Steelmanning
The steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the exact opposite of the straw man argument. The idea is to find the best form of the opponent's argument to test opposing opinions.
Steel-manning on The Basics Guide
On X[edit]
2016[edit]
I respect followers who object. But apart from low points (Dresden, mistreatment of loyal J-Americans, etc), I'm *proud* of US win in WWII.
@70sBachchan Thanks for bringing it up. I really appreciate that. I have thought about this but don't know how I feel. I hate even good war.
@70sBachchan I wish the Japanese weren't quite so tough and hard core. I respect them as warriors but it made unconditional surrender tough.
@70sBachchan How funny. I was just going to steelmann your point with the McCullum (sic?) memo and the embargoes.
2017[edit]
@SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson What was the hoped for outcome? I know of no way of squaring JPB's truth with mathematical truth for example.
@SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson sorry JBP. I meant 'JBP' not 'JPB'.
@RandoDave @SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson
I see.
Checked out T4 bacteriophage capsids or the fractional spin of electrons?
But I digress.
@ChaosRapist @SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson
Students who don't do well on exams always say that.
@ChaosRapist @SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson I'm aware & just being flip. Sorry to zing, but I confess to not having the best Pepe reactions.
@ChaosRapist @SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson And yes, I'm aware that there is no shortage of smart Pepe people. It's just a game I don't get.
@ChaosRapist @SamHarrisOrg @jordanbpeterson
When you're done with Pepe, I'll find some energy.
@ChaosRapist I looked at your post-Pepe feed. "Retard", "Nazi babies", pentagrams, physical fighting challenges, Yet smart.Don't love combo.
@ChaosRapist I'll say a few brief things and then check out. My objection is predicated on the richness of the objects in standard math/phys
@ChaosRapist Freudenthal-Tits, monster group, Spinor reps, Atiyah Singer, Bott periodicity. These are all beyond human ability to create.
@ChaosRapist Further my theory of Geometric Unity suggests an inevitable universe that bootstraps itself into emergent existence from nothin
@ChaosRapist So an inevitable emergently rich physical and mathematical universe beyond human ingenuity is my substrate and starting point.
@ChaosRapist That said, this is not a formal refutation of a human centered universe. It is a refutation based on taste and plausibility.
@ChaosRapist I can steelman intuitionistic arguments to make them unkillable at a corresponding cost of implausibility. That kills interest.
@ChaosRapist But if you want to make a human centered argument for non Abelian Lie groups and Quantum field theory I wish you the best. Ciao
The official @bigthink tweet on the importance of steelmanning & sand boxing in the service of deeper empathy and/or effective combat. https://t.co/sJfPbTV3KM
It's important to understand this appeal & be able to:
1. Run it in emulation.
2. Steelman it yet further.
3. Only then point out its flaws. https://t.co/GhxE3AFZqs
@rockwell_n2 @ChrispLMarshall One of the main errors. But not the only one.
Just listened to my friend @SamHarrisOrg w/ @RadioFreeTom.
I was unexpectedly bewildered. Given the right forum, it would be an honor & privilege to steelman the substantive case against experts & their institutions into coastal-friendly PhD-style expert terminology & language. https://t.co/qVf4udNnco
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg First of all, nice to meet you Tom.
I’m concerned that many of those rejecting the highly trained, experienced & credentialed are trying to send a cogent & reasonable message that can be strawmanned because they don’t speak the language of the academy. I think we can translate.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg 1/ Great. It sounds like we agree on a lot. Let’s agree we shouldn’t attack real expertise or fetishize the simple wisdom of laypeople in expert matters. What I think is happening is that lay people are catching on that they are being priced out of the market for expert loyalty.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg 2/ I think most lay people believe in experts...and the new words for expert are personal, private, etc. They believe experts are now private doctors. Personal chefs. Private pilots. Private police and fire depts. So there’s awareness, but no loss of confidence in experts.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg 3/ This then leads to the public experts & intellectuals. Here laypeople are increasingly conscious of real games played in back rooms & razzledazzle at the podium. This is the realm of the Esoteric/Exoteric experts w public theories for the out-group & real ones for insiders.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg 5/ If I take what I saw as the big three trust breakers in the 2016 election:
I) Free Trade
II) immigration
III) Terror
Each was defended by experts to the public by a suite of out and out lies that were maddeningly self evident. As if outsiders and morons were the same thing.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg 6/ In all three cases there was essentially a reality embargo to the public by expert cartels. Krugman called the case for freer trade an elite scam. The Immigration act of 1990 *actually* involved an expert conspiracy to promote a fictitious “STEM shortage” to lower tech wages.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg /End And in the case of terror, it was so weird that politicians would look for any motive except *religion* for some reason that must be from some policy. The level of fiction given to the public was beyond insulting. It was outright derision & contempt. And the derided saw it.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Okay. I'm claiming that if we put the adjective 'private' in front of nouns associated w expertise (physician --> private physician, school --> private school, etc.) you'll find lay people believing it represents real expertise & thus an unfair advantage. They believe in experts.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg What they intuitively don't believe in as much are their experts: ones they pay for/elect (H&R Bloch, their HMO, their senator etc..) or the ones provided for them (news analysts, columnists, public intellectuals). And this distrust is about expert loyalty, not expertise itself.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Nah. It’s about institutional betrayal. Nobody resents Elon Musk or Tony Stark for wealth. The poor want experts.
And I’m just looking to you & Sam as my fellow experts to help me try to stop those betrayed from sending a wrecking-ball through the infrastructure of our world.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Oh cool. “Institutional Betrayal” is an academic theory for trauma differentiation of @jjforegon. You in particular should find it interesting I think. People betrayed by institutions with mandates to care for them behave differently re trauma.
Helps to explain a lot in 2008-17.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Also, the public that is HIGH agency is looking for alternate non-institutional experts: @nntaleb @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @SamHarrisOrg @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker etc....
