With apologies for Appeal to Authority: Paul Graham elucidates the low value of Ad Hominem in his post How To Disagree: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
It's not as though the author's biases or background are completely irrelevant; but discussing them is unhelpful without additional clarifications on the mistakes, ignorances, or dishonesties alleged.
Imagine a different context: maybe I have a strong opinion as a lay citizen on campaign finance issues. It's all well and good for someone to enter saying "I'm a political operative/lobbyist/etc, and you don't know what you're talking about"; but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't (which would be just as helpful and pertinent if I had turned out to be an expert anyway).
> but it's a zero-information statement until they describe what they know that I don't
I don't think it's a zero-information statement at all. If S. Weinberg tells me that my physical arguments are wrong but he doesn't have the time to say how/why, then it's certainly a non-zero information statement and I'll scrutinize my line of thoughts thoroughly after that. Dismissing this as a zero information statement would be pretentious from my part. The same goes for you against the expert in political finances.
It seems that there's an underlying assumption in your argument that we're all equal and equally capable of having opinions on anything unless someone comes to us, and spends time thoroughly showing us why we are wrong. Or that we are all correct until proven wrong. This is problematic because 1/ we're not all equal, and acknowledging that we dont know everything is important, 2/ it's unlikely that there's always an expert around willing to spend time educating us everytime we feel the need of commenting on things we dont know, and 3/ we may not comprehend why we are wrong by lack of proper education.
I’ve heard a lot of the terms from that post but never read it. it’s extremely awesome and thanks for sharing. Was particularly inspired by this line:
You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.
It's a public discussion of an important matter, and these tend to go best when people present arguments based on their positions. When someone like you fails to do this, then I tend to assume that it is because they lack such.
I don't see a thorough debunking to be honest. The first commentor points to the practical results of particle accelerators. The Vox article (and the blog author) acknowledge this fully. But all examples that are given are the result of past accelerators, where we had reasonable expectations to find new technology because we were still exploring the standard model. This is not the case for a larger accelerator, and this is Hossenfelders point.
The second commenter follows a similar logic. He doesn't seem to engage the point that we don't expect the discovery of something new, he seems to suggest that scientists should build bigger accelerators simply because we can.
But he must know that this is not how science works. Chemists don't just simply perform all imaginable chemical reactions just to completely map the space of chemistry. We allocate scarce resources like time and money to experiments that, according to our best models, may yield promising results. We have ideas for experiments like this in physics, they just happen to not involve a larger accelerator. Scientists are not blind cartographers.
That is not at all how science works. Models yield predictions about the world, not "results" as you suggest. We design experiments to test if those predictions, and thus the models, are correct. Often, new "results" are found when a model fails, and that is why we test boundary conditions.
There is no way of predicting which line of work is likely to yield new physics as you suggest there is.
Neither of those twit sequences directly address the points made. Yes, a larger collider would probe the Higgs field with more precision. It would lead to more precise measurements of what is already known. The question at hand is "is it worth 20 billion dollars"? And if it is, why are all the press releases surrounding the proposal hyping up new physics?
The first link is not very compelling. Nobody disputes that particle physics has produced useful derivates for humanity in the past. The question is whether it will in the future, and whether they will be worth $20B.
Says who? This isn't a debate and you're not the debate moderator.
For my money, interesting things about the author are absolutely on topic. They help us put what we're reading in context.
And opinions are okay here too.