Thanks for the feedback on why my post did not make a good impression on you*. I’ll respond to each of your points individually. My responses are in bold.
It presents as new something that’s not new at all. (Maybe your specific take on the idea of multiple universes and the like is new, but you don’t say anything about what that specific take is.) E.g., there’s the “string theory landscape” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Leonard Susskind’s “The cosmic landscape”) and “eternal inflation” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Michio Kaku’s “Parallel worlds”, though I admit much of the book is about other things) and Tegmark’s “mathematical universe” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Tegmark’s own “Our mathematical universe”).
You said my post did not make a good impression on you* because “It presents as new something that’s not new at all.” My original point was that we don’t need to artificially limit ourselves to non-philosophical, universe-centric thinking, and there is some risk involved with censorship by the self-described “shut up and calculate” school of thought. (Yes, the term was initially coined by a critic, but many people now describe themselves as being in this group, like a sort of “badge of honor.”) I’ve read the books you suggested. I agree they are excellent. If my point was redundant with these books or other posts on LW, I apologize. It seems there is also some redundancy on LW when it comes to posts on AGI risk, and the problems that could result from closed or censored discussions on AGI risk. Yet I feel this redundancy has been handled somewhat differently than my own apparent redundancy.
Its complaints seem exaggerated. “Theocracy”, really? You complain here that you only said some scientists are “theocratic” and everyone wrongly assumed you meant science as a whole. But what “theocratic” (as opposed to, say, “religious”) means is that the people in charge, specifically, are driven by religion and probably suppressing all dissent. It makes no sense at all to say “these few people, a subset of a subset, are theocratic”. So of course you were taken to be making a claim about The Scientific Establishment more generally. Anyway, it seems very untrue that there’s anything like a theocratic prohibition on multiverse theories; the nearest thing to a theocracy in fundamental physics at present is the priesthood of string theory, and I think on the whole string theorists are for multiverses.
You describe my writing as “complaining,” and my discussion of risks as “complaints.” These words have an obvious negative connotation. Do you consider discussions about AGI risk to be full of “complaints,” or are they “valid concerns”? Why do you choose to use demeaning words to describe my concerns, but not the concerns of others? Also you say “...it seems very untrue that there’s anything like a theocratic prohibition on multiverse theories.” I don’t feel there’s a “theocratic prohibition” on multiverse theories, but I do feel there is a bias against, and some censorship of, multiverse theories and other philosophical outlooks on physics. I described this bias as being “theocratic” in the way physicists with this bias criticize and sometimes suppress the physicists who discuss “why” quantum phenomena might happen. I would encourage you to ask any multiverse theorist if they’ve ever encountered this bias. (And yes, string theory is one particular multiverse theory. I don’t think I said otherwise.)
The focus on “moderators of the physics subreddits” seems weird. Who cares about the moderators of the physics subreddits? (And why would Less Wrong be a suitable place to discuss their alleged deficiencies?)
My original post had only one sentence about reddit. Granted, reddit is not exactly a bastion of intellectual thought. However, it can be used to get a real-time impression of sentiment among a certain portion of society. I referred to “moderators of the physics subreddits” as an example of the bias against philosophical physics in action. I thought Less Wrong would be an appropriate place to discuss the bias against philosophical physics. The moderators were just a real-time example. I have no more desire to focus on reddit than you do. I didn’t know I would have to elaborate on that one sentence repeatedly in these follow-up posts/replies.
In fact, that focus strongly suggests a specific scenario: you have some theory of physics, you’ve been trying to promote it on Reddit, it hasn’t gone down well, and you’re annoyed about that. And, unfortunately for you, in the great majority of such cases the problem is not primarily with the Reddit moderators. Of course you might be the exception! But the expectation you’re setting up is not a good one.
Again, the word “annoyed,” is like the word “complained.” And again, would you describe people worried about AGI risk as being “annoyed” by it? Or would you choose words like “concerned” and “worried”? And there was indeed a specific scenario or reddit that disturbed me recently, but it didn’t have to do with me “promoting” an idea. It was a post in which someone asked if Brian Greene’s perspectives were “BS” and there was pile-on of people criticizing Brian’s ideas. Obviously, he doesn’t need me to defend him. Still, the scenario represents the problem I’m talking about. The issue is not a personal grudge, but rather it’s a broader issue of a bias against larger, philosophical outlooks in physics.
Taking a look at e.g. /r/physics, there is discussion of philosophy, multiverses, etc., from time to time. So if the Evil Theocratic Moderators are suppressing such discussion, they aren’t doing it very carefully.
