The frustrating part is that Woit is right: mainstream media has completely lost the ability to report intelligently on technical subjects.
The WSJ piece is a perfect case study in how everything gets flattened into culture war narratives and influencer drama instead of actual substance.
Once upon a time you could at least expect fact-checked reporting from established outlets. Now even the “serious” papers are outsourcing their sense-making to Joe Rogan clips.
The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.
When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.
As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.
> As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.
You got me on language at least, but it's not that simple. It was overturned for specific "private" spaces-- e.g. the Oval Office-- but the most recent Court of Appeals panel from June 6th did find that the East Room is not private like that and kept in place the prior ruling that the AP's allowed in the East Room. (The NYT article you linked doesn't mention this, but it's really only talking about a July 22nd denial of the AP's emergency petition challenging the partial overturning, not any change to the situation on the ground.)
Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege).
Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists).
You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
Because it’s a moral obligation. The fourth estate is critical to the sustainable operation of our system of government and society. The electorate need to make informed decisions at the polls. In the same way lobbyists inform representatives the media inform the electorate.
"There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone."
Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
When framed in terms of bias, the implication is that things in the centre are unbiased, or that the bias somehow equals out — that you get the best picture by reading those news sources.
...when the truth is that no news source is unbiased. Period.
Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!
In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
You say that the WSJ is "more balanced and less biased than NYT", based on that website.
But a bias towards centrist American politics doesn't mean a lack of bias — far from it.
For example, 30 years ago a "centrist" report on global warming might have given equal space to right-wing and liberal perspectives, even though the vast majority of scientists at the time sided with liberals on the facts.
20-ish years ago a centrist report on Iraq would have parroted the administration's lies about WMDs and the urgency of going to war. And the New York Times was one of those organisations!
Presumably because WSJ is the one who wrote the article this person found objectionable. NYT did not write such an article.
They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]
That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners.
Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
It's addressing an article published by the Wall Street Journal. It's not singling it out as a uniquely bad publication or saying any other popular publication is doing better.
> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.
I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.
Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.
Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration.
That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
It isn't hard to argue that most of the advances that people recognize as scientific advances are more from material sciences than they have ever been theoretical physics, though?
Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?
Well it is hard to talk about theoretical physics at the XVIII century since physics in general was nascent and there was little separation between the disciplines. But I believe the industrial revolution was largely driven by the development of the steam engine, so Watt, Carnot, later Kalvin, etc.
Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
It can be true that news has always struggled to get certain/technical subjects entirely accurate while also being true that there's been a serious decline from an earlier point to now.
Gell-Mann amnesia isn't about being "not entirely accurate." The news has commonly gotten things completely backwards and completely wrong, from physics to babysitting. "Wet streets cause rain."
Ok, but are you arguing that it's always gotten as many things completely backwards and as completely wrong as often as it does today? If you're not arguing that, then it seems like a little bit of whatabout-ism to say "well they've gotten things wrong before." If you are arguing that, then that's fine, I can see your point and there's a historical case to be made there.
Are you sure this isn't just an example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.
Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?
If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Society is going through a moment of epistemic collapse. We don't know what knowing is anymore. Do you have facts, I have facts that invalidate your facts. Twitter provides live feeds to events but then you're relying on eyewitness data and is incredibly easy to manipulate sentiment there and in other similar sites. [1]
Comedians are trusted as sources of truth because they can squirm away from being too specific, and algorithms feed you what you want to hear. It is indeed a postmodern moment we are in right now.
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.
I have a suspicion that Finland is able to do well against fake news mostly because it is Russian fake news and people know them very well.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
The US definitely has a global target for disinformation. I've lived in Latam and the propaganda was far more easy to spot. The link I gave a lot was concerted efforts by the democratic party but I do acknowledge there is Russian, North Korean, Chinese, and probably other propaganda that is looking to destabilize. However, I do think that we are at a moment where the idea of objectivity is loosing its foundation. That's a cultural philosophical moment we're having, and I don't know if you can say that Finland is above this epistemic shift.
The linked WSJ article has an interview-quote from Scott Aaronson:
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
> finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate.
Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in anticipation of these rhetorical chisels that will try to pry into any minute crack to dismiss the entire issue at hand.
It's not just technical subjects, either. In the midst of the chaos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, they ran an article [0] yesterday titled (it has since been edited) "Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology".
