[g6pdh]

Yes, I know her and I agree with what she says. I also think many physicists working in the field secretly agree with her but it's a taboo to admit it openly. As an insider I can assure you that currently most analyses in experimental particle physics are a mechanical repetition of previous analyses with a few slight modifications to adapt them to the bigger statistics. It's true that it could simply be an effect due to the experiments lifetime, that have been running for 20 years now and where younger generations are struggling to come up with ideas not yet explored. I can speak less from the perspective of theoretical physics, but it seems obvious to all those in the field that there's a proliferation of papers proposing new particles, new interactions, etc. with no real impact.

[cauch]

I am also a former CERN scientist, and while I agree with the fact that recent papers are more and more a box-checking exercise with low value, I'm concerned on how Hossenfelder misrepresent the causes of that and the situation.

You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis.

What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she jumps to another conclusion, without any good observation for it or without scientific approach. These conclusions seem to be fed by the easy trap of "it's a conspiracy". We know how easy it is for people to give credit to these theses and to totally overlook that some claims are, in practice, totally unrealistic (so we have thousands of new PhD students and postdocs exploring how it works every year, the majority of them leaving the field, and strangely, the very very big majority choose, for absolutely no good reason, to keep hidden the secret they saw).

I agree with some of Hossenfelder's observations, but I find her conclusions often unsubstantiated, overstating elements that are more realistically way rarer than what she described and overlooking plenty of valid hypotheses. The fact that these "great revelations" brings her viewership also fit with a slow crank-ification. The fact that she also released videos on subjects outside of her domain and that these videos contained a lot of approximation also does not give a good image of how reliable is her approach (not that it is a crime to not know something outside of your field of expertise, but it should be something that a good scientist should be fully aware of, and they should simply not do such video in the first place).

I'm not sure if there is a real "taboo" to openly agree with her, I think it is more about the fact that she destroyed herself her own reputation with bad calls and bad conclusions, and people don't really want to tarnish themselves by association.

[anthk]

What's your opinion on Beatriz VIllarroel and her experiments on transient traces in plates?

[cauch]

I don't know her.

But in general, I don't value "individual groundbreaking research". This is a very "Disney" view on how science work: a misunderstood genius that makes a discovery that the "scientific elite" refuses to acknowledge. Or very "Ayn Rand" or "Elon Musk" view, with all the teenage hedgelord energy associated to it. The myth of the "one-man-groundbreaking-discovery" makes for good entertainment, but even if it is 95% stupid and not 100% (yeah, individual contribution matters, yeah, inertia and misplaced skepticism exists, so what), that's a 12-year-old kid fantasy.

I'm not saying this person is not reliable, I don't know. But if her research is valuable, it will come out, and not because of one person. With Hossenfelder, the situation just turned into a media circus, which is just not useful at all. Such situations just feel like it is a "instagram gossip" deal rather than being about science.

[dfsfsdfsdfsd]

I'm not sure what I think of this. Prodigious amounts of original research where produced by individual geniuses, often misunderstood at the time.

[cauch]

I'm not saying that individuals cannot do huge contributions, but that what matters is science and the "fan club" aspect around "geniuses" is just boring. It may have some slightly different elements than the "fan club" aspect around pop stars or boys bands, but it is basically the same thing.

So, yeah, I'm grateful to Einstein and acknowledge it was an impressive work, but not more than anyone else who has impressive skills.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Hossenfelder is falling into the same trap most people who make their living off social media do. Lots of money can be made with conspiracies and controversies, much more than with boring facts. This just seems to creep up over time on most of these people. Jordan Peterson fell into the same trap. He used to have pretty interesting insights but then he developed a huge loyal following and over time he felt like he knew the truth about pretty much everything. And the followers were happily cheering him on.

[cauch]

While I agree, it is worth adding that it is not a "natural consequence". Other than them have similar following and yet don't fall into that trap.

People who have fallen into that trap are not "average people" who are "victim of social media mechanism": their actions were and are still the result of their choices, and they still have a brain that should allow them to step back and see what they are doing. The fact that they felt into that trap tells us something about their qualities: they are poor analysts and we should not give them much credits (the fact they did decent analyses at first does not exclude the fact that they are poor analysts, just that they managed to get decent results despite being badly equipped for it).

[kashyapc]

I see; thanks for expanding on it so honestly.