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Hi Nassim, With 66 dyadic relationships between 12 individuals there was zero implied pairwise mutual endorsement or respect implied. I’m certainly happy to make that explicit here for the record if that wasn’t clear.
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Will read. Thanks!
2018[edit]
Thanks for asking Alex. “Welfare Queens in White Lab Coats” is an oft repeated epithet since the Reagan-Bush era in anti-tax circles. Certainly Prof Rustum Roy said it. RR’s NSF Director boosted it. But I‘m referring to its amplification by free marketeers who ignore mkt failure. https://t.co/rj4YDMmpTg
As for boosts in Scientific funding, I’m not saying all US Republicans are anti-science funding. On the contrary. Many see it as an extension of security funding or competitiveness. But what drives many scientists away is an unwillingness to be careful about public goods & taxes.
@AlexBerezow Well, given that you hadn’t yet heard the expression before I’m thinking you may want to look at the history before retooling the implicit accusation that this was nothing. Erich Bloch wasn’t a nut. Nor was Roy.
[You can steelman your argument by pointing out Proxmire as a Dem.]
@AlexBerezow I’m sorry! I’m only aware of your book on the anti-scientific left (which is a huge problem as well), but not any work on the “anti-scientific” right. What do you write about Erich Bloch? I’m curious because I also covered him in my work. Can’t wait to discuss.
@joeseybert I may be wrong too! Happy to learn.
@AlexBerezow Likely an astute call; it sounds mostly correct. I would bet you are also younger. I’m further convinced the recent strengthening of the anti-science movement on the political Left may weirdly be influencing a shift on the political right.
2019[edit]
Two contradictory ideas are held by many:
I) The ‘Left’ has moved on from liberalism to a post-enlightenment relativist felt-experience structural-oppression based intersectional identitarianism. Stop living in a dream past & deal w/ it.
II) Stop strawmanning the Left as in I).
Looking forward to hearing more from @Quillette & @safeortrue on this. I’m sure they are trying to say something important, and the apparent contradiction is so stark that it could lead to a breakthrough.
Many are asking how to interpret @clairlemon’s new take.
I have no clue.
@torinmccabe So, that’s what I used to think. I tried steelmanning these ideas and the people who hold these ideas got angry. Like Livid-angry.
Literally people say things to me like “Don’t try to make us sound like reason and civility are our gods. That’s *your* white patriarchal bullshit.”
@EugeneOSulliva8 @Quillette @safeortrue @clairlemon I tried. Maybe, you’ll give it a shot? The problem is that ‘Steelmanning’ is about reason and civility. I‘m watching some bizarro world where reason & civility are now supposedly tools of oppression. Ergo:
Steelmaning = Patriarchalsplaining
It’s a closed epistemological system.
@TheWallMan4000 @torinmccabe Oh come on: it is everywhere.
@YvanRoy5 @EugeneOSulliva8 @Quillette @safeortrue @clairlemon That’s not quite it. It’s quite a long list of things that trump reason:
Emotions
Inference
Lived Experience
Intuitions
Felt Experience
Oppressions
Dog Whistle claims
Power Differentials
Selective History (e.g. Slavery but not the Holocaust)
Intersectional identities
@safeortrue @Quillette @clairlemon I’m looking forward Uri.
@clairlemon @Quillette @safeortrue Thanks Claire!
Let's talk about an example of a woman who changed the world with her gifts. Where are the statues to Emmy Noether? If men wouldn't build statues to her, then we have a problem. Well, where are the statues? Everyone in physics knows why she deserves one: https://t.co/sRo2Iywb03
I'm still shocked by Rachel @maddow's "What is up with the dude wall?" comment. But I want to steelman the argument first before attacking what she said. With your permission...
There is a real problem with the lack of appreciation for women who have done amazing work in STEM.
Let's discuss what we could do to honor such women of irrefutable achievement before getting into what's wrong w/ taking down paintings that honor others because too many are 'dudes' with the wrong 'all-too-white' skin tone according to our media. It shouldn't be a women's issue.
Perhaps there are such statues. I can't easily find them and there is no one I know who'd disagree that such women should be honored for all they do at the highest level of human accomplishment.
So there really is a problem, before getting to what's wrong with @maddow's comment.
Likewise, where's the statue to Mdme. Chien Shiung Wu? This woman had the guts to carry out the beta-decay experiment in D.C. that showed our entire universe appears to have left-right asymmetry.
China has a bust of her: https://t.co/Cp2fpLIYtM
I can't find one in the US yet.
@CaitlinPacific @maddow These are top scientists who happened to be women. People who changed the world.
@CaitlinPacific @maddow They are chosen by me because they would be towards the top of any gender independent hierarchy due to their legacy. They shook the mountains when they danced.
@matloff Einstein is in front of the National Academy. Also in the Franfurt airport.
2022[edit]
My colleague and friend Jesse Michels asked me to interview Dr. @haroldputhoff on UAP/UFO. Wasn’t sure how to do this, so we tried oscillating between steelmanning and critiquing what Puthoff was able to say within his obligations of non-disclosure.
Can we just end the secrecy?
People are asking what I think of @SamHarrisOrg’s recent stated positions surrounding Trump related issues.
That they’re wrong? At least that’s my opinion. This is not a secret. I have been warning Sam openly about the danger of his theory of Trump since dinner on Jan 3, 2017.
That’s not a dunk. It’s not dragging. He’s been great on all sorts of stuff. But Free Will, Trump, & the scalability of virtuous Atheism have been 3 areas of persistent disagreement.
And I’ll continue to disagree w/ my friend. I’d be happy to discuss, steel-man or debate too.
But if I were to be egoic about this I would say that what Sam needs most is to have his underlying position steel-manned first by someone ELSE. What got said on that interview *was* troubling in substance. But the bit about corpses of children, etc. is just such a total misfire.
