Comments by "John Luetjen" (@jehl1963) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

  1. I'm waiting for Google to add context to this video since the subject is controversial and at least one side is based on imaginary arguments.
    244
  2. Well summarised, Sabine! By coincidence, I'm about rhe same age as the semiconductor industry, and have enjoyed working in that industry (in various support roles) my entire life. I've been blessed to have worked with many bright, creative people in that time. In the end ,I hope that I've been able to contribute too. Kids! Spend the time to learn your math, sciences, and management skills, and then you too can join this great quest/campaign/endevor.
    52
  3. Excellent discussion of the subject. Thank-you. A couple of points merit mentioning though, to bound the discussion and provide some perspective. 1) Just because scientists newly discover something does not make it new. Only the observation is new. The biologica phenomena (in the case) has probably been going on for millennia. 2) If scientists, doctors and medical professionals, and engineers all do their jobs diligently and professionally, society will work through it. But this does require the relevant members of society to master the discrete and challenging subjects of math, physics, biology, and other "hard sciences". 3) Finally, life has always been, and remains fatal. Stopping death is not achievable. If it is not Bird Flue, it will be COVID, heart attack, inhaling smoke, or maybe a crazy neighbor or jilted lover. The important thing is the quality of life. While focusing on your own quality of life only impacts 1 person, being gracious and contributing to the quality of life of others impacts countless people, and two or three around you doing this will impact you more than you yourself can achieve. What does this have to do with bird flu? Wars, disease, famines, and suffering will always be with us. Don't be alarmed. Focus on doing what you can, and helping those around us.
    38
  4. Excellent coverage of the subject. Being interested in history, I always cringe when people say that people didn't live as long as they do now. Based on family records I know that even 400 years ago, most of the people in my family tree were living into their 70's and beyond. But as you point out there were a lot of infants who died too. My Dad, in his 80's used to tell me that each year his doctor would tell him that he's expected to live another year. My Dad on the other hand also liked to quote 100+ year old George Burns, who once quipped "At my age, I don't buy green bananas".
    29
  5. Yup. In many respects, I think that highlights the difference between science and Engineering. A lot of engineering resources are invested in incremental improvements. It may not be glamourous, but it is meaningful. Just by constantly smoothing out the rough edges in process, important gains are made. Let's hear it for all of those engineers, technicians, operators and staff who continue to make constant improvements!
    25
  6. I work in the semiconductor industry. If a young engineer in my industry were to show up with a similar analysis to justify a $100,000 investment -- he'd be cut-off in mid-presentation and told to go back and do the appropriate SPC calculations before returning to ask for monetary support. If a civil or mechanical engineer presented a similar level of analysis to justify a bridge design or an airplane part, it would be almost criminal. But yet here we are, making government and societal investments of trillions of dollars based on what was shown in the video. This is painful to watch!
    20
  7. This is why I watch Sabine's channel.
    20
  8.  @BB-yf6tm  The end does not justify the means. If the math doesn't support a certain conclusion, you can't wish away the math because of how important it is. If it is that important, the math has to support the conclusion. To do otherwise is delusional.
    16
  9. @Costa_Conn  Sure. Quantitative is science. Qualitative is opinion or a wish.
    14
  10. The sense of betrayal over the admission about the climate paper I find curious. What was he betraying? I thought Science was all about utility. Either the conclusions in the paper accurately predict a future outcome, or they don't. Emotions like betrayal should not enter into the discussion. The fact that they do reveals that the person or people who feel betrayed were holding a secret which the other person ( in this case the auther) revealed. This inadvertently gives credence to what the author revealed. If it was simply a case of scholarly disagreement, those who disagreed would have merely published a rebuttal with data and an explanation of how their competing model predicts the outcome better. But this was not done.
    14
  11. ​@odellm Well summarized. People just assume that a straight democracy is better, but that often leads to a tyranny of the majority. But the electoral college forces candidates to chase electoral votes in both big and small states, urban and rural voters. That is a good thing.
