5 ms·

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

hilariously 1mo ago
Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.
- chongli 1mo ago
  No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?
    - chongli 1mo ago
      And that's the reason she's wrong?
      - cauch 1mo ago
        You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).
        chongli 1mo ago
        No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc). Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.
        cauch 1mo ago
        You said > No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe. Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it. I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.
  - cauch 1mo ago
    I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
    - grebc 1mo ago
      Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
      - cauch 1mo ago
        There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector. You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector). Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector. As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
- Arainach 1mo ago
  Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.
  - devmor 1mo ago
    This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.
    - nobodyandproud 1mo ago
      They were testable, no?
      - Nextgrid 1mo ago
        Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
        Arainach 1mo ago
        Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun). String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
        alecst 1mo ago
        String theory, being a high-energy theory, predicts that at high energies things will look “stringy.” It’s not untestable in principle. But it is out of reach of current experiments. I think that distinction is important.
aurareturn 1mo ago
When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?
- nullbio 1mo ago
  This isn't a great argument. Researchers who do not think string theory is good are not going to spend years on it. There are plenty of experts that dismiss string theory. I have no skin in the game, and don't care either way, fwiw.
  - panda-giddiness 1mo ago
    I don't think someone needs to be a (former) string theorist to have an informed opinion on string theory, but I do think they should at least have a physics research background. Like, if someone can't explain what second quantization is, then why should I care about their opinion on string theory at all? There's just not that much room for a discerning conversation. (With the obvious caveat that I have different expectations for a real-life conversation than a discussion forum.) Our grandparent is sort of the perfect example of an insight-free comment: confidently claiming string theory is useless (without supporting evidence) and then claiming (more like imagining, since there's again no evidence provided here) that an LLM would have abandoned such a research program long ago. What's there to discuss? The comment is based on a made-up scenario; it is, in other words, pure fiction.
- the__alchemist 1mo ago
  You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill.
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    In the age of infinite bullshit generators, the even more useful skill is being able to say "I don't know." Or "I'm not qualified to have a useful opinion on this so I'm just not going to say anything." I could write a bunch of stuff about my personal opinions on string theory and waste everyone's time, or I could just shut up and not be a human stoichastic parrot.
8note 1mo ago
even if its not particularly relevant to the physical world around us, it still explored cool math
vhantz 1mo ago
> It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working. > String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier. Not only are LLMs perfect machines with all the intelligence of humanity without any of our problems, they are also everything else. I wait to get my hands on one of those LLMs people on hn seem to be using. I want to believe too. Let me into the religion of the perfect thinking machine gods.

hilariously 1mo ago

Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.

chongli 1mo ago
No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago
  As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?
  - chongli 1mo ago
    And that's the reason she's wrong?
    - cauch 1mo ago
      You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).
      - chongli 1mo ago
        No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc). Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.
        cauch 1mo ago
        You said > No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe. Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it. I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.
- cauch 1mo ago
  I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
  - grebc 1mo ago
    Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
    - cauch 1mo ago
      There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector. You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector). Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector. As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
Arainach 1mo ago
Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.
- devmor 1mo ago
  This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.
  - nobodyandproud 1mo ago
    They were testable, no?
    - Nextgrid 1mo ago
      Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
      - Arainach 1mo ago
        Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun). String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
        alecst 1mo ago
        String theory, being a high-energy theory, predicts that at high energies things will look “stringy.” It’s not untestable in principle. But it is out of reach of current experiments. I think that distinction is important.

aurareturn 1mo ago

When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?

nullbio 1mo ago
This isn't a great argument. Researchers who do not think string theory is good are not going to spend years on it. There are plenty of experts that dismiss string theory. I have no skin in the game, and don't care either way, fwiw.
- panda-giddiness 1mo ago
  I don't think someone needs to be a (former) string theorist to have an informed opinion on string theory, but I do think they should at least have a physics research background. Like, if someone can't explain what second quantization is, then why should I care about their opinion on string theory at all? There's just not that much room for a discerning conversation. (With the obvious caveat that I have different expectations for a real-life conversation than a discussion forum.) Our grandparent is sort of the perfect example of an insight-free comment: confidently claiming string theory is useless (without supporting evidence) and then claiming (more like imagining, since there's again no evidence provided here) that an LLM would have abandoned such a research program long ago. What's there to discuss? The comment is based on a made-up scenario; it is, in other words, pure fiction.
the__alchemist 1mo ago
You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill.
- fragmede 1mo ago
  In the age of infinite bullshit generators, the even more useful skill is being able to say "I don't know." Or "I'm not qualified to have a useful opinion on this so I'm just not going to say anything." I could write a bunch of stuff about my personal opinions on string theory and waste everyone's time, or I could just shut up and not be a human stoichastic parrot.

8note 1mo ago

even if its not particularly relevant to the physical world around us, it still explored cool math

vhantz 1mo ago

> It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working. > String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier. Not only are LLMs perfect machines with all the intelligence of humanity without any of our problems, they are also everything else. I wait to get my hands on one of those LLMs people on hn seem to be using. I want to believe too. Let me into the religion of the perfect thinking machine gods.