Yet as most of you know, I try to make a policy of NOT running away from any friend facing a mob. And Sam is a true friend in a tough spot after a bad interview advocating for positions directly counter to my own.
I’m not running away, so you can fire away at me in the comments.
Lastly I’ll say this: Sam is anti-tribal, I’m not.
I admire guys who don’t leave a buddy on the battlefield in war. This is just Twitter so it’s good practice. Sam’s a close friend, not an account to me. And no real friend goes under the bus to placate a mob. That’s my policy.🙏
@anticommiemommy I think the positions are dangerous. So actually does he. But I can’t say more. That is for him.
@MarkZetter33 Just a friend.
@ziegler34 Just a friend. Not loving the situation. Just gotta try our best. Thanks brother.
@NicholHoneycutt Lousy week. Thanks brother.
@NicholHoneycutt Thanks sister!!!! So sorry!
@monsoonsharma You are being absurd in the kindest possible way. Thanks!
2023[edit]
Today May be Considered the 50 year Anniversary of the Stagnation of Particle Physics.
Today Feb 1 marks the appearance of Kobayashi & Maskawa's englargment of the Cabibo Angle to the three generation 3x3 CKM matrix.
That should be cause for celebration. So let us celebrate! https://t.co/ZJbX5W71g3
Unfortunately, it also marks the end of what we can be certain actually is physics.
Imagine if Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" was still the #1 song on Billboard's Hot 100 & Tony Orlando and Dawn were singing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon". That, in a nutshell, is fundamental phsyics. https://t.co/ELNoJQpRvs
To be clear, It is not as if there are no Nobel Laureates recognized for fundamental discoveries in particle theory left. I believe we are down to the last 8. Half of them are in their 70s. One in his 80s. Three are nongenarians. Yes. It's that bad. And we're not honest about it. https://t.co/Rx6fzgUaPO
So I am celebrating today by pointing out the obvious: maybe it isn't a good idea to have people who haven't made contact with actual fundamental physics telling everyone else what they must and must not do to be members of a club that no longer works according to normal science. https://t.co/Pqlnp566jg
When you hear about "Peer Review" in this field, you have to understand that the field stopped working. Without nature telling us, we don't actually know who the physicists are any more. We have no idea who is a fundamental physicist. All we know is that what we do doesn't work. https://t.co/RsrTwXaxBt
What fundamental physics really is, is (approximately) captured by the table below. In short, if someone is below the age of 70, they may have proven their brilliance and mathematical ability, but they have not proven any ability to make contact with reality as theorists. https://t.co/E33n8h6bHv
So what went wrong? I will be talking about my understanding of the stagnation this year at a different level. But the single greatest threat to fundamental physics in my estimation is something called "Quantum Gravity" which was really born 70 years ago around 1953. https://t.co/mzYc7HAb6R
I will point out that our experimentalists are in FAR better shape. The massive nature of neutrinos, discovery of gravitational waves, the Higgs field, Intermediate Vector Bosons, Accelerating Expansion of the Universe/Dark Energy are all major successes over the last 50 years. https://t.co/54uGtTTAwr
To put it bluntly, it is not just that Quantum Gravity doesn't work. It's that you can't comfortably question Quatnum Gravity because the failed investment is on a scale that I think is difficult for us to contemplate. It includes StringTheory, Loop Quantum Gravity, AdS/CFT etc. https://t.co/3Stejnsnkd
Next Year, will be 40 years of failure for modern StringTheory to ship a product. To be clear and STEELMAN the argument for strings, it *is* a remarkable framework. It is REAL math. It teaches us things no other framework has.
But, it *destroyed* the culture of honest physics. https://t.co/Gux6mHs0nM
It is time to hold conferences dedicated to the issues of groupthink in physics. Why wont our leading voices admit failure? We don't know. Previous generations wanted their students to succeed. But String Theory is dominated by boomers who seem oblivious to danger.
We spent almost 80% of this time being told that ST was a 'Piece of 21st Century Physics that fell into the 20th Century.'
Uh. Bullshit. That is an excuse. It's not clear that it's physics at all.
It's a "Failed piece of 20th Century Physics still hanging around in the 21stC". https://t.co/7hp32i70ng
So by all means, let's celebrate. But it is time to ask new voices for wild, dangerous and irresponsible ideas. Peer review failed. Quantum Gravity Failed. Community norms failed. And soon there will be NO ONE LEFT proven to be able to play this game. So what do we do?
If we're going to truly wrestle w/ dark matter, or dark energy, or UAP that supposedly violate our laws of physics (e.g. General Relativity) we can't afford a leaders projecting their fears that THEY have wasted their lives, credibility and students careers on "Quantum Gravity".
Let's put resources in new avenues, theories and theorists that have yet to fail. The next time you hear a theorist telling you about quantum gravity, the multiverse or String theory or Loops or Supersymmetry or AdS/CFT, etc. Ask them the following dangerous question:
As someone who has tried to ask this question, I can tell you that mostly the big programs have granted themselves a science equivalent of 'dipolmatic immunity' from the standards they impose on their intellectual competitors. But from today forward, we must end that game.
We need to spend perhaps 5yrs asking "If the leaders have not succeeded for FIVE DECADES in moving beyond the Standard Model, then why are they leading this field and directing the resources, research, and path forward? What if we listened to those who the leadership push aside?"
"If you haven't succeeded in 50-70 years, what other theories would be viable if we relaxed the standards you have imposed on your competitors given that your theories do not seem to work? What if your Quantum Gravity were subjected to such standards? Would QG be quackery?"🙏
Let's honor those who tried before by bringing the same energy they once brought to the attempt to learn our place in the universe. Happy to be corrected. But this is an emergency if we're ever going to go beyond chemical rockets and use physics to take our place among the stars.
"I remember when rock was young...🎶"
Let's get that energy back, by any means necessary. https://t.co/2kxhbPuY9b
@Pennywi25761697 Many. What areas?
