• 43 Posts
  • 858 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 27th, 2023
  • blakestacey@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025English
    13·
    1 day ago

    People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don’t think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

    When Devereaux writes,

    without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt […] But because there’s no giant ‘history formula,’ no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don’t work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

    I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an “explanation” which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

    That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

    I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025English
    14·
    7 days ago

    From Yud’s remarks on Xitter:

    As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn’t actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

    Well, not with that attitude.

    You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

    If “wearing masks” really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think ™.

    you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who’d like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

    zoom and enhance

    g-factor

    <Kill Bill sirens.gif>

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