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
I believe it says quite a lot when a major and supposedly reputable institution like the WSJ will sacrifice journalistic rigor when they see an opportunity to potentially besmirch the image of a sharply unpopular demographic. Facts still matter over agenda. People should be fired for this.
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
>I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it.
The author is a member of the academic community and are known for their grounded and informed takes on topics which are extremely complex and only well understood by high level physics theoreticians and researchers.
They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.
> If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts.
That's a good general takeaway, not just for physics drama. I can think of several people whose books are great or at least pretty good, but their social media presence is...Flanderized, would be a kind way of putting it.
High energy physics and cosmology have been kind of stuck for years, generating untestable theories. But low energy physics, down near absolute zero, has had a steady stream of new experimental results. Real progress down there. Optical tweezers, attosecond lasers, quantum condensates...
I also just finished a four-and-a-half-hour defence of modern physics by Sean Carroll which has some really good counterarguments in it, as well as a whirlwind history of the last century in physics.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
I am conscious of the irony of responding to this post by posting podcasts.
The focus on technical and scientific studies here shouldn’t dissuade anyone from questioning more approachable subject matters, namely anything involving studies or scientific inquiries should be placed under suspicion. Moreso when it relates to hot headed topics of the moment that drive clicks and engagement (outrage).
This all reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia which is an absolutely real thing, and this turn of events with regards to WSJs capability (if it can be called that) shouldn’t surprise anyone.
It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism)
It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science
The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.
The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).
It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.
The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other than a party trick of philosophical philistinism. He showed that a journal that "covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture" doesn't perform adequate peer review of theoretical physics papers.
The problem is that his motivation was to critique "science criticism", but nothing about what he did did anything of the sort. He went about it with the same scientific rigor that one would expect from Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.
Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.
Journalism is kind of a weird thing... it's often been about truth to power and reporting even what the govt/establishment doesn't always want to see. Of course this also attracts a lot of activism. I think they've, for a long while, crossed over to more propaganda over truth in general. This combined with infotainment news business trends in general is a bad mix.
I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
> I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
Or maybe this was a rhetorical point? Even today, there are articles that are trying to piece together who informed on the plant and what the basis for an ICE raid was. It seems you and the authors retain a similar understanding of the situation.
My understanding is that the workers are actually contractors and not direct employees of Samsung and were left to make their own Visa arrangements and instead of getting the correct Visas to be able to actually work in the US, they used business travel (B-1) Visas which are supposed to be for temporary travel in order to enter the US for a maximum of 6 months.
This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.
I likely have read at least one of the articles you were citing (or similar work) and my sense was that information was obtained later that was unclear at the time of the event. I see your point - especially when a journalist writes about an area where I have personal experience - but I guess I don't equate this to a decline in journalist quality given the confusion around an event like this.
To me, it's just a core part of "Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How" as basic tenants of what a news article should cover in terms of an event. Part of this in terms of professional reporting (not twitter) is to reach out to sources or agency contacts for comments/statements. Even a "ICE has not yet returned a request for comment." placeholder would have helped significantly. It's just a matter of due diligence, and with online reporting there should be some follow-up/editing as new information presents or responses do come in.
> WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.'
When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make much of the odd era of doublespeak we endure (when is a 'special military operation' a 'war'?). But it's hard to imagine that there has ever been a time where even the selection of a descriptive phrase carries political weight. My imagination may be limited, I suppose.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument and you mean that content meant for general consumption has always (read since its inception) been 'generic' and with '[injection] of political opinion.'
I actually think the opposite is true. TV did not exist in the same way 50 years ago, so journalists played a more important role in transmitting news.
Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?
It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').
2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)
because no one here seems to have said it yet: I actually think experts and academics, by and large and especially in physics, are the most likely to know what they're talking about! Personalized mavericks are rarely right, and the mavericks people hold up as mavericks are usually just conventional (researchers, leaders, etc) who either are right place right time (jack welch, for example: good ceo, but what catapulted him to myth wasn't him, it was being in the spot where law was such that he had the opportunity to make the first real shadow bank before people realized the consequences) or just have charisma so they seem different.
I’m not sure if this is the point you mean to make, but Michio Kanu is one of the bigger cranks in physics communication. He said ion an (maybe the Joe Rigan interview?) that quantum computers would be able to act as a truth detector for AI. He wrote a whole book on quantum computing in fact despite clearly not understanding it at all[0].
The WSJ and other outlets are also completely failing at understanding the "chronically online" messaging from recent mass shooters, and are unintentionally spreading the memes and attention that the perpetrators are seeking out, thus feeding the cycle.