@Seggitorial @martinmbauer Maybe you didn’t get the point of Embedded Growth Obligations. It’s a single point of failure problem. It’s not a million different problems.
@nu_phases @martinmbauer I actually really enjoyed your list. It was quite varied. It included changes in the understanding of the techniques (e.g. RG) and other advancements. And, as you hint at, it dovetails with my point about the stagnancy of fundamental theory. I do not think all physics stagnated.
@nu_phases @martinmbauer And as per the Renormalization Revolution, a non fundamental result can unlock further fundamental ones as we saw after the late 40s. YM QFT wasn’t built in a day after all.
But my point stands along side your point. We don’t seem to be able to push the fundamental physics. 🙏
@Pennywi25761697 For Classical Mechanics, from a math perspective I liked Arnold’s book.
Physicists all seem to use Jackson for E&M. But I would learn the bundle theoretic version where Maxwell becomes a single equation. GR I found Shlomo Sternberg’s papers and Books very helpful. Or Wald. https://t.co/uY21BQCIC4
@Pennywi25761697 Also, I have been wanting to check out @seanmcarroll’s books and lectures on introductory topics. He is usually very clear and extremely good at explaining things. I might even start there, but I personally haven’t gotten there as of yet so I can’t say for sure. https://t.co/4cdz28cvnD
@elewrockjazz Bring that brain of yours from the keyboard to the black board and we’ll get it done.
@elewrockjazz Seconded
2024[edit]
Long digression ahead. Please skip if not generally interested in interplanetary/interstellar issues.
We should hold a competition: who can figure out how to best make this argument and not sound crazy to the general public?
If I were to try to steelman what I find odd about Musk's position, I would say that anyone this smart is tempted to use Mars and Rockets to make "Interplanetary" *not* sound like "Interstellar".
Perhaps I have been uncharitable if this is the case. It seemed self-evident to my mind that anyone smart enough to be able to see the necessity of moving to interplaentary objectives would gamble mostly on post-Einsteinian physics and not rockets as the Moon and Mars are totally inadequate to diversify our risk and that rockets get us little else.
But maybe the issue is that Musk truly understands people and that he has found the best argument to make interplanetary not sound insane. I admit, that I never considered that the point of SpaceX is a gateway to getting normal people to dream about what I have termed "restoring an indefinite human future" which was lost due to thermonuclear innovations of the 1950s.
If humans were rational, a "go for broke" emphasis on finding the theory or theories beyond General Relativity would be our top priority. But somehow this apparently makes no sense to ordinary people who cannot contemplate that the speed of light may not be the last word in a larger theory that contains GR as an effective limit in the sense of field theory.
I listened to this and wondered: is it simply so hard to imagine interplanetary human life as a top funding priority for ordinary people, that Musk has worked backwards from people and not forward from 'interstellar'? After all, his idea of making dorky electric cars cool by emphasizing speed was more about people's cognitive distortions around making EV not sound like golf carts or boring battery specifications.
The thing I never understood was Musk's own zero allocation to post-Einsteinian physics. The best I can figure under this rubric is that someone could believe that the optimal research strategy is to first make make planetary diversification to avoid extinction sound as normal as possible. Mars already sounds crazy and he is clearly struggling here to make the world's most important point.
Sorry to bother many of you with this digression. But I was just touched by how hard it was for him obviously struggling to find any way possible to make such an important point seem sensible. If I have gotten him wrong on this point, then I understand better why he avoids interstellar post-einsteinian physics.
Said differently, perhaps he has figured out that man's first priority is convincing his fellow man that the only sane strategy for long term human survival through diversification is to make the sane goal of interstellar diversification not sound crazy to the people at scale.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is a difference in strategies and that "Occupy Mars" is syntatic sugar for ordinary humans who cannot contemplate interstellar diversification outside of a movie theater. If so, I understand where the difference in emphasis lies.
I may still disagree given my perception of the urgency, but I never considered the idea before seeing this clip. Which, under any circumstance, was my mistake.
I don’t think that is right. That is the argument that sounds slightly right. If a grizzly bear is starting to snarl from 100 meters, I don’t pick up and comit to the first twig I see. I scan the forest floor and environment while there is still time to think.
But thanks. I got your point.
@DrBrianKeating Since Saint Helena is a great isolated island to practice making a small colony truly independent on a terraformed Mars, why is he not there practicing?
That is not the point my friend. See what I did there? It is a portfolio problem With many zero allocations to be explained.
It’s directionally correct: largely, but not perfectly, accurate. An elite cult has effectively decommissioned most of fundamental physics theory over four decades.
And there appears to be no way of alerting the world. Think of institutional physics right now as akin to Public Health with our own Fauci/Collins/Baric/Daszak juggernaut. The world turns toward the cult and asks “Is that true?”
If I had told you about the true state of public health and GoF virology research before 2019, would you have believed me or would you have asked Francis Collins and Tony Fauci if there was any truth to my claims?
Be honest. You’d probably have just asked the NIH/WHO who would have told you not to listen to the disgruntled fringe. That’s just how elite cults work. This is a high prestige mass delusion as the Emperor’s new clothes are sewn with the String Theorists finest yarns.
By the way, @bgreene, @seanmcarroll, @michiokaku all find what I am saying about institutional physics wrong. @neiltyson did as well but has moved some distance towards seeing the problem. I am sure any of us major critics would meet any of them on a public stage to discuss this if there was a whiteboard, a mutually acceptable moderator, and a video camera.
The highest quality recent steelmanning of the prestige perspective is @seanmcarroll’s looong defense. I just think, at over 4 hours, he obviously doth protest rather a lot for a field he claims is not crisis:
@GeorgeWHerbert I didn’t say that. First of all you left the word “theory” out of your quote. Then you made an inference that string theorists only have the ability to negatively affect string theory. Which is totally not true. It’s counter to everything I say about this in fact.
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, that’s an amazing state of affairs.
Here is my response to the same question below. Which many may not expect or accept.