    13
  12. At 0:15 Sabine points out that the idea of a universe especially tailored to life is sometime used as support for the idea of a creator. Personally I always thought this was a weak argument, since our existence in a universe which is "hostile", or at least not tailored to life would almost be a stronger argument for a creator. The reason is that if the statistical probability is against our existence, then the fact that we do exist stands against the odds. This is the same problem that I see with the concept of "random evolution". Given the relatively low probability of chemicals spontaneously organizing themselves into humans (and Australian Lungfish, New Caledonian fork ferns and the Gymnosporangium confusum to name a few) in the 4.5B years of the Earth's existence, what other models can explain this? Yes it happened, but the odds are massively against it. Now we learn that the odds of the Universe being amenable to life are also pretty long. So it seems that the secular "godless" universe model is becoming more and more improbable. BTW -- I don't expect a scientific proof of God. There is never going to be one (at least until God chooses to reveal himself). Until then faith will be required, although Pascal's Wager is an interesting probabilistic exercise.
    13
  13. The expression "making money" often confuses people about the idea of creating wealth. Mining Bitcoin doesn't create wealth any more than the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing does. The US BEP can print far more money than they do now, but that won't make the nation, nor it's citizens any richer. In many cases, it will wipe out their savings (wealth) by devaluing the US Dollar. The same applies to bitcoin mining. It doesn't create any wealth since it doesn't create any value for anyone. Nobody is fed, clothed or sheltered by the bitcoin that is being produced. It is a fiat currancy. Wealth is only created by producing value, not currancy. Producing currancy without a corresponding increase in value merely produces inflation.
    12
  14. I think the fact that the paper was 57 pages long was to discourage people from reading it.
    12
  15. Very interesting and well presented. Having been a "Travelling Salesman", and managed inventory in warehouses, I think I'm qualified to provide a real-world response to the idea of using quantum computing to calculate the ideal solution to those problem. Yes, it can and and will do so, "...but at the end of the day..." it's most likely not going to make a world-changing improvement? Why? Because of diminishing returns, and the corollary to the idea of "diminishing returns", which is "other factors". Diminishing returns: Having planned my daily sales routes using different software packages, I quickly came to the conclusion that it is far simpler -- and just as effective -- to avoid planning bad routes. Mathematically -- if there are N! possible routes for N stops to be made, there are usually just a few "bad" routes. For example always moving from one stop to the furthest available next stop. Don't do that! Once you have eliminated the bad routes, the rest of the routes often have very similar values, and the downside risk of picking any of them is very small. So "at the end of the day", it doesn't matter which you pick since the difference between them may only be a few minutes of travel time. And given that any particular customer visit may have a variance of 10-15 minutes, saving a minute in travel time will not make a difference in the time that you arrive back at the hotel at the end of the day. This brings me to the "other factors". In a world where optimization yields diminishing returns, other factors can quickly trump the benefits of sophisticated optimization techniques. In the example given above, a talkative customer, or maybe some unexpected news of a potentially big deal (which is why I was visiting customers in the first place!) may cause me to chuck my day's plan in order to spend more time with that customer. In the case of warehousing, you may spend countless hours calculating the ideal locations for parts based on their size, weight, value and projected activity level, only to be faced with stocking the next fad product (Look! Pet rocks! A Mood ring! Slime!!!) which will suddenly cause you to throw the whole scheme out and start again. It is impossible to predict the next fad product, in either the commercial realm, nor in industrial products. There is a world of unknowns out there waiting to jump up at some unpredictable time and ruin your ideal solution. So maybe the best solution is to not get too heavily invested in any solution, and instead focus on avoiding the stupid solutions. This could be summed up by saying "Just don't do anything stupid". There are evolutionary benefits to just not getting yourself fired/killed/eliminated, and living to fight another day.
