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"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard"
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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I think she leaned a bit too heavily onto the notion that string theorists, as a whole, were lying. I think more likely they genuinely thought they were on to something. They may have been wrong but they didn't think they were wrong. A lie is deliberate misinformation, not simply being mistaken.
Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with "it's not a lie if you actually believe it," in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like "Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing..." is so gross. It's like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.
That's 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?
This was a half-cocked and not through rant that others and blames a whole group of hard working physicists just because they were wrong. This kind of rant has no place in the scientific process or science communication.
That's like saying NDT is "one astrophysicist" or Freud is "one psychologist". We're talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he's sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn't bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.
None of them wrote books that said "Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do". Fuck, just make another thread asking "What do y'all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?" and you'll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.
Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I'll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.
Yeah, again, if she has a problem with Brian Greene or specific people, call them out, don't slander an entire branch of physicists. Most of them were working very hard on the math and theory to try and figure out if there was anything that could be testable, for those who even understood their field well enough to realize how important that was.
No, you and her are just lashing out and looking for someone to blame for a distrustful public. How about you both take a step back and notice that not every western country is as science-phobic as the US, and maybe there are other issues at play (like having a shitty public education system for one).
Again, if you want to huff and puff and get all red in the face at someone that's fine, but name specific people who you think lied and say why, don't just cattily say "it was all of them"
Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don't remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.
Which is why the funding mechanism of science is so profoundly unscientific. Funding must be based on the quality of the experimental process, not positive results.
I'd go further, and say that most scientific papers are profoundly unscientific: without the data and analysis process they base their claims on, most papers are no different than just saying "believe me, I'm a scientist".
There are some honorable exceptions, of papers which publish accompanying data and the tools they used to process it, but the vast majority don't.
The fact that negative results don't get published at all, is just disrespecting the word "science". One of its basic premises is that of falsability, so proving a theory wrong, is just as valuable as proving a different one right.
To be a fly on the wall when he heard about the reproducibility crisis
science is a liar sometimes
@FaceDeer @interolivary What is this in relation to? I am still trying to figure out mastodon
@admin I'm viewing this thread from a kbin instance, not Mastodon. It's a threaded discussion in the style of Reddit. https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org/t/91867/string-theory-lied-to-us-and-now-science-communication-is should show it as I'm seeing it. The community is actually on beehaw.org, so it's posted via Lemmy.
I know that Kbin and Mastodon interact, but honestly I'm a little unclear on the details myself. I thought I had to go to the "microblogging" tab for the Mastodon stuff.
I've got an account on kbin too, just out of curiosity. Mastodon posts (what's the Mastodon equivalent of a tweet?) end up over on microblogging, but people on Mastodon can see "regular" posts too so they are often in the comments.
No idea how these comments show up on Mastodon, I don't use it. "Microblogging" just isn't my thing
I don't have a lot to contribute to the overall discussion, but I've seen Mastodon's version of tweets called toots.
@interolivary @GreyEyedGhost Toot!
@GreyEyedGhost @interolivary Sorry 😅 I just Tooted!
https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org/t/91867/string-theory-lied-to-us-and-now-science-communication-is