Comments by "" (@kunibald128) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

  1. Ok but first (minute 05:17) we are told that capitalism is a system that works "without anyone needing to have an overview" and this is why it is "pure genius", then we are offered multiple demonstrations that extensive overview and supervision by governments, including drastic economic intervention (such as imposing a price on carbon), is absolutely required to make it work. Is this not a contradiction? Perhaps we would better accept from the start that invisible hands are not to be trusted for the achievement and maintenance of the common good.
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  2. Sabine I think that if there was a misunderstanding it probably originated from the sentence at 3:34 "I do not want to pay for it." This comes across as the cornerstone of the video and it really sounds like an endorsement of the trend that you now say you only meant to describe without endorsing.
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  3. ​ @vicnighthorse  No, the "profit motive" is not a universal necessity. Many endeavours in human history (including but not limited to many scientific discoveries) have been driven by entirely different motivations, such as (among others) genuine curiosity and love of the truth. The idea that personal profit is at the basis of every human behaviour is nothing more than a working assumption, which does explain several aspects of reality, but definitely not all of them.
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  4. ​But why should we starve? If less work is needed to produce the same goods, why can't we just work less and leave everything else unchanged?
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  5. ​ @SabineHossenfelder  But would not this line of argument apply to literally everything that is currently being paid by taxes? Public spending is needed in some areas and education (from basic school to PhD) is one of them.
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  6.  @SabineHossenfelder  Thank you for your reply. Now you have clarified that with "I do not want to pay for it" you meant: "I understand that some people are angry that their taxes are funding some mediocre research." It is perhaps true that some publicly funded research is mediocre, but the example chosen in this video is very bad because (by your admission): 1) The work in question may not be mediocre. 2) Many of the people who are angry at it formed their opinion in an irrational way, merely triggered by a set of keywords. From these premises, the logical and most educational conclusion should be to call out the angry people for their fallacy and try to explain why often research that is seemingly useless is instead actually useful. Then again, do expose (if you wish and as you have done in the past) examples of actually mediocre research, strictly limited to the field where you are in a position to express such judgement, but please always make sure to put a very clear and explicit distance between those examples (on which you can offer solid arguments and knowledge) and the examples on which the public is forming irrational opinions on. They simply are not examples of the same phenomenon and conflating them together in one single discourse is highly dangerous (in my opinion).
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  7. ​ @alexanderlau770  You make an important point, although I am not sure that a money incentive for reviewers would resolve the issue. Academics generally do not need more money, they need more time (less duties of all sorts). Also, many qualified academics are forced out of academia (due to shortages of open positions) and thence are lost to the reviewing system, aggravating the situation. Both problems would be resolved by hiring/retaining more people.. so in the end it is indeed a money problem, but at a much broader and more systemic level (in my opinion at least).
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  8. Sabine, I have not understood why you say that eternal inflation must also have had a beginning at some finite time in the past. My understanding of this theory is quite limited, but what I get is that it should, on large scales (much larger than any individual universes), more or less resemble a de Sitter model (spatially flat with Omega_Lambda = 1). Under these conditions the expansion law is a pure and simple exponential, it does not admit any beginning or singularity and more in general there is nothing special about any point in time.
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  9. ​@vladimirnadvornik8254 Only at a very superficial level. If you want to go deeper, you need to formulate hypotheses in a mathematical language, then conduct experiments to test them.
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  10.  @vicnighthorse  I may have misinterpreted your words. I have no interest in arguing with you specifically, so I will reply not to contradict you but to refine my earlier observation and perhaps even find a common ground with you. I obviously agree that greed predates capitalism. It is however a distinctive trait of our epoch and in particular of our capitalistic civilization to organise our societies under the assumption that the maximization of individual profit is the main driver of everyone's behaviour. Perhaps this is not your own thought (happy to learn that) but it is a very widespread view, which has a negative impact on many apsects of our societies, including (among many others) the way academia and scientific research are organised.
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  11. Indeed, as a model of the Universe, we don't need it to be expensive, as long as it is expansive!