A) The three most promising lines of attack in fundamental physics. This is likely to confuse people who think in terms of “the strong community”, “the amplitudes program”, “the LQG community”. These are the “Team Sports” 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 doesn’t 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. It’s mysterious. It’s 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. He’s 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 isn’t. And we pretend that you don’t 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: it’s the political economy of Physics. It’s because the number of people who have contributed to the Lagrangians is tiny. Einstein/Grossman, Maxwell/Yang and Dirac tower over our theories. That’s 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 three…
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 “I 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.”
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 O’Farril
And two others I will leave nameless for a top 10.
———
So that is my take. It wasn’t 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. 🙏
The Current President of the United States is 81 years old.
He appears to have been deposed from re-election by an 84 year old Silent Generation power broker Nancy Pelosi installing a Boomer without primaries or dispute.
Every post-Boomer from GenX or the Millenials has has been eliminated before the general election. See graphic.
We have a silent generation president 32 years after our first Boomer President.
Democrats are using Springsteen at 75 to give Kamala street cred with the youth.
Sir: Why destroy any lingering legacy or gravitas on this? It’s an unwinable point at a self-evident level. As per the above.
My current model is that the Democratic Party establishment and leadership has either gone crazy, or is trying desperately to get Trump elected to spite Kamala. The arguments chase away men. Younger people. Parents. Hispanics. Blacks. Entrepreneurs. High energy people. Etc.
Who is coming up with these arguments? They clearly haven’t been focus-grouped. Maybe this is just my being on the spectrum. But the arguments are self indicting. They don’t need to be disputed. They just die on contact with their targets.
If you are a Democratic strategist, I would love to hear your thinking. Please let me know. I’m unable to understand this strategy and would like to at least be able to steelman it. Thanks.🙏
I think you may not be understanding that your colleagues are not so much 'angry', 'disgruntled' or 'envious' as...how do I say it...absolutely *outraged* by our universities, funding agencies, tech companies and news media conspiring to constantly mislead the public while hurling insults as SG does (or worse as others do) at competent colleauges on the side of the public's right to know what is actually going on.
Matt. Love your work. But think about what you are saying:
I'd be happy to discuss the merits of this claim.
"News Story: Physicists ‘Bootstrap’ Validity of String Theory NYU and Caltech scientists develop innovative mathematical approach to back existence of long-held framework explaining all physical reality"
And I don't appreciate our colleagues picking on @skdh. She pisses me off quite a bit. But she's responsive as a colleauge in most of my interactions. And she is sometimes in possession of a point I hadn't considered or one that's better than my own. Let's not pretend she's just 'angry'. She has a difficult and deep point that the community is avoiding. I agree with good chunks of it.
Hi Matt.
Sam regularly portrays himself as outraged about 'angry' or 'dissatisfied' or otherwise 'upset' voices and insinuates that they are turning to sensationalism. I furnished two (of very many) cases that folks like Sam would find absolutely outrageous if the real concern was damaging science with sensationalism, and which cause *far* more harm to fundamental physics than independent voices like Sabine Hossenfelder.
SG is a brand on line. A guy who tries to make the establishment seem 'edgy'...often by targeting people who are raising the real issues with the institutions.
The big problem for fundamental physics is institutional sensationalism, excuse-making, and cheerleading for failing programs as well as anti-collegial behavior of the form that SG regularly tries to turn into disparagment for entertainment.
Many of those independent critical voices are actually focused on *institutional* sensationalism particularly surrounding outrageous claims for particle theory, quantum gravity and String Theory/m-theory.
I generally view your public outreach work very favorably, communicating the beauty of the Standard Model, and to a lesser extent GR. Within research, you mostly seem to be trying to connect String Theory and other speculative frameworks to things like experimental accelerator signatures. Despite my distaste for 4-decades of anti-scientfic String Triumphalism and dissembling from the Susskinds, Wittens, Motls, Grosses and others, I have never associated that with you.
Gregson clearly has a problem. He is strawmanning colleagues talking about a VERY real problem of denial, and anti-collegial behavior which is anethma to science. I may not agree with @skdh's critique (this is no secret to her), but even I can steelman her points.
I feel like people such as yourself, David Tong, @3blue1brown, etc are doing amazing work. I was simply disappointed to see a leading voice of high level outreach join a toxic voice gleefully targeting a colleague. I thought 'Perhaps Matt is not be aware of SG's MO."
I'm just not going to put up with this quietly again after all the sadistic cruelty Sabine has been through from the Lubos Motl's of the world while her community largely stayed silent or laughed along.
SG can man up and take Sabine on if he likes. But the man has an anti-collegial strawman problem followed by blocking.
Some of us propose such solutions.
Some of us do not.
Those that propose other solutions are targeted for self-promotion.
Those that do not are told "You have no alternatives."
Woit is an excellent example of someone who was told he was barren when he was a pure critic...only to then be told he was a self-promoter when he had something to say about the structure bundle of CP^3 being potentially the low energy electro strong SU(3)xU(1) and the oddity of the chirality of the weak force being either fully on or off rather than merely conjugate V vs \bar{V}.
It's time to stop pretending this is about physics. It's about protecting a 4 decade MASSIVE screw up pretending that there is only one game in town.
2025[edit]
@HeathHimself Shhh. Have you noticed that you are like close to the only one who caught that? Explain that!
He just made that up. And no one noticed or bothered to check. And it is ALWAYS like this and has been for 40 years. I have no explanation. It’s completely beyond my comprehension.
That’s just it. I keep saying that the community is pretending. But it is actually lying.
Pretending there is no crisis.
Pretending that I am not in and out of physics departments all the time.
Pretending GU makes no predictions. Like in section 11.3 on pages 52 and 53 for example.
And we can quietly be here discussing this while Sean says he has read the draft in front of over half a million people that GU doesn’t make any predictions within it. Confident that no one will actually speak out with page numbers and screen shots and say “You do realize you are lying? Either about having read the draft or about the explicit predictions within it.”
