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blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
83
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Eric "I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me" Weinstein:

    Invite me back to Harvard as the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project in the @HarvardEcon department and I will give a talk on how this really works. You don’t have to pay me a cent if you video it.

    I’ll cover:

    The need to fire Claudine Gay.

    The need to end activist studies depts.

    University Bioweapon research

    String Theory

    CPI Cost of Living

    Evolutionary theory applied to Humans

    Low Dimensional Geometry

    NSF STEM Shortage Panics

    DEI hiring against merit

    Epstein and Science

    Cognitive abilities expectations in Geographicly widely separated populations.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Hossenfelder starts her "Summary" section thusly:

    I have shown here how the assumption that matter and geometry have the same fundamental origin requires the time evolution of a quantum state to differ from the Schrödinger equation.

    This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:

    What I am assuming here is then that in the to-be-found underlying theory, geometry carries the same information as the particles because they are the same. [...] Concretely, I will take this idea to imply that we have a fundamental quantum theory in which particles and their geometry are one and the same quantum state.

    Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.

    I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, it's a bad implementation of that premise. She doesn't have a model; she has a pathological "fix" to a problem of her own making.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • I am still staying away from YouTube, so I am happily cut off from the bulk of her content. But when she teases a video with the phrase

    People in Western countries are having fewer kids

    I reserve the right to say "yikes".

    Oh, and she has podcasted with sex pest Lawrence Krauss, multiple times ("What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence").

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • That passage of Hossenfelder's jumped out at me, too. It's a laughably bad take about the implications of Bell's theorem that ignores how just about every interpretation of quantum mechanics has responded to Bell-inequality violations, and it attempts to sanewash superdeterminism.

    Not her first time doing that...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Also, the focus on geometry feels anachronistic; a century ago she could have proposed a geometric explanation for why nuclei stay bound together and completely overlooked gluons.

    She wrote a whole book about how physicists have deluded themselves by pursuing mathematical "beauty", and now she's advocating "everything is geometry".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Hey, remember Sabine Hossenfelder? The transphobe who makes YouTube videos? She published a physics paper! Well, OK, she posted a thing to the arXiv for the first time since January 2024. I read it, because I've been checking the quant-ph feed on a daily basis for years now, and reading anything else is even more depressing. It's vague, meandering glorp that tries to pretty up a worldview that amounts to renouncing explanation and saying everything happens because Amon-Ra wills it. Two features are worth commenting upon. The acknowledgments say,

    I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself.

    "Tee hee, I shut off my higher brain functions" is a statement that should remain in the porn for those who have a fetish for that.

    And what literature does Hossenfelder cite? Well, there's herself, of course, and Tim Palmer (one of those guys who did respectable work in his own field and then decided to kook out about quantum mechanics). And ... Eric Weinstein! The very special boy who dallied for a decade before writing a paper on his revolutionary theory and then left his equations in his other pants. Yes, Hossenfelder has gone from hosting a blog post that dismantled "Geometric Unity" to citing it as a perfectly ordinary theory.

    If she's not taking Thielbux, she's missing an opportunity.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • "Everyone who believes this lives in San Francisco" is the pure poetry of self-owns.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Translator's note: kaikaku means flan

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • A spectre is haunting Silicon Valley. The spectre of getting force-femmed by diamondoid bacteria.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Musk’s Grokipedia — Grok AI rewrites Wikipedia

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  • With Grok, Grokipedia aims for maximum truth through first principles and physics.

    Fuck you.

    Signed,

    a physicist