    11
  16. Yes, unfortunately the quality of scientific research (especially in the social sciences) has not covered itself in glory given the lack of repeatability and the documented instances of plagerism and data falsification, especially among the supposed leaders of the scholorly community. So I'm pretty skeptical of the scholoarship. I don't need a scholar to tell me if it's raining outside. I can see the effects of constant social media use on young people. In the case of Facebook, I could see what it was doing to my life, so I've steered away from it.
    10
  17. After 200 years I'm still waiting for Thomas Malthus (or anyone else) to admit that he was wrong. But in the meantime the worlds population and average standard of living has just gone up and up since he made his predictions, and we have more food and energy today than we ever have had before. I find it curious that so many people latch on to consistently disproven ideas. But it is unfortunately very clear that then there is power is scaring people.
    10
  18. I admit that I almost turned it off after the first 5 minutes. I'm happy that I didn't. Sabine does a masterful job of letting him talk himself deeper and deeper into his logic hole - just by asking factual, math based questions.
    9
  19. I now have learned that my mind is not expanding with the universe. Oh well...
    8
  20. "...without some editor spitting into the soup." Most likely the best mixed-metaphor I've ever heard! 🤣🤣🤣
    7
  21. By chance, I watched a video earlier today from Thomas Sowell about "Why intellectuals can't survive at room temperature." It enlightens this whole subject quite a bit.
    6
  22. At about 4:00 you mention "...using strong magnetic fields..." Uh...yeah. Just like that someone conjures up a magnetic field strong enough to locally overwhelm a star's magnetic field, which can be created in an economical (speaking in terms of energy) fashion. Yeah...
    6
  23. @BenjaminGoose  I don't know. To me, the quality of the study is more important than who produced it. The best way to measure the quality is to have the study callenged by attempts to replicate it or falsify it. If neither of those two steps has been done, I'd take the study as worth a grain of salt.
    6
  24.  @Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters  Yes. It's unfortunate that half of any distribution will be less than the average. But it is a mathematical reality.
    6
  25. Where to start? First off -- the study was biased by starting with a presumed political position: Anthropological climate crisis is real, and you are wrong if you don't believe it. Now let's see why you believe wrongly. A neutral study would have tested believers and deniers equally about how they reached their conclusions, their understanding of the science and their attitudes towards otther viewpoints. Such a study would then help people to understand how and why each group reached the conclusions that they did. That would be far more meaningful then a study trying to confirm the bias that deneiers are scientifically ignorant and closed minded. Come on Sabine; I expect better from you!
    6
  26. An unproveable trueth is irrelevent. It's impossible to separate an unproveable truth from a falsehood.
    6
  27. I'm confused by the Maxwell's demon analogy. That's like saying that I can reverse entropy by setting up a plant that separates hydrogen from oxygen in our atmosphere, thus creating "clean energy". That is only true if you ignore the energy required to perform the process. The reality is that it takes more energy to separate the gasses than can be recovered by letting them recombine. Maxwell's demon only reverses entropy if you ignore the energy consumed by the demon while it is performing its sorting tricks.
    5
  28. Here I thought this was about the "Doomsday clock" running out of money.
    5
  29. Yeah. as Sabine suggests, I agree that we'll continue to get more sophisticated tools (i.e. better translation software or software that can get us a head start at translating ancient languages, software that can give us a good start when asked good questions, etc.), but actual intelligence is still a long way away. As Sabine eludes to at about 0:16, even humans after millions of years of development have a hard time with intelligence. So no, I don't think that it's a handful of years away. Also, I think the Bible had it right in Genesis (not to mention Arthur C. Clark in 2001) when it suggests that with intelligence must come a knowledge of good and evil -- and with that comes the opportunity to perform genuine evil deeds.