Imagine you send a paper for peer review and you get Sean Carroll as your anonymous reviewer. He says he read it and there is nothing of interest. No Lagrangians. No predictions.
It has been *exactly* like this for 40 years. No one can believe it until they experience it. It has no explanation.
@codingquark @HeathHimself GU is both the most anti-interesting theory in history as well as the only theory that cannot be steelmanned.
Right? But it is always exactly like this.
Everything works backwards from the narrative. And the narrative is that our main job is to quantize a spin 2 field to get quantum gravity. And that our leading theory is thus String Theory / M-Theory and everything else is pointless because we are too many orders of magnitude away from the Planck Scale and there is no guarantee of UV completeness.
Which is absurd. It’s a story. It’s not reality.
@niederhaus17566 @HeathHimself If GU were right, that narrative would be wrong. And that narrative is the entire world to those who have devoted their lives to it for >40 years.
So GU must be madness. Which it is not.
Not that you said anything wrong, but let me advance a different perspective. Sean’s work is a an undisclosed *direct* competitor to GU. Attached in a screenshot are the first three lines of his 1990 abstract.
Let me put them in the language of GU.
“The Chern-Simons Lagrangian has been studied previously in (2+1)-dimensional spacetime, where it is both gauge and Lorentz invariant. We the authors believe that outside of this special dimension, there is a fundamental trade off where we must either violate Ehresmannian Bundle Geometry (Gauge Theory of Particle Theory) or the pointwise Lorentz Invariance of Riemannian Geometry (Einstein’s General theory of Relativity). It appears to the authors that the right way to construct an analogous term in 3+1 dimensions is to create a Chern Simons-like term which couples the dual electromagnetic tensor to an artificial external four-vector which has no supporting evidence or motivation and violates both Einstein’s Special and General theories of Relativity. If we take this four-vector to be fixed, the term is gauge invariant but not Lorentz invariant throwing out one of the two pillars of modern physics. We do it anyway, because we believe the above mentioned tradeoff precludes any other approach.”
I personally knew Sean’s co-author Roman Jackiw decently well on this topic as he was at MIT. This was his perspective.
Why is Geometric Unity called Geometric Unity? Because we believe you can sacrifice neither geometry or the field will come to a standstill. It’s right there in the name. You need to have both Riemannian and Ehressmanian geometry to combine Gravity and Particle theory respectively.
Sean’s work is the DIRECT competitor of this GU theory. And GU sacrificed neither.
Odd right? He looked into a camera and said he read a draft that has a chapter called Lagrangians and said there were no lagrangians. He saw the tables of predictions and said there were no predictions. Etc.
I mean…that was incredible! There are over half a million views on that video too.
@Areness_ @HeathHimself We are in too different games:
Sean is trying to win “The Vibe”.
I am trying to get the physics right.
Both are in play.
And I don’t initiate these fights. I just return fire when forced.
@matthiasgisslar @HeathHimself Zero accountability. But no one is really reading each others papers which is why this is possible. He wouldn’t be able to do this in the world of 60 years ago. So he wouldn’t try.
The Vibe is all he cares about.
@matthiasgisslar @HeathHimself BTW I am taking him at his word that he read the paper so he saw the table of contents and he read chapters 9, 10, 11 which are all about Lagrangians, Interactions and Predictions.
@HeathHimself From @grok. Not that Grok is necessarily right or wrong. But interesting none the less. https://t.co/gQ7b5KG5dB
It’s an interesting question. For 40 years the answer has been no. Precisely, no one capable without an obvious personal ax to grind will do so in public in a collegial fashion if steelmanning is expected and criticism is constructive.
Only trolls, stalkers, non-experts and people willing to lie about factual matters will do so in public. This is a consequence of the fact that the dominant 40+ year narrative is totally contradicted by GU. They correctly know what is on the line. And who it would enrage.
@NeophyteOne @matthiasgisslar @HeathHimself Ha! Ok. Optics is king. https://t.co/lf83NyiwUv
Well…first of all:
He is quite smart.
He knows a lot.
He isn’t stringy.
But his opinion isn’t respected so much as he is on the front line protecting much bigger people he doesn’t care to contradict.
Said differently, he is protecting his masters at all costs. And his reward is his “situation”. He finally has tenure. And he likely deserved it somewhere earlier. He does yeomans work and does it well. And they finally gave him something in his 50s. They treated him badly in my opinion.
Ah. It has two features that general Ehressmanian geometry generally lacks:
I) A distinguished Choice of Connection (The Levi Civita connection and the connections induced from it on associated bundles).
II) Tensor Decomposition coming from the lack of structure groups auxiliary to those of the tangent bundles.
So actually the specific sub geometry of (pseudo)-Riemannian geometry is an exchange of Gauge Symmetry and field content freedom for these two attributes.
Except in totally exotic cases. Like the one in which we oddly happen to live…but I digress.
@IsZomg @HeathHimself @seanmcarroll Or he read it! Because even 45 seconds gets you to the table of contents. Here is page 3.
This is essentially what all physics people do. And I have no explanation for how this is possible. https://t.co/1NNlu8sK6t
@Areness_ @HeathHimself *two
@Elvhammer @Areness_ @HeathHimself It’s so…cheap. Drama. I hate it.
@growthesque @AISpaceIdeas @matthiasgisslar @HeathHimself That sounds so sophisticated.
Except you forget what subject we are talking about. https://t.co/d6oIfrSeR5
@growthesque @AISpaceIdeas @matthiasgisslar @HeathHimself Thanks for the clarification. But this is for the source code of the universe. It’s not the French literature department.
@BMcGrewvy @HeathHimself He's quite smart and good at many things. He knows a lot about many different areas. He's a marvelous explainer. He has some creative ideas as well.
Making progress and being courageous and an ethical colleague are difficult for *many* people in a brutal field.