They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
The media has been failing at this since Columbine, if not before. They don't take the contagion effect nearly as seriously as they ought to, given that so many shooters have been documented now as idolizing previous shooters.
When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
I've never heard of Eric Weinstein, but he sounds like a crank. I don't think he should be grouped together with Sabine, whose primary message is that she believes science funding priorities are out of whack, and are currently funding things she believes won't be fruitful or are over explored at the expense of things she believes are more promising.
There is a huge gap between - we should change funding priorities vs "Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science". One is a reasonable but potentially controversial viewpoint. The other is batshit insane. These 2 views should not be grouped together.
Sabine has been recently supporting Eric Weinstein. She started off criticizing research, but has been following the path to grift. Now she appears on podcasts with fellow Weinstein and other cranks.
I'll admit i've watched some of her videos from time to time, but don't follow her super closely. If she's giving air-time to full on cranks, that is disappointing.
> Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.
In short, I'm predicting port 80 and 443 as we know it today will see much less usage because of LLMs. Or that it'll move to more curated one off blogs like it used to be. Stack Overflow died because of LLMs. I'm not certain if other social media is next or not. Anyone want to guess at when HN will be a hot mess of bots and garbage?
The critique is somewhat misplaced. There have always been terrible, ignorant newspaper articles. There sometimes used to be good, informative ones, but this is getting scarcer and scarcer.
If anything, "yellow journalism" has been the norm. Being a journalist used to be a step above parasite and ambulance chaser in popular opinion. You didn't need a college degree, let alone an Ivy league degree like today, to do it. Most papers were blatant mouthpieces of owners or certain political parties. Everyone knew that. "Objectivity" was laughed at by reporters.
That shifted with Watergate, which, afterwards, journalism began to have a certain prestige as "crusading truth seekers." Journalists doubled down on that view, cultivated it, and began to believe in it. Nowadays, journalism (at least in major markets) is more about prestige and access to power. Some journalists have a complex and believe that they have the access to the truth, leading to much handwringing about its "professionalism".
In reality, journalism is closer to writing in a journal after a party: they just offer accounts of events. That we expect better from them is, in part, a creation of their own making that is now starting to bite them in the ass.
You’ll be downvoted for this and my comment will be marked as off topic or whatever but you capture the gist of it. These news outlets shouldn’t delve into anything requiring the use of word “epistemic” their “collapse”, when they fail to report on much more basic things.
This shit is infecting every news source. Even CBC yesterday put out this garbage headline "Charlie Kirk shot dead at university event, Trump says".
Who cares what Trump says. Responsible reporting would be getting the information from primary sources, not fettering responsibility for determining newsworthiness to whatever Trump says.
By nature, journalists are not subject matter experts. Even in the height of our technological progress during the space race, the best they could do was call up a nationally recognized expert, get an oversimplified explanation, and publish a summary of that. The true knowledge was locked into a small set of researcher circles running out of exclusive labs and in whatever they published or lectured about.
Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:
- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.
- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.
Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.
The bias in favor of "dark matter" is a strong example of why academic physics is corrupt. There is absolutely no astrophysical evidence for dark matter, only gravitational anomalies of regular matter, yet significant money has been funded into it for decades, at the expense of ignoring other simpler satisfactory theories. The alternate theories have been prematurely rejected on false grounds without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development.
I'm assuming it means rejected "without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development," as stated in the rest of the sentence. What do you think "prematurely" means?
Hear hear. One of my red alarms the last 6 months has been saying anything about Sabine less than parise is verboten on HN is controversial, no matter how kind and couched and calm and cited.
Professor Dave actually fights back against anti-science hacks like Weinstein and Hossenfelder. I dont mean to say he is some ultimate physics authority but I think its silly to name him here in this context
Reading books is A-OK but you can't ignore online, and especially the online-offline nexus. Witness this week's escalation of a 4chan beef into a real-world assassination, another thing that the WSJ misreported.
"Hey, fascist! Catch!", "Bella ciao" and three arrows are all antifascist. I would assume that the shooter is motivated by antifascist political ideology at odds with Kirk's political ideology.
The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.
Ok, the song exists on a playlist with a few hundred saves. I don’t think it’s a widespread groyper meme though. I’ve never seen them reference it on Twitter.
Maybe the arrows are a video game reference? I still don’t see a groyper tie there.