    4
  30. Yes, the decade with largest number of record high temperatures for each state occured in the 1930s (USA Today). By the way, the decade with the largest number of low temperatures... was also the 1930's (Also USA Today). Last week when Boston was having high temperatures of ~95F, all of the news organizations were reporting that it was a "Record Heat wave". Since when is a summertime temperature of 95 a record in Boston? A couple of years ago I pulled the NOAA temperature data for Boston going back to the mid-1800's and calculated average and standard deviations up through 1950. When I then carried those forward to 2022, lo and behold -- there was no statistically significant warming. 97F is only about 2-sigmas above the average. Come on folks! DO THE MATH!!! Tracking weather based on averages and making straight light predictions is barely high-school level math. I expect better from our scientists and leaders.
    4
  31. I don't know about that last part. Historically, the long term planning capabilities of a one-party system have always been bad. It just comes down to simple math. A single person just can't process enough information to consistanly make good choices compared to countless individuals making decisions and developing competing solutions. This is where capitalism combined with democracy has always outperformed systems which are just capitalism without democracy or democracy without capitalism.
    4
  32. In the case of Rome, it wasn't that scientists and accademics were being targeted, but rather that the government authorities ran out of funding that they could drain from the economy, and the resulting failure to secure the boardes, which let in the various Germanics and other Barbarians.
    4
  33. Well done and fairly reported. You started to hint at one point which you didn't discuss. This is all premised on "what we know right now". So if you had presented this discussion in 1946, there would have been no discussion of Morton Salt reactors or other subjects. So for some to argue that (for example) "Nuclear is bad and we shouldn't use it" is only meaningful within the context of today's technology, which may change at any time. Also any discussion about "known reserves" of a resource should have the same caveat. People have been talking about "running out of oil" pretty much since the petroleum industry has been founded. But new technologies in discovery, extraction and processing keep moving that end date back. I'm sure that the same applies to uranium reserves.
    4
  34. Your best video yet Sabine! I even watched through the ad!!! Why? I think it was because you were learning about the subject as much as the viewers. I encourage you to please continue this in future videos. 👍👍
    4
  35. I'm sorry. Neil who??? I've gone my whole life ignoring him and I don't see anything here that tells me that I'm missing anything of value.
    4
  36. The majority of dark energy is made up of dark humor! 😅👍
    3
  37.  @__christopher__  True, but being born and raised in the US, but having spent considerable time in Germany knowing many cultural Germans, being of German background, etc. etc -- I can say that the center 50% of the bell-curve of cultural Germans have a tendency to be noticeably more direct in their speech than the similar distribution of culturally US people. It's not good or bad, just a difference in the expectations of communications within the two populations. If you reverse the question and ask cultural Germans about Americans, they will often tell you that Americans "beat around the bush", "don't say what the mean" and things like that.
    3
  38. The trite thinking in many modern "scientific:papers is amazing. I think that Sabine pretty well nailed it on the issues that should have been caught at peer review, if not earlier. Frankly, the analysis described is barely above the level of what I would expect from an under-grad.
    3
  39. @triftex8353  True. I kind of buried the main point. How much energy would be required to create a magnetic field of X Gauss, which would be capable of drawing off the required material. On that note, why not just create a huge coil and inductively draw electricity from the Star's magnetic field?
    3
  40. <sarcasm> Obviously, the airlines just need to hire the academics who produced the paper and -- voila! -- their pricing problems will be solved! Duh! <end sarcism>
    3
  41. The negative press is just jealousy. Economically speaking, Katy and her friends just reduced their net worth by some amount, and that money was spread across all of the engineers, technicians, administrators and other "little people" in the form of salary and wages. That was the free choice of Katy and friends, and to the benefit of the employees and suppliers of Blue Origin. I'm fine with it!
    3
  42. ​@olafsigurson5333 Is the universe really infinite? When you consider the dimension of time, there is an end -- at the beginning. Soecifically at the singularity. If you consider scale a dimension, there is also a boundry at the quantum level beyond which there is nothing.