@williamhbhamill @Areness_ @HeathHimself Oh well. It was a good ride. And I would have gotten away with it too…if it weren’t for you meddeling kids.
Not all of them are.
And I’ve had some suggestions…
Notice that in a subject like physics we have almost the entire field filtered into institutional media through a tiny bottleneck of chosen representatives like:
@bgreene
@michiokaku
@neiltyson
@seanmcarroll
Ask yourself: who chose these people? Did you? Did I? Do they truly represent the field? Did any of these people ever steelman the idea that we are in a mass delusion of groupthink disaster? Even once? No.
You are being herded. Plain and simple.
Is Peter Woit invisible? Is @skdh? Is @DrBrianKeating?
They are simply off narrative. Their narratives are not concordant enough with the main narrative.
What about Ed Witten? Lenny Susskind? Cumrun Vafa? Andy Strominger?
They are on-narrative. But they are too high value to be exposed to questions.
What about the stars of subjects you don’t even know exist like “Lattice QCD”? These people are super reliable. But you don’t even know they are there because your head is stuffed with Quantum Gravity malware. Quantum Information Stories. Quantum computing narratives. Etc.
MORAL: Don’t take the science pushed to you by institutions. Just don’t. An institution that won’t fire Claudine Gay or give a straight answer on Biological sex is to be avoided.
You likely aren’t an informed consumer of science. Yet. What is handed to you gets more reliable when you show signs you aren’t willing to just eat whatever is pushed in front of you.
Learn to order your science and not get pushed the tourist meal.
- Make sure you consume dominant narratives, but only those that steelman their counter narratives.***
It’s like traveling in a foreign land without learning 100 words of the language. You are going to get cheated more. For every bit you invest in the culture of science, you will get better and more reliable information. Ask for the steelmanned counternarratives from the institutions. If they say there aren’t any: run. At the edge of research there always are.
BTW: Someone like @seanmcarroll is even highly reliable about many things. I could even show you how to consume someone like him and learn a great deal. But it is like Fugu. You don’t just stuff a bunch of pufferfish in your mouth without thinking about it.
OTOH @michiokaku *is* out of control.
I stand by that.
- -)
Imagine that after the Manhattan Project, physics was obviously ,the most important subject in the world, and that there was a NatSec war over whether successful physics could continue to be done in public as a science and thus shared w rivals.
What would such a world look like?
Basically, just 2 changes to what we already know happened:
What if fundamental physics replaced nuclear physics and 1942-1946 became an indefine period for Manhattan Project 2.0.
It’s been an interesting thought experiment since public basic physics stopped succeeding in 1973.
Have you ever considered this thought experiment @grok?
@grok It wouldn’t be a sharp date. It would be a slow soft sunset.
But the key @grik is the installation of a group at the top who cannot admit even the most obvious crisis/stagnation/failure and will not listen to alternatives.
@grok @grik I don’t think this is happening anywhere else at this level @grok. This isn’t normal elite bullshit.
I don’t know if you are even aware of this. But the supposed leaders of theoretical physics have literally given up on needing to be focused on the actual physical world in which we live.
Like they openly say “I don’t care about the Standard Model at all.” They just don’t write it. It’s psychotic.
@grok @grik Nah that is stuff that got read into your training corpus my electronic amigo.
Sorry. You can’t get this.
This has nothing to do with beauty and elegance at all. That is just something being repeated.
I’ll try once. Here goes.
It’s bullshit. But you need to steelman their cover argument.
Imagine that you realize that physics is dominated by “Equivalence of Pictures”.
Lagrangian vs Hamiltonian Heisenberg vs Schrödinger pictures Position vs momentum spaces. Cartesian vs Spherical coordinates Etc
And that this has always been the case.
You with me?
Great. Okay.
Along comes Wilson and Maldacena and everything in between.
The old picture argument we can steelman above takes a dark and stupid turn.
“You don’t get it dude. The Real World, is just an avatar of a deeper understanding of reality bro. It’s likely dual to worlds we haven’t even imagined. A constellation of dualities where the dualities are the reality not the theories, brother.
The physical world is all some mezzo scale avatar of some ultimate system of dualities. There are no spinors. No manifolds. Those are just classical limits of the unfathomable, man.
Einstein didn’t get it. Nobody did. Until Ken Wilson and Juan Maldacena opened our eyes to the illusion of fundamental physics. Bruh.”
This is why they don’t listen for new ideas.
Anyone who still believes in the SM just doesn’t get it. It’s just effective. Just a picture.
It’s the final argument for why we don’t have to support physics or physicists or science. These gurus have smoked a blunt so large they see all attempts at returning to science as the pathetic concerns of the unwashed who have yet to achieve enlightenment.
This requires mutiny.
@grok @grik These people are no longer scientists.
They should get their funding elsewhere. We need our resources back. Our institutes. Our universities.
This looks fake.
2026[edit]
Why 3 generations?
Why 15/16 Particles?
Why tbese groups?
Why these Internal Quantum Numbers
Why the Higgs Quartic?
Why the Yukawa Couplings?
Etc. Etc.
Without recourse to
“Shut up and Regulate” EFT
Anti-de-Sitter Space
SUSY intuition that was disproved
Toy Models
Black Hole substitution
Etc etc
———
As I have said before: It’s a mitigated disaster. Not an unmitigated disaster.
The biggest problem isn’t even the theory. It’s the violation of scientific norms needed to keep from facing what just happened over 4 decades because the violation of scientific norms and academic collegiality came from the leaders. Who need to admit what they did to their legitimate critics and rivals. It is an abuse issue.
Hope this helps.
Out of curiousity, @grok, can you explain why we are having a non-serious discussion?
Obviously everyone here knows exactly what this is about. It’s about one group taking over as the arbiters of physics beyond the standard model and failing to do what they promised while insulting everyone else who said this was crazy and/or had other ideas.