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  12. My opinion is highly subjective and is not meant to be disrespectful, but I have the impression that Sabine's take on this one is almost borderline with populism. Again I may be wrong but these are the steps that I see in this video and make me think of that: 1) Take a complex subject which for some (usually irrational) reason has come to be hotly debated by the public despite most people being illiterate about it. 2) Present a superficial analysis of the subject (in this case, drawing conclusions on an entire thesis based on its abstract), mainly in the direction of reinforcing the public sentiment, especially when it is negative. 3) Apply wild generalizations (in this case, from this thesis to the whole academia) and on this basis declare without an actual proof the existence of a huge problem or even an emergency. 4) Suggest drastic and simplicistic solutions that may superficially sound satisfying to the laymen but cannot work in practice (in this case, cutting public funding to fundamental research).
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  13. Thank you for speaking the truth about the cookies, indeed my grandma is very upset that also this year she didn't get the prize. It is a scandal!
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  14. These would be good suggestions for a thesis in science, not for literature.
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  15. Top culinary metaphors in this one!
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  16. This is an interesting remark, but I thought that massive particles could also be entangled. Am I mistaken? What would the explanation be in that case?
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  17. For the record, "Swiss cheese" models of the Universe do indeed exist, they are used to study the effects of inhomogeneities (compact mass concentrations within large voids) primarily on the propagation of light.
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  18. Wow, I was never a fan of Elsevier but did not expect them to publish this level of rubbish. I am astonished and seriously concerned.
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  19. @JamesLevineAndSons Legit point, but what is then your take on Sabine's main argument? Reading the account of this traveller is an experience that you have directly made by yourself and you need to make sense of this experience of yours in one way or another. If you maintain that the Earth is flat you should also necessarily conclude that this person is a liar. Is this your position on the matter?
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  20. Jokes apart, Sabine is totally right here. More in general, I find it very concerning that we don't seem to be able to see the difference between science and technology anymore.
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  21. We need more of those public funds to be used for actually retaining qualified academics inside academia (instead of forcing them out of the system after a few years). In this way we will have more qualified reviewers available (paid by their salaries as Sabine said). This would also alleviate the publish-or-perish nonsense and thence reduce the number of papers of dubious quality to be reviewed to start with.
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  22. I have not understood the key point here. How would we know that the vibration was caused by a graviton rather than by a classical (non-quantized) gravitational wave?
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  23. If we do not have free will we also cannot choose whether to act as if we had it or otherwise.
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  24. But why should every participant country aim to eventually be able to build the entire machine in house from scratch? What would be wrong with each participant specializing in the production of some components and then exchanging them with other equally important parts produced by the others?
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  25.  @yeboi5478  I agree with you, the Industrial Revolution was certainly a net good for humanity as a whole, but it should not be idealized either. Also during that period a countless number of lives were lost, or made utterly miserable, in completely preventable ways.
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  26. I guess that the proponents of this theory could object that perhaps the purpose is not to fool anyone, but just to do an experiment, and perhaps it does not take much effort to the authors of the experiment to do so. I nonetheless very much agree with you that the entire idea is ridiculous, I would say because of Ockham's razor: in the considered scenario an objective reality exists somewhere anyways, so why can't it just be ours, especially in the absence of any indication whatsoever of the contrary? I find the hypothesis wholly unmotivated and unnecessary and have not yet understood whether its proponents truly find it plausible or they just think it is something cool or original to say.
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  27.  @Brooofs  We have no memory of how we got here but in most cases our parents do!
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  28. "Democratically flooded with crap" is an excellent description of our civilization.
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  29. A real solipsist would never tell anyone because of course it would not make any sense to do so.
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  30. Simple answer: you can move some matter with your mind and specifically what is connected to your brain by your nervous system.
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  31. ​ @incognitotorpedo42  You could take a look, for instance, at Chile in 1970-1973, when people tried to pursue a very different path in a fully democratic way before being forced to abandon their chosen way forward precisely at gunpoint.
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  32. Respectfully I think that this argument is not correct. In the described scenario, our presence within reality does not cause it, it simply adds to it the property of being perceived.
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  33. Sure it is very late to start taking any of these measures. Still better late than never I guess.
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