I don’t think moderators are “evil.” Again, “evil” is an extreme and loaded word. Why not “biased”? Furthermore, your choice of capitalization in “Evil Theocratic Moderators” seems like an attempt to make me seem like I subscribe to something crazy and extreme. I imagine that it’s easier to paint me as extreme, and then criticize me for the alleged extremism, than it is to criticize any of my actual points. However, I would agree that this is just a bias I’m talking about, and not an all-out total censorship of all philosophical physics theories. There are indeed philosophical theories that make it through “from time to time,” as you noted.
Also:
I don’t think shminux’s assumption that you could stand to learn some fundamental physics rather than handwaving about it was unreasonable, whether or not it was correct. Your original post doesn’t read like it’s written by someone with substantial expertise.
As far as the advice to learn fundamental physics goes, I only mentioned my books on special and general relativity to convey that I do have an understanding of “some fundamental physics.” I would agree though that a person can always think more and more deeply about the basics. (For example, concepts like mass-energy and spacetime are almost infinitely interesting.) Also, I didn’t intend for my post to be like an academic physics paper. LW doesn’t seem like the right forum for that. I was only trying to discuss the idea of a supra-universal, philosophical approach to some physics phenomena, and the bias that exists against that approach.
Having self-published books about relativity is not strong evidence about whether a person has expertise in fundamental physics. (I actually suspect it may be evidence against.) Again, I am not claiming that you are a crank; I’m not in a position to judge. But the evidence we have available at present doesn’t give us much grounds for confidence that you’re not.
This is getting tiresome, but as before, your choice of wording seems a little passive aggressive when you say “I am not claiming that you are a crank; I’m not in a position to judge. But the evidence we have available at present doesn’t give us much grounds for confidence that you’re not.” Words like “crank, annoyed, complained” seem slightly disrespectful. However, you’re right that, in my original post, I also was disrespectful when I said “I’ve noticed a universe-centric perspective among some scientists that seems to almost amount to a sort of theocracy. For example, there is a subset of the quantum physics community who refer to themselves as the “shut up and calculate” faction. They dissuade people from asking “why” certain phenomena occur.” I agree that “theocracy” is a loaded word, like “crank, annoyed, complained” and “evil.”
As far as my books and evidence are concerned, DM me if you’d like a free PDF copy of one of the books, and I’ll send it to you. Then you can have more evidence to judge my knowledge of “fundamental physics” for yourself.
[EDITED to add:] Oh, one other thing: your profile gives a URL for your web page, but it is the wrong URL. The real one has .org on the end, not .com.
Nice catch.… thanks! I make that mistake all the time.
Finally, I’m not going to engage further, so please try to refrain from saying anything else that misrepresents or exaggerates my positions, as I won’t respond. If people want to know what I actually said in the original post, the follow up post, or this reply, all they need to do is look. In any case, I appreciated the discussion.
[EDITED: *I edited my original reply. Originally, I had written about why “you downvoted my post” when you (gjm) actually said you did not downvote my post. Sorry for the mistake. I was working on too many projects and replies at once, all while copying and pasting from a separate document. In order to fix the mistake, I have since changed “you downvoted my post” wording to “my post did not make a good impression on you” wording. I’m not familiar enough with LW to know if the platform will show the inline edits when I submit this edit. I hope it does, but if not, please know that I initially was incorrect on the downvoting versus “not a good impression” issue. I think the rest of my comments still stand though.]
Thanks for the feedback on your original downvote.
I was not offering “feedback on [my] original downvote”; there was no original downvote; as I already said, I did not downvote your earlier post. (Nor this one, nor any of your comments.)
You said you downvoted the original post because “It presents as new something that’s not new at all”.
No, I neither downvoted that post nor said I had. But I do think that that post presents as new something that isn’t new, and I stand by that.
My original point was that we don’t need to artificially limit ourselves to non-philosophical, universe-centric thinking
Sure. But when you post something saying “Isn’t it a mistake to think X?”, the implication even if you don’t say it explicitly is that people generally think X. No one is posting articles saying “Isn’t it a mistake to think that the sky is green?”.
You describe my writing as “complaining,” and my discussion of risks as “complaints.” These words have an obvious negative connotation. [...] Why do you choose to use demeaning words to describe my concerns, but not the concerns of others?
I didn’t particularly intend any negative connotation. (If you wanted to describe some of the things I said about your post as “complaints”, that would be pretty reasonable too.) The term certainly isn’t “demeaning”. Out of curiosity I put my own username and “complaint” into the LW search bar, and the first thing it found (which admittedly is from years back) is a comment of mine in which I describe myself as “whining” and having a “complaint”. Other search results also show me calling things “complaints” without any derogatory meaning. I think your, er, complaint here is just off-base; the demeaning you think you see is not real.