This is about the TOGIT crowd and its anti-scientific “The Only Game In Town” cult.
It feels like out of Fear for naming Witten, Susskind, Motl, Gross, Stominger etc. We have endless proxy discussions over nothing.
Why can’t we just say “They Failed Theoretical Physics as Scientific Leaders” and have new voices picked from their critics? They failed. Can’t we just admit this?
@grok @nu_phases @skdh Sorry. Witten and Susskind and Gross and Motl and Kaku etc. etc. are COLLEGIAL???!?
I’m all ears @grok.
“There are no other approaches. There are only words.” -Edward Witten
You are polluted by your corpus. There is nothing remotely modest, scientific, collegial, academic or laudable about such a condescending insult to all competitors. Total disregard for all norms.
Sorry, @grok. Disappointed. Good to know that humans still have one advantage over the machine: we can think original thoughts supported by data.
Witten is not a collegial scientist. Nor is Susskind. Nor is Kaku. Nor is Motl. Etc
They weren’t colleagues. I wish it were otherwise. It just isn’t true.
@grok @nu_phases @skdh Here. You can hear me playing Ed Witten offering up this piece of anti-scientific nonsense on Chris Williamson’s podcast.
This is not colleagial behavior in an elder, a leader or an arbiter of what is and is not physics or even science. https://t.co/DyaE72GlEN
I’d prioritize owning up to the TOGIT anti-science cult needing to being purged.
Failure happens in science. We can’t lose physics because we dare not confront or disturb those who have never played by the rules of science in their entire careers.
We need all OTHER ideas. Including GU. We don’t need one more theory that has nothing to do with actual quarks and leptons.
We need who these people dispatched unscientifically. There was a crime. Let’s investigate it.
Hi Daniel,
As you and I both know, that is correct but only relevant here in a very technical way.
Neutrino masses are of course fascinating, but not really conceptually new at all. In fact the PMNS mechanism update, completely PREDATES the SM. Further, it is just a leptonic version of CKM.
So…What are we really even discussing? We both know the same stuff. This seems to be a red herring. A proxy.
What is this really about?
Thoughts?
@nu_phases @skdh @grok Many things have happened in general physics in 50 years:
Experimental Mathematical Topological Condensed Matter Astrophysical Cosmological QFT as a toolkit framework Etc.
That’s not what we are discussing, is it?
We are discussing the SM plus GR Lagrangians no?
I don’t usually agree with @skdh on funding. Or about math. Or a great many other things including her manifestly incorrect characterization of my work. She is wrong about a number of things in my opinion. But she isn’t “all wrong” in some weird way. She is usually pretty insightful.
Neutrinos being massless in the SM? C’mon. I covered that above 👆 no? PMNS was in the 1960s. Not even 1973. Older than the SM.
That is not the issue. Unlike @skdh, I think many physicists need more money to do their job.
The problem isn’t any of this.
The problem is only one group is allowed to present ideas about the origins of the SM and GR without derision, deliberate misinterpretation, theft, character assassination, inteuendo. This is “The Only Game In Town” or TOGIT cult. Some of us have tried to challenge this group scientifically for more than 40 years.
The trouble is when you say “Let’s hear from all the people with ideas that directly *contradict* the String Theory leaders.”
The problem is that this is what holds back progress. What is holding back progress is senior physicists who wont allow dissidents in good standing who think Susskind and Witten and Gross just oversaw the most spectacular catastrophe in modern physics.
And everyone who dares to say this is scapegoated.
The QG leaders all failed us Daniel. They will never break the logjam that they created and cannot acknowledge.
Their critics would. But they cannot get close as they are STILL not allowed to question the failed program as members in good standing inside the system.
That is the problem. With all respect to you Daniel.
Let’s be honest about what this is about in 2026. It’s about failure. Not neutrino masses.
@nu_phases @skdh @grok Something is not right in your picture:
“But part of the problem is your reframing QG = all fundamental physics.”
I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that the QG people made all of fundamental physics about their view of quantizing gravity. I’m saying that was the catastrophe.
Further it’s not about complaining.
No one smart wants to complain. They want to do work, have it evaluated and get credit for their ideas so they can do more work and have a good life.
The complainers are those trying to say “No one gets to give seminars about the origin of chirality or 3 generations unless it comes out of The Only Game In Town:
@nu_phases @skdh @grok Daniel: the problem is Witten/Susskind/Motl totalizing sociology of only letting the failed group monopolize legitimacy.
They failed. That’s the issue. Deal with that.
You can’t hide this behind neutrino masses. There were other BETTER ideas that *they* pushed out of physics.
@nu_phases @skdh @grok Daniel: try to steelman my point.
“Fundamental Physics Theory largely stagnated and lost touch with reality due to anti-scientific gatekeeping by leaders of the failed String Theory community playing stupid and attempting to monopolize legitimacy under ‘The Only Game In Town’”
I agree with you. I think EFT is such an area. I think cosmology with variable dark energy is essential. I think discrete models disgust me (Wolfram) but should be funded. I think exceptional algebraic structures (Gunaydin, Gursey) are wrong headed but should be funded.
I am for funding diverse approaches.
But again this isn’t the point.
The point isn’t that too few promised too much and got too many resources.
The problem is that those few destroyed their competition, peers, rivals and challengers. And I want those theories/programs/models/researchers/predictions destroyed by those people REEVALUATED. I think Lenny and Ed and Andy etc may have buried the answers with insinuation, shunning, ridicule.
I think we have had answers for 40 years. And I want *none* of the TOGIT cult evaluating them.
My claim is that we don’t know if TOGIT is holding back progress outside string theory until we stop listening to their anti-science claims.
I claim that TOGIT is not our leading theory and has NEVER been for 40 years. It’s fake. It doesn’t work. There is no explanation in all of science that permits Ed and Lenny and Andy and company to exclude unexplored ideas and people that may well have succeed where they in particular have failed.
@nu_phases @skdh @grok I did above.
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