It's an organization with an unpredictable return on investment, in practice, they don't really have any negative consequences if they waste public money, or if it was actually useless (unless too obvious to external people).
It's somewhat part of investing into experimental science.
Sabine really represents the “apathetic disillusioned” - no hope for fundamental physics. I left after we discovered the Higgs based on similar observations, there was too much invested in group think. If you have to raise $50B to ask “what happens if…” then the “if” has to be damned likely, or you have to share the risk with a large group.
My own conclusion, back then, was that the collider paradigm had run its course. Without economical tools, and no theory to guide experiments, the field was stuck.
I’m not apathetic though, and believe there are ways for both theories and experiments to break the stall.
Theory could dig into the backlog of shortcuts and dirty tricks, that underlines the machinery of QFT, are there other ways of probing the quantum fields?
Experimentalists can at the least get behind novel acceleration schemes like laser plasma wake fields, to reduce the massive capital risk of conducting model-free searches for new signatures. Or as the theorists, hunt for alternative ways to “excite the quantum fields”.
This may
Not be recipes, but as a community Particle physics has been way to focused on chasing resonances with ever larger machines.
I think that there are two problems here: one with physics and another with society. I'm somewhat familiar with academic world, and what she (and the letter) say about career scientists who optimize for formal metrics without any regard for any real scientific value strikes too close to home. They value complacency above else, original ideas and challengers to incumbents are driven away, and nobody really cares if studies replicate or data is massaged, whereas being even remotely ideologically impure kills your career instantly. I think society across the globe slowly starts to realize this state of affairs, and the backlash against science as a whole will be enormous.
In the eyes of the taxpayers, there's not that much of a difference between particle physicists who have been spending billions of dollars on bigger and bigger colliders, and psychologists who popularized non-replicating studies based on a sample of 35 university students but refused to touch IQ (one of the most, if not replicated psychology concepts ever), or biologists who invented new species out of thin air based on the most minuscule differences between population just to stop a development project they oppose for ideological reasons. All of this will cause severe backlash. Baby will be thrown out with the bathwater, trust and funding for science as a whole will suffer for decades.
There's one big difference to taxpayers: the psychologists and biologists don't cost billions of dollars.
National funding agencies are fundamentally in the business of choosing "this not that" because of the constraints of finite funding. Just like with VC math, it's difficult to imagine the benefits of the billion dollar collider outweigh the opportunity cost of investing in a large nation's worth of researchers to explore smaller, cheaper ideas.
That's too specific a message, with too much nuance, to try and get to the general public. When trust in science is going down, its going down as a whole.
The current US Presidential administration is in the process of throwing the entire bathroom out, tub and all. We're going to have substantially less reliable data over the next decade.
Thankfully, we have more than one country in the world, and we can compare outcomes when different countries pursue different strategies. Results may surprise. 2,5 years ago I, as the rest of HN, was sure that Twitter wouldn't be able to function in a few months after layoffs, but here we are.
I did not see many people betting real money on twitter not running, did you? You have have to filter out the momentary hype.
> The current US Presidential administration is in the process of throwing the entire bathroom out, tub and all.
Are they, maybe, I have not seen any popularized document detailing their plans and they are taking large steps that will have consequences. Since there is not well popularized plan uncertainty and doubt is filling that void, a consequence which is easy to anticipate(as are some consequences of uncertainty and doubt).
> We're going to have substantially less reliable data over the next decade.
With no well popularized plan, hard to tell, and even harder because there are people hard at work on their own vision of the future that do not 100% line up with the current administration's plans and those people will influence the next decade as well.
Yes, here we are; I spend almost no time there now since every time I drop by all I see is political noise and culture wars. Most people I used to follow now either take part in the shit show or have lost interest in posting.
Huh. I found myself nodding along, perhaps a bit hesitant to jump into conclusions[0], but then she drops from a final emotional outburst straight into... a sponsorship segment pushing some bullshit anti-data-broker data broker service. Feels like VPNs all over again, and I honestly can't treat the earlier parts of the video seriously anymore.
I've seen her writings here and there over the years, and I remember she was generally respected as an opinionated expert. What happened?
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[0] - I've seen my share of dramas which started with a message like this video, and where I thought I had a good picture, until some time later some critical details came to light and I ended up flipping my stance on it 180°.
Are things going that bad for scientists these days?
(I'm not just reacting to the existence of a sponsorship section alone - more to the choice of the sponsor, the presentation, and the very juxtaposition of a "trust me while I quote from private conversation" and "this video was sponsored by a data broker company".)
She wraps up the video and unofficially tells people to leave via 'let me know in the comments', then speaks unemotive capitalist brand advertisement speak about a product, and the video ends. I honestly can't see the merit in your performative outrage here. It's very clearly known why people take advertisement deals, and its placement here is after all the content concluded.
You can find ways to dismiss opinions you don't like, but targeting individual contributors that use sponsorships to maintain or alleviate financial stability is an interesting attack. I guess if that's your only critique, you have no claims to any other negative critique about her points? Just a literal ad hominem? "What happened" to actual discourse?
> You can find ways to dismiss opinions you don't like, but targeting individual contributors that use sponsorships to maintain or alleviate financial stability is an interesting attack.
> Just a literal ad hominem?
I do not read what in the comment as an attack, but an outsider to the field trying to judge the opinion they are absorbing.
Some people are going to expect an experts to have an outside money stream that comes from their expertise so in video adds are not necessary. That is not a heuristic that is going to be right 100% of the time, but is is not the worst heuristic or an attack.
I can understand an expert moving to science communication / popularization, and I understand what the trappings of such enterprise are. However, the creators have a choice in what they advertise and how they do it, and the choices they make reflect on them and on how their message is received.
