5 ms·
I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics. Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of th
by scottlocklin 6y ago
I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics.
Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of thing[0]. Obviously there are many problems with the sociology and incentive systems for physics departments; affirmative action, papers with 1000 "coauthors," infrastructure fees for grants involving giving a grad student a pencil, political witch hunts, difficulties in family formation, herding behavior in subjects, byzantine political games, overcrowded winner take all credit. Frankly you'd have to be kind of a combination masochist moron to want to do it these days outside of the rare person whose career is assured post PhD; masochistic morons probably don't make good scientists.
But nobody talks about the fact that an awful lot of "physics" these days is unfalsifiable piffle. Phenomenology, network theory, cosmology, noodle theory, "quantum computing," black hole physics, neural net fiddlers, nanotechnologists, cosmologists, numskulls babbling about "muh multiverse" and "muh simulation hypothesis" -the world let alone the average physics department has entirely too many of these. Nobody in the physics department can make fun of these cranks for entirely political reasons. And at this point the lunatics outnumber the actual scientists, who, you know, can make predictions that can be checked, rather than generating piffle suited for press releases and late night bong sessions.
[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/06/the-end-of-science/ https://www.wired.com/1996/06/the-end-of-science/
https://web.archive.org/web/20201004020641/https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/science-faction-is-theoretical-physics-becoming-softer-than-anthropology/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201004020641/https://blogs.sci...
- troelsSteegin 6y agoI don't understand why affirmative action would be a problem for physics departments. What's the basis of that? As an outsider, I'll say that I see the jobs of a physics department as a) making physics b) making physicists c) teaching physics d) funding making physics. How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?
- inglor_cz 6y ago"How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?" This isn't obvious to me either. While I can see that hiring to match predetermined racial quota can result in subpar performance, most of the world does not play the diversity/inclusion game in the way that USA does, and does not seem to have better results.
- scottlocklin 6y agoIt's not a problem if you assume, as most affirmative action does, that 2+ sigma talent (baseline physics professor) and motivation is evenly distributed across populations. It probably isn't; virtually nothing else is in any biological population above the evolutionary level of a paramecium, and so you get numskulls like this in your physics department: https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI Merit is a pretty good criterion; worked for a long time!
- inglor_cz 6y agoStill, there is a natural experiment. There is no affirmative action in Taiwan or Japan (or Czechia, where I live). In that case, shouldn't teams from those countries exhibit some advantages against American ones? Or is the effect so small that it gets erased by, say, better facilities or funding?
- vharuck 6y agoI've come to see affirmative action's value for the future. Hiring was not free from bias in the past. Even if that's no longer true, the existing lack of physicists in a community means less people from that community will have physics as a goal. Kids rarely dream of attaining roles they don't see. And if kids don't see roles on television or in daily life, that leaves their community. Underrepresentation causes an artificial self-fulfilling prophecy. It's hard to come up with an unbiased way to correct current problems caused by past bias.
- wbsss4412 6y agoAssuming that capacity to produce valuable scientific results is uncorrelated with society’s historical prejudice (ie people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are as likely as any other to produce such results, given they aren’t hampered by historical prejudice), seems more reasonable than assuming that “talent” is reducable to a single normally distributed variable that we have consistently been able to measure in practice.
- getlawgdon 6y agoIt's just more "subtle" dogwhistling on HA. There's nothing wrong with AA in physics because there is still huge underrepresentation in physics.
- ta988 6y agoWhy do you put nanotechnology in your list?
- scottlocklin 6y agoBecause even a reasonable set of first steps towards creating artificial mechanical life forms made out of arbitrary atoms do not exist and probably never will. Drexler wrote a stupid science fiction book. Good marketing for chemists for a while I guess. Remember the congressional hearings back in 2005 on how nanotech was going to be 15% of US GDP by 2015? I do! https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg21950/html/CHRG-109hhrg21950.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg21950/html/C...