My original post had only one sentence about reddit.
Two, I think (the one after the one that explicitly contains the word “reddit” is surely continuing the thought of the previous one), out of only 12 sentences in the whole post, and the Reddit physics moderators are one of only two specific groups of people you call out as having a “theocratic” attitude. I don’t think my description of what you wrote is unreasonable.
Again, the word “annoyed”, is like the word “complained”.
Again, I didn’t intend it derogatorily. I get annoyed all the time. There is nothing wrong with getting annoyed (other than the fact that it’s an unpleasant experience).
someone asked if Brian Greene’s perspectives were “BS” and there was a pile-on of people criticizing Brian’s ideas.
It sounds as if you’re talking about this reddit discussion, … except that I had a look at it and I didn’t see a pile-on of people criticizing Brian Greene’s ideas.
I don’t think moderators are “evil”
The grandiose language and capital letters were intended as a signal that I wasn’t being terribly serious, and was neither stating my own opinion nor making actual claims about yours. I’m sorry if that came across as dismissive. (Also, I think that when you begin by calling something “theocratic” you lose the right to complain that others are presenting your position as extremist.) Anyway, the point is that discussions like e.g. the “is what Greene and Kaku say BS?” one do happen, despite being somewhat philosophical and speculative, which to my mind indicates that whatever bias you might perceive it doesn’t prevent such discussions taking place.
your choice of wording seems a little passive-aggressive when you say “I am not claiming that you are a crank; I’m not in a position to judge. But the evidence we have available at present doesn’t give us much grounds for confidence that you’re not.”
I’m not sure how I could have expressed that in a way you would find less “passive-aggressive”. Since the point I am making is “one reason why your post wasn’t well received may have been that it gives the impression that you might be a crank”, there’s no way to say it without using the term “crank” or something broadly equivalent. I can’t say “but of course it’s obvious you aren’t in fact a crank” because I’ve got no way to tell whether you are or not, because you’ve said very little about your opinions and ideas. I appreciate that it isn’t pleasant to be told “what you wrote sounds like you might be a crank”, but I think that is actually one of the reasons why you got downvoted.
DM me if you’d like a free PDF copy of one of the books [...] then you can have more evidence [...] I’m not going to engage further
It doesn’t seem like there’s much point in my having more evidence, if you’ve decided there isn’t value in further engagement.
Yes, good point. My bad… I was working on responses to multiple comments from both posts, all in a different document, while my dog kept jumping on me. To fix my error, whenever I say something about “You downvoted my post because...” please substitute “My post did not make a good impression on you because....” Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for pointing it out!
Thanks for the feedback on why my post did not make a good impression on you*. I’ll respond to each of your points individually. My responses are in bold.
It presents as new something that’s not new at all. (Maybe your specific take on the idea of multiple universes and the like is new, but you don’t say anything about what that specific take is.) E.g., there’s the “string theory landscape” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Leonard Susskind’s “The cosmic landscape”) and “eternal inflation” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Michio Kaku’s “Parallel worlds”, though I admit much of the book is about other things) and Tegmark’s “mathematical universe” (example book by famous author with major publisher for popular audience: Tegmark’s own “Our mathematical universe”).
You said my post did not make a good impression on you* because “It presents as new something that’s not new at all.” My original point was that we don’t need to artificially limit ourselves to non-philosophical, universe-centric thinking, and there is some risk involved with censorship by the self-described “shut up and calculate” school of thought. (Yes, the term was initially coined by a critic, but many people now describe themselves as being in this group, like a sort of “badge of honor.”) I’ve read the books you suggested. I agree they are excellent. If my point was redundant with these books or other posts on LW, I apologize. It seems there is also some redundancy on LW when it comes to posts on AGI risk, and the problems that could result from closed or censored discussions on AGI risk. Yet I feel this redundancy has been handled somewhat differently than my own apparent redundancy.
Its complaints seem exaggerated. “Theocracy”, really? You complain here that you only said some scientists are “theocratic” and everyone wrongly assumed you meant science as a whole. But what “theocratic” (as opposed to, say, “religious”) means is that the people in charge, specifically, are driven by religion and probably suppressing all dissent. It makes no sense at all to say “these few people, a subset of a subset, are theocratic”. So of course you were taken to be making a claim about The Scientific Establishment more generally. Anyway, it seems very untrue that there’s anything like a theocratic prohibition on multiverse theories; the nearest thing to a theocracy in fundamental physics at present is the priesthood of string theory, and I think on the whole string theorists are for multiverses.