Meanwhile mainstream sources are reporting that the shooter appeared to be motivated by left political ideology.
You seems to be trying to cram this into an inapplicable left-right frame. This is intermemetic warfare. That's why major newspapers need extremely online editors to fact-check their reporting.
I know it's hard to be this online, and I don't blame you for not being. Charlie Kirk was shot by a Nick Fuentes Groyper in the ultimate escalation of an online meme war that has been leaking into the real world for at least the last 6 years. The WSJ is unable to report on this effectively, because they are insufficiently online. They need a meme culture desk.
I'm not sure why the author is making digs at Joe Rogan so much... I mean, his podcast isn't really a deep dive into anything, its more conversations with generally interesting people from a number of different backgrounds. Sometimes MMA, sometimes conspiracy nuts... It's not a scientific podcast and I'm not sure that anyone is claiming it is.
Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
> I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though.
I regularly check Fox's website along with CNN and NewsNation, which gets me ostensibly right/left/center views on things. Having not seen much TV Fox, I assumed Fox News Digital put more spin on things. It could just be the stupid little quip taglines they put over all of their image thumbnails that made me think that, as opposed to the actual article content, though.
Yeah, I tend to do similar to check article subjects from a couple different sources. It's amazing how many times bits of information are straight out missing from one or another that changes the context of things a lot. There's really no excuse for it with online reporting other than twisting/propagandizing events.
On Fox content, yeah I'm more referring to the written news content (not editorial).
All said, I'm probably going to unplug for a couple weeks regarding social media, news and politics... some of the posts on Bluesky and Reddit the past couple days just make me feel a bit ill.
The frustrating part is that Woit is right: mainstream media has completely lost the ability to report intelligently on technical subjects.
The WSJ piece is a perfect case study in how everything gets flattened into culture war narratives and influencer drama instead of actual substance.
Once upon a time you could at least expect fact-checked reporting from established outlets. Now even the “serious” papers are outsourcing their sense-making to Joe Rogan clips.
The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.
When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.
Do they have special rights ? Perhaps an expectation or a duty.
From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.
As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.
> As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.
This was overturned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-co...
You got me on language at least, but it's not that simple. It was overturned for specific "private" spaces-- e.g. the Oval Office-- but the most recent Court of Appeals panel from June 6th did find that the East Room is not private like that and kept in place the prior ruling that the AP's allowed in the East Room. (The NYT article you linked doesn't mention this, but it's really only talking about a July 22nd denial of the AP's emergency petition challenging the partial overturning, not any change to the situation on the ground.)
Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege).
Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists).
You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
Might be worth asking: Why would “the media” do this? Over thousands of outlets?
I think you could reduce the profession of journalism to “forced transparency”, which can be a form of accountability unto itself.
In short: because it’s simply who they are by definition
Because it’s a moral obligation. The fourth estate is critical to the sustainable operation of our system of government and society. The electorate need to make informed decisions at the polls. In the same way lobbyists inform representatives the media inform the electorate.
From TFA:
"There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone."
Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
Framing it as a spectrum between Left and Right is absolutely daft.
In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right.
That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
How is it daft when we’re discussing a critique of an American institution by another American institution?
“Other places are further left” seems irrelevant to this discussion.
When framed in terms of bias, the implication is that things in the centre are unbiased, or that the bias somehow equals out — that you get the best picture by reading those news sources.
...when the truth is that no news source is unbiased. Period.
Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!
In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
All Sides has a documented methodology for how they establish their spectrum (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method...). So even if you hold this view, I think calling it “daft” is dismissing the rigor of their approach.
You say that the WSJ is "more balanced and less biased than NYT", based on that website.
But a bias towards centrist American politics doesn't mean a lack of bias — far from it.
For example, 30 years ago a "centrist" report on global warming might have given equal space to right-wing and liberal perspectives, even though the vast majority of scientists at the time sided with liberals on the facts.
20-ish years ago a centrist report on Iraq would have parroted the administration's lies about WMDs and the urgency of going to war. And the New York Times was one of those organisations!
Here's the archived post:
https://archive.is/dXu2P
Presumably because WSJ is the one who wrote the article this person found objectionable. NYT did not write such an article.
They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]
That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature.
This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
The press has a lot of problems right now:
* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.
* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.
* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.
IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
> * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs
This has more or less always been the case.
The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners.
Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
It's addressing an article published by the Wall Street Journal. It's not singling it out as a uniquely bad publication or saying any other popular publication is doing better.