I'd say, my own emotions aside, she made a pragmatic mistake here - first delivering a quite powerful bomb that she explicitly acknowledges we need to trust her about (as it's an excerpt of a private conversation, not possible to independently verify), only to tell us - also explicitly - that the video was sponsored by a company. This is the kind of stuff you find in late-stage capitalism jokes, or movies about corporate utopia where this juxtaposition is exaggerated for effect. I did not see it coming, and I struggle to understand why it did.
But more generally, while I wouldn't describe it as "targeting individual contributors that use sponsorships to maintain or alleviate financial stability", I do believe that what kinds of sponsorships people choose and how they fulfill the sponsor's conditions does directly reflect on trustworthiness of the entire message - to think otherwise would be to believe that humans are capable of compartmentalizing their activities into high-integrity and low-integrity parts, which is something I don't believe humans are capable of over long-term. Maybe I'm wrong about that - if psychology says it's normal, then perhaps I need to reconsider my heuristic. But if I'm right, then this is directly on-topic and I believe it's right to bring it up, to the extent the creator/speaker is asking the audience to take them on trust. Aka. on authority. Which means it applies doubly so to the experts - their choice of what and how they advertise matters more, because they're lending their credibility to both the message and the ad that pays for it.
> I'd say, my own emotions aside, she made a pragmatic mistake here - first delivering a quite powerful bomb that she explicitly acknowledges we need to trust her about (as it's an excerpt of a private conversation, not possible to independently verify), only to tell us - also explicitly - that the video was sponsored by a company. This is the kind of stuff you find in late-stage capitalism jokes, or movies about corporate utopia where this juxtaposition is exaggerated for effect. I did not see it coming, and I struggle to understand why it did.
I agree here. I would say historically this was a more common view. What I observe is that more people are disregarding this and it is in part due to feedback loops between the very large audiences that web platforms provide today and the creator. If you message connects with a large enough group of people with enough loyalty/trust(that say weird sponsor messages do not effect there viewership) you can safely disregard the rest of audience to a large degree. Delivering with emotions, "delivering a quite powerful bomb"s, etc help build that loyal group of followers but also lead to a feedback cycle that can make things more one side/hyperbolic/etc.
This has a knock on effect in people, at least those like me, who now devalue many similar emotional pleas without evidence for both good and ill. After all if people are incentivized to be delivering impassioned speeches and "bomb"s, statistically there are going to be more people who do so inappropriately, sometimes it seems somewhat normalized just due to how much I see it. To me the message she delivered had little to no impact on me because it was not delivered with either reasonable evidence or at least a start of a plan or solution to the issue she is describing. This knock on effect just makes things worst to some extent though since creators already in that feedback loop have even less incentive to reach out to someone like me because they have to overcome the additional barrier, and would not when the same level of loyalty even if they did.
> But if I'm right, then this is directly on-topic and I believe it's right to bring it up, to the extent the creator/speaker is asking the audience to take them on trust. Aka. on authority. Which means it applies doubly so to the experts - their choice of what and how they advertise matters more, because they're lending their credibility to both the message and the ad that pays for it.
I agree it is on topic and relevant, but it did not register to me at all in this video because the trust was lost when there was only the impassioned deliver without hard evidence or an action plan to help address the issue. It likely also does not register to those in the loyal impassioned group of followers either.
Independent of potential regulation, creating more high trust, potentially collaborative, sources of information seems like like a partial way to counter balance some of this.
I'm not trying to dismiss her opinion. I'm surprised to one day read her essays and watch some talks, and now suddenly discover she's became another YouTube influencer.
It would be merely off-putting if it was tacked onto a video about hard, verifiable facts - but to make a video that explicitly asks the audience to trust her on her world, and then end it by saying the video itself was sponsored by a company? Surely she's aware of the optics? Even the regular YouTube influencers usually know better and skip the sponsorship section when making a complaint video.
I'm also not committing an ad hominem here (if anything, maybe some adjacent fallacy). This is the lens through which I view all YouTube channels, and it applies here, and doubly so given that this is not a video about independently verifiable facts - it's all based about an e-mail she claims she received, and she acknowledges that directly. We have to trust her at her word.
Now, I don't know about you, but if someone in one moment tells me some information, and then in the next moment starts giving me "capitalist brand advertisement speak" about some dubious product, I'm going to take it as a sign that someone doesn't actually care about my well-being, as manipulating someone into a bad deal for profit is plain malice[0]. Additionally, I might question that person's integrity - depending on obviously they're knowingly pushing a bad product, or how indifferent they are to what they're promoting. Which, in turn, will make me question everything they just told me before - after all, if they just demonstrated they're fine with lies or bullshit now, why should I assume they held themselves to the highest standards of scientific and personal truth moments before?
I'm honestly done complaining over YouTube creators; I just accepted that many of the well-known pop-sci channels turned into content marketing schemes. At least I stopped being surprised by exaggerations and inaccuracies in the main parts. I commented this time only because I totally didn't expect to see a reputable scientist doing this kind of stuff.
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[0] - Yes, I stand firm on this, and yes, if you scale this view up, you end up considering the entire field of "marketing communication" (covering a subset of intersection of sales, marketing and advertising) as a cancer on modern society. I wrote an article about this some time ago, which I've been told has apparently popped up on HN last week.
You seem to somehow connect it to public spending. But "lost resources" happen in every kind of company and are just a function of size. A small office will lose some random notes, a data processing company will have a few TB hanging around due to forgotten cleanup processes. It just happens and one of the functions of your AWS TAM is to ask you sometimes about an unused bucket they noticed. The more you spend every month, the more things can become a rounding error in cost.
It's an organization with an unpredictable return on investment, in practice, they don't really have any negative consequences if they waste public money, or if it was actually useless (unless too obvious to external people).
It's somewhat part of investing into experimental science.