Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.

No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.

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cauch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.

	▲	grebc an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.

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smallmancontrov 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?

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chongli 5 hours ago | parent [-]

And that's the reason she's wrong?

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cauch 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).

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chongli 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc).

Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.

	▲	cauch 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You said > No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe. Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it. I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.

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Arainach 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.

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devmor 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.

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nobodyandproud 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They were testable, no?

	▲	fragmede 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, we can test it, but you'll need to give me a ton of money in order for me to test it.
	▲	Nextgrid 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)