[sls]

In a recent blogpost [1], Hossenfelder responds to a review of her book. All but the first two paragraphs are basically a response to this idea. A brief excerpt:

> In most cases, however, physicists are not aware they use arguments from beauty to begin with (hence the book’s title). I have such discussions on a daily basis.

> Physicists wrap appeals to beauty into statements like “this just can’t be the last word,” “intuition tells me,” or “this screams for an explanation”. They have forgotten that naturalness is an argument from beauty and can’t recall, or never looked at, the motivation for axions or gauge coupling unification. They will express their obsessions with numerical coincidences by saying “it’s curious” or “it is suggestive,” often followed by “Don’t you agree?”.

[…]

> What physicists are naive about is not appeals to beauty; what they are naive about is their own rationality. They cannot fathom the possibility that their scientific judgement is influenced by cognitive biases and social trends in scientific communities. They believe it does not matter for their interests how their research is presented in the media.

Have you read the book or any of her posts about the ideas in the book? There are in fact a lot of people who do claim that research programs and research dollars should be prioritized because of ideas like naturalness or beauty, even when decades of increasingly expensive and time-consuming work has led to no support for the natural or beautiful hypothesis.

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-philosopher-of-sc...

[calf]

I find Hossenfelder problematic because if you look at the rhetoric the blog post itself is relying on intuition and in essence a beauty argument in order to make a sociological point. I think Hossenfelder has a point about the state of professional physics, but the way this is communicated is unclear and lacks this rhetorical introspection as well. It's why her posts draw so much attention; the strong assertions, the arguing, and how the unrigorous writing itself obscures this.

[masteranza]

There's no need for anyone to read her book, because it's just a pile of garbage written by someone who doesn't have a clue about modern physics. Hossenfelder is an armchair physicist who failed in her discipline and started writing books for profit. The very idea of naturalness is basically the thing people hope the machines will someday do - namely think and be able to explain what is actually going on through fleshing out noise from the essential mechanisms.

The stuff she writes on her blog are so stupid it's beyond belief. First she criticizes theorists (who write far more reasonable and far less philosophical articles than she) for using advanced mathematics and exploring various possibilities, a minute later she criticizes experimenters for trying to build a better particle collider. She's a person who would gladly see the resources flowing to the less skilled wannabe-physicists with no real knowledge, because she's one of them.