You describe my writing as “complaining,” and my discussion of risks as “complaints.” These words have an obvious negative connotation. Do you consider discussions about AGI risk to be full of “complaints,” or are they “valid concerns”? Why do you choose to use demeaning words to describe my concerns, but not the concerns of others? Also you say “...it seems very untrue that there’s anything like a theocratic prohibition on multiverse theories.” I don’t feel there’s a “theocratic prohibition” on multiverse theories, but I do feel there is a bias against, and some censorship of, multiverse theories and other philosophical outlooks on physics. I described this bias as being “theocratic” in the way physicists with this bias criticize and sometimes suppress the physicists who discuss “why” quantum phenomena might happen. I would encourage you to ask any multiverse theorist if they’ve ever encountered this bias. (And yes, string theory is one particular multiverse theory. I don’t think I said otherwise.)
The focus on “moderators of the physics subreddits” seems weird. Who cares about the moderators of the physics subreddits? (And why would Less Wrong be a suitable place to discuss their alleged deficiencies?)
My original post had only one sentence about reddit. Granted, reddit is not exactly a bastion of intellectual thought. However, it can be used to get a real-time impression of sentiment among a certain portion of society. I referred to “moderators of the physics subreddits” as an example of the bias against philosophical physics in action. I thought Less Wrong would be an appropriate place to discuss the bias against philosophical physics. The moderators were just a real-time example. I have no more desire to focus on reddit than you do. I didn’t know I would have to elaborate on that one sentence repeatedly in these follow-up posts/replies.
In fact, that focus strongly suggests a specific scenario: you have some theory of physics, you’ve been trying to promote it on Reddit, it hasn’t gone down well, and you’re annoyed about that. And, unfortunately for you, in the great majority of such cases the problem is not primarily with the Reddit moderators. Of course you might be the exception! But the expectation you’re setting up is not a good one.
Again, the word “annoyed,” is like the word “complained.” And again, would you describe people worried about AGI risk as being “annoyed” by it? Or would you choose words like “concerned” and “worried”? And there was indeed a specific scenario or reddit that disturbed me recently, but it didn’t have to do with me “promoting” an idea. It was a post in which someone asked if Brian Greene’s perspectives were “BS” and there was pile-on of people criticizing Brian’s ideas. Obviously, he doesn’t need me to defend him. Still, the scenario represents the problem I’m talking about. The issue is not a personal grudge, but rather it’s a broader issue of a bias against larger, philosophical outlooks in physics.
Taking a look at e.g. /r/physics, there is discussion of philosophy, multiverses, etc., from time to time. So if the Evil Theocratic Moderators are suppressing such discussion, they aren’t doing it very carefully.
I don’t think moderators are “evil.” Again, “evil” is an extreme and loaded word. Why not “biased”? Furthermore, your choice of capitalization in “Evil Theocratic Moderators” seems like an attempt to make me seem like I subscribe to something crazy and extreme. I imagine that it’s easier to paint me as extreme, and then criticize me for the alleged extremism, than it is to criticize any of my actual points. However, I would agree that this is just a bias I’m talking about, and not an all-out total censorship of all philosophical physics theories. There are indeed philosophical theories that make it through “from time to time,” as you noted.
Also:
I don’t think shminux’s assumption that you could stand to learn some fundamental physics rather than handwaving about it was unreasonable, whether or not it was correct. Your original post doesn’t read like it’s written by someone with substantial expertise.
As far as the advice to learn fundamental physics goes, I only mentioned my books on special and general relativity to convey that I do have an understanding of “some fundamental physics.” I would agree though that a person can always think more and more deeply about the basics. (For example, concepts like mass-energy and spacetime are almost infinitely interesting.) Also, I didn’t intend for my post to be like an academic physics paper. LW doesn’t seem like the right forum for that. I was only trying to discuss the idea of a supra-universal, philosophical approach to some physics phenomena, and the bias that exists against that approach.
Having self-published books about relativity is not strong evidence about whether a person has expertise in fundamental physics. (I actually suspect it may be evidence against.) Again, I am not claiming that you are a crank; I’m not in a position to judge. But the evidence we have available at present doesn’t give us much grounds for confidence that you’re not.