    3
  43. Yeah! "Pahking your Cah at Hahvahd Yahd" is the timeworn knock on the Boston accent by the rest of the country. But true Bostonians understand that this represents, specific accent of the Back Bay and non-Jewish Brookline, and Irish population, and not representative of other neighborhoods and towns in the Boston area. ;-)
    3
  44. A well presented discussion of a difficult subject since I was able to follow it all along. It would seem (again) that we have reached a point where science has reluctantly concluded something which had been stated in the Bible at least 2 thousand years ago. For this I point you to 2 Pet.3:8: where the being who created the universe is described: "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.". So to an observer outside of space-time, the past present and future all exist. To many this is the realm of "Flying spaghetti monsters" and an example of how the Bible is a fantasy. But now hard science has concluded that the past, present and future all exist in the same way, as you describe at 12:00. You may not believe in God, but you have to accept the historical fact that this verse has existed in writing for almost 2000 years. The other "classic" example of this is the "Big Bang". The "Big Bang" was not proven until my lifetime, when the steady state universe was falsified, and the fact that it was not cyclical and was in fact a one-way-trip (at least for this space-time continuem) was only proven with the clarification of the cosmological constant in 1998. The properties of time that you discussed at 10:00 also help to resolve the apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2, and how both could be true. Strike another common complaint about the Biblical accounts.
    3
  45. In my professional life I often see people using models to try to pick the "right" or "optimum" to do. I've come to appreciate though that there may be 2 or 3 right solutions which are very different,. Even then you are looking for a few solutions out of countless real potential outcomes. Instead I've settled on turning that method on its head. Instead I now try to use models to identify the clearly boneheaded, wrong options to avoid. It's like multiple choice test taking theory. If I can go through life without making the most painfully wrong decisions, in the long run it will turn out ok. It also helps to minimize the effects of unintended consequences.
    3
  46. Sabine was in rare form for this video!
    3
  47. On the other hand, I suspect that this ability to see what isn't there -- but could be, is what drives humans' relentless creativity. For example, the person who can look at a block of marble, and see "David" in it, and than turns it into a reality. As Michelangelo(?) pointed out, he merely stripped away the excess material so that we could see the sculpture that already existed in the marble.
    3
  48. All in all a very well presented discussion of the subject. There were a few places where I was going to stop and start typing a rebuttal, but then you got to the point that I was going to say anyhow. In the end, I think this subject represents a microcosm of all of our existences. As someone wiser than me once pointed out: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." Keeping this universal plight in mind, it's also important that we refrain from trying to remove the speck from others' eyes when we are blinded by the log in our own eye. It's easy to preach to others about making greener choices that they should make -- as we look down on them from our SUV that is carrying merely a driver. Coal miners do not risk their lives deep in the earth merely because they don't care about the environment. They are also serving others who cannot access an affordable form of energy with which to heat their homes in the winter. Many of those involved in the realm of "Green causes" are more concerned with being seen as being a great person in front of a great cause, while they knowingly hide lies and deceit in the calculations that they know others won't or can't check. In the end we are sharing a journey on this small planet travelling through a vast and inhospitably universe. When we have the opportunity to help others, please do so. Don't willingly hurt others. Don't be greedy. Be loving and supporting of those you find around you, and appreciate others who do the same.
    3
  49. Great video Sabine. Putting all of the points together -- could 5G contribute to global warming by incrementally increasing the temperature of moisture in the air by small amounts over large areas? This will have a knock-on effect of causing the moisture to be dispersed to higher altitudes as it warms, causing a greater greenhouse effect.
    3
  50. This is some academic climate activist wet dream. The places in the US where homeowners can't renew their policies are the same places where insurance rates are government controlled. This limits the insurance industry's ability to accurately access and price risk. If the government gets out of managing an industry that it knows nothing about, the industry will do just fine. Besides, why should this climate prediction be any better than all of the other predictions frrom the last 30 years -- which have proven to be wrong. Florida and the Muldaves still exist, London is not under water. Life continues to go on.
    3