read you an email that I was asked to keep confidential because I think it explains some of my worries about academia.
People ask me how you can tell whether scientific experts are leveling with them if the lay public doesnât understand deep science.
Here an interviewer asks a leading String Theorist how things are going after 25 years since popularizing String theory in a well received book:
If Brian Greene publicly said he doesn't believe in string theory anymore it'd be the end of the field. He'd ruin the lives of thousands of people. Even if it was what he thinks, I strongly doubt he'd ever admit it.
The issue isnât String Theory which has obviously failed in the terms it set for itself.
The issue is the âString Theory is the only game in townâ which appears designed to destroy fundamental physics itself. If you have spent 40 years bragging and failing, wouldnât you at least ask âDoesnât anyone have any other ideas?â before finally going over the edge of the cliff?
*Absolutely* not. And that tells you that string theory isnât a theory. Itâs some kind of a suicide pact. Better that the field die than we ask âWhat if the string theorists were always wrong including pronouncements about quantum gravity and against other theorists? What if âthe only game in townâ was always an obviously totally unethical anti-scientific move to destroy and poison the market place of ideas?â
cc: @bgreene.
Yes, but that wasn't my point. My point is that Brian is a highly visible string spokesperson, I'd say second after Witten, but Witten doesn't talk much. If Brian were to renounce string theory, he'd be responsible for killing the careers of thousands of people, and he must know that. I am just saying I think it's unlikely he would do it, even if he had stopped believing it makes sense, and you need to factor this in when evaluating what he says.
I took your point. For some reason my point doesnât seem to get through.
I agree with you. He *could* make a strong statement to admit defeat. There are clear reasons not to do this from the ST perspective. It is thus unlikely.
My point was that he could do something *vastly* less expensive. And the fact that Susskind, Witten, Greene, etc wonât do even that tells us that this isnât about string theory. Itâs about no other theories or theorist being worth considering. Itâs abuse of the referee role.
Somehow, the String Theorists set themselves up as a football team that is also the *sole* source of game referees.
So even when their team loses on the field, they still win by referees decision that they are the only real team competing. Everyone else focuses on whether they have background independence, particle predictions or a renormalizable spin 2 quantization. That is a total red herring.
Sabine: Theoretical physics isnât this dumb or anti-scientific. Itâs impossible. âThe only game in townâ campaign is not a string theoretic idea. It is totally foreign to science.
Something separate doesnât want rival theories side by side. In a science we would all be expected to listen to each other. This is what my first memories of physics looked like 1983-1988. There were different ideas. Nothing like this.
The defining feature of String Theory is that it would rather fundamental physics die than that String Theory face healthy adult rivals that were not maimed, crippled, stolen, or murdered in their cribs.
I'm going to explain how profound levels of dissent in physics are driven out of the community.
Q: "Why avoid the arXiv? That isn't peer reviewed or even moderated! Anyone can put anything on it!"
A: "Unmoderated?? The old P. Ginsparg Los Alamos National Labs server? Who knew!"
No researcher can afford to lose access to the arXiv. And no one talking openly about the actual Quantum Gravity mass delusion can have access to the journals & arXIv.
You cannot challenge the QG narrative from the inside; its achievement is that it finally made physics *safe*.
[The field of fundamental physics stagnates in â73 when our Lagrangians stop changing.]
I understand your frustration, but I think it's somewhat misdirected. The arXiv needs some sort of screening. But they have little money and not enough people. I think they're trying to do the best they can.
@skdh I assume we are both familiar with how some of our mutual Physics/Math PhD colleagues have been treated at arXiv for being deeply off the Quantum Gravity narrative? I think they could stop treating those people differently from everyone else.
Itâs not that String Theorists ended up forgetting details of the physical world, so much as they ended up resenting the physical world for existing.
Imagine being lectured on how physics works by these people:
âI donât give a damn about the Standard Model.â
âThe Standard Model is âUgly as Sinâ.â
âI havenât had a lepton or hadron enter any work Iâve done in 25 years.â
âWe all know Supersymmetry is needed to make our best models work. When nature decided not to provide superpartners at the LHC we retaliated and snubbed her right back by ignoring her from then on.â
âItâs okay that you donât get all the magnificent progress made in quantum gravity and theoretical physics since Juan [Maldacena]. Itâs not for everyone. It requires a powerful mind and is very subtle if you are still focused on the physical world.â
âOutsiders canât get that it is the physical world that held physics back. Luckily we solved that, but it is awkward to talk about this with people outside quantum gravity.â
âRight. I just donât care about the physical world. Sorry.â
âWe have to admit the truth. String Theory with a capital S failed as physics. Period. Which is why we have to go back and re-examine everythingâŚAnd then rebuild String Theory again in light of what we learned.â
ââ-
These people are lecturing others about what science is. As professors. As journal editors. As prize recipients. As members of the National Academy.
This is a mass delusion Sabine. Or a cover story. I think I donât have a third option. What is clear is that the above is 100% anti-science. It is trying to stop science from happening in public physics. It is a community mass delusion threatened not only by science, but now by the PHYSICAL WORLD itself.
Am I the only person on earth experiencing this at this level?? This is something you learn by putting up a real alternative focused on the real world of 3 generations of chiral matter. The above is what is unlocked when there are alternatives presented.
This isnât about funding anymore Sabine. Itâs not about predictive power. Itâs not about being seduced by beautiful mathematics.
Itâs about physicts stopping physics in physics departments by resenting and spurning the physical world for failing THEM. And then lecturing us on what science is when they have not a clue how science works. At all.
I would argue that denying a genetic basis of skin colour is on a different level than forgetting the details of the standard model, but same energy I guess.
I have certainly met people with this attitude but I've found that to be quite rare.
The mass delusion that still persists in the foundations of physics is the idea that just guessing some maths amounts to making a scientific "prediction". It's a major methodological problem that physicists are evidently unwilling to solve, even though I am perfectly sure that most of them know very well what I am talking about. And the major reason for this is that many of them quite literally live from inventing nonsense theories and publishing them. They haven't learned anything else.
That said, it's somewhat tangential for the point I was trying to make in the comment that you quote. I just meant that the basics of genetics are middle school knowledge and even leaving that aside, one doesn't need a PhD to notice that skin colour, like many other physical features, is highly heritable. In contrast, I don't expect people to know the symmetry groups of the standard model.
I think we have different experiences.
The first line of defense is âOf course if anyone had any more promising ideas on how to go beyond the Standard Model, weâd all work on thatâŚâ