This is getting tiresome, but as before, your choice of wording seems a little passive aggressive when you say “I am not claiming that you are a crank; I’m not in a position to judge. But the evidence we have available at present doesn’t give us much grounds for confidence that you’re not.” Words like “crank, annoyed, complained” seem slightly disrespectful. However, you’re right that, in my original post, I also was disrespectful when I said “I’ve noticed a universe-centric perspective among some scientists that seems to almost amount to a sort of theocracy. For example, there is a subset of the quantum physics community who refer to themselves as the “shut up and calculate” faction. They dissuade people from asking “why” certain phenomena occur.” I agree that “theocracy” is a loaded word, like “crank, annoyed, complained” and “evil.”
As far as my books and evidence are concerned, DM me if you’d like a free PDF copy of one of the books, and I’ll send it to you. Then you can have more evidence to judge my knowledge of “fundamental physics” for yourself.
[EDITED to add:] Oh, one other thing: your profile gives a URL for your web page, but it is the wrong URL. The real one has .org on the end, not .com.
Nice catch.… thanks! I make that mistake all the time.
Finally, I’m not going to engage further, so please try to refrain from saying anything else that misrepresents or exaggerates my positions, as I won’t respond. If people want to know what I actually said in the original post, the follow up post, or this reply, all they need to do is look. In any case, I appreciated the discussion.
[EDITED:
*I edited my original reply. Originally, I had written about why “you downvoted my post” when you (gjm) actually said you did not downvote my post. Sorry for the mistake. I was working on too many projects and replies at once, all while copying and pasting from a separate document. In order to fix the mistake, I have since changed “you downvoted my post” wording to “my post did not make a good impression on you” wording. I’m not familiar enough with LW to know if the platform will show the inline edits when I submit this edit. I hope it does, but if not, please know that I initially was incorrect on the downvoting versus “not a good impression” issue. I think the rest of my comments still stand though.]
I was not offering “feedback on [my] original downvote”; there was no original downvote; as I already said, I did not downvote your earlier post. (Nor this one, nor any of your comments.)
No, I neither downvoted that post nor said I had. But I do think that that post presents as new something that isn’t new, and I stand by that.
Sure. But when you post something saying “Isn’t it a mistake to think X?”, the implication even if you don’t say it explicitly is that people generally think X. No one is posting articles saying “Isn’t it a mistake to think that the sky is green?”.
I didn’t particularly intend any negative connotation. (If you wanted to describe some of the things I said about your post as “complaints”, that would be pretty reasonable too.) The term certainly isn’t “demeaning”. Out of curiosity I put my own username and “complaint” into the LW search bar, and the first thing it found (which admittedly is from years back) is a comment of mine in which I describe myself as “whining” and having a “complaint”. Other search results also show me calling things “complaints” without any derogatory meaning. I think your, er, complaint here is just off-base; the demeaning you think you see is not real.
Two, I think (the one after the one that explicitly contains the word “reddit” is surely continuing the thought of the previous one), out of only 12 sentences in the whole post, and the Reddit physics moderators are one of only two specific groups of people you call out as having a “theocratic” attitude. I don’t think my description of what you wrote is unreasonable.
Again, I didn’t intend it derogatorily. I get annoyed all the time. There is nothing wrong with getting annoyed (other than the fact that it’s an unpleasant experience).
It sounds as if you’re talking about this reddit discussion, … except that I had a look at it and I didn’t see a pile-on of people criticizing Brian Greene’s ideas.
The grandiose language and capital letters were intended as a signal that I wasn’t being terribly serious, and was neither stating my own opinion nor making actual claims about yours. I’m sorry if that came across as dismissive. (Also, I think that when you begin by calling something “theocratic” you lose the right to complain that others are presenting your position as extremist.) Anyway, the point is that discussions like e.g. the “is what Greene and Kaku say BS?” one do happen, despite being somewhat philosophical and speculative, which to my mind indicates that whatever bias you might perceive it doesn’t prevent such discussions taking place.
I’m not sure how I could have expressed that in a way you would find less “passive-aggressive”. Since the point I am making is “one reason why your post wasn’t well received may have been that it gives the impression that you might be a crank”, there’s no way to say it without using the term “crank” or something broadly equivalent. I can’t say “but of course it’s obvious you aren’t in fact a crank” because I’ve got no way to tell whether you are or not, because you’ve said very little about your opinions and ideas. I appreciate that it isn’t pleasant to be told “what you wrote sounds like you might be a crank”, but I think that is actually one of the reasons why you got downvoted.
It doesn’t seem like there’s much point in my having more evidence, if you’ve decided there isn’t value in further engagement.
He said he did not downvote the post.
Yes, good point. My bad… I was working on responses to multiple comments from both posts, all in a different document, while my dog kept jumping on me. To fix my error, whenever I say something about “You downvoted my post because...” please substitute “My post did not make a good impression on you because....” Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for pointing it out!