> The WSJ piece is a perfect case study in how everything gets flattened into culture war narratives and influencer drama instead of actual substance.
But the article is literally about the culture war, so of course it is framed in a culture war narrative.
I guess you can claim the WSJ shouldn't have written this piece at all, but I didn't see anything glaringly wrong about it.
From the WSJ article:
> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.
I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.
Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.
Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration.
That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
It isn't hard to argue that most of the advances that people recognize as scientific advances are more from material sciences than they have ever been theoretical physics, though?
Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?
Well it is hard to talk about theoretical physics at the XVIII century since physics in general was nascent and there was little separation between the disciplines. But I believe the industrial revolution was largely driven by the development of the steam engine, so Watt, Carnot, later Kalvin, etc.
Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
News never reported well. Murray Gell Mann noticed long ago.
It can be true that news has always struggled to get certain/technical subjects entirely accurate while also being true that there's been a serious decline from an earlier point to now.
Gell-Mann amnesia isn't about being "not entirely accurate." The news has commonly gotten things completely backwards and completely wrong, from physics to babysitting. "Wet streets cause rain."
Ok, but are you arguing that it's always gotten as many things completely backwards and as completely wrong as often as it does today? If you're not arguing that, then it seems like a little bit of whatabout-ism to say "well they've gotten things wrong before." If you are arguing that, then that's fine, I can see your point and there's a historical case to be made there.
Are you sure this isn't just an example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
It's almost like defunding the entire stack was a bad idea!
> The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.
Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?
If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
[dead]
Society is going through a moment of epistemic collapse. We don't know what knowing is anymore. Do you have facts, I have facts that invalidate your facts. Twitter provides live feeds to events but then you're relying on eyewitness data and is incredibly easy to manipulate sentiment there and in other similar sites. [1]
Comedians are trusted as sources of truth because they can squirm away from being too specific, and algorithms feed you what you want to hear. It is indeed a postmodern moment we are in right now.
1.)https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.
Maybe your society. Finland is doing great with media literacy and resilience to misinformation in Europe.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-f...
As a general rule, you can sit there and moan about problems or you can spend 5min to find proven solutions. It's hard to do both.
I have a suspicion that Finland is able to do well against fake news mostly because it is Russian fake news and people know them very well.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
The US definitely has a global target for disinformation. I've lived in Latam and the propaganda was far more easy to spot. The link I gave a lot was concerted efforts by the democratic party but I do acknowledge there is Russian, North Korean, Chinese, and probably other propaganda that is looking to destabilize. However, I do think that we are at a moment where the idea of objectivity is loosing its foundation. That's a cultural philosophical moment we're having, and I don't know if you can say that Finland is above this epistemic shift.
The linked WSJ article has an interview-quote from Scott Aaronson:
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICv6GLwt1gM
> finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate.
Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in anticipation of these rhetorical chisels that will try to pry into any minute crack to dismiss the entire issue at hand.
In my own writing experience of stuffing qualifier words and caveats everywhere, it's at least as old as Usenet.
Error: Compiler warning: Appeal to Authority fallacy detected on line 8, your argument is hereby invalid
or whatever fallacy nerds like bringing up in debates, just pick your favourite one and insert it here.
> your argument is hereby invalid
Adjacent to Fallacy Fallacy: Just because the argument is unsound doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong. :p
It's not just technical subjects, either. In the midst of the chaos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, they ran an article [0] yesterday titled (it has since been edited) "Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology".
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
I believe it says quite a lot when a major and supposedly reputable institution like the WSJ will sacrifice journalistic rigor when they see an opportunity to potentially besmirch the image of a sharply unpopular demographic. Facts still matter over agenda. People should be fired for this.
edited but no retracton.
A couple thoughts:
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
>I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit
The author is a member of the academic community and are known for their grounded and informed takes on topics which are extremely complex and only well understood by high level physics theoreticians and researchers.
They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.
https://archive.is/wAtCw
Huh, Firefox on Debian:
I apparently can't bypass it.EDIT: Chain: https://pastebin.com/raw/Mch2XTiQ
It's been archived on archive.today.
https://archive.is/wAtCw
That said, I'm not having this issue at all. Strange.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250912131943/https://www.math....
www.math.<any university in the world>.edu SSL cert expired??? unfathomable!!
As a former math sysadmin... I apologize on behalf of math sysadmins
I don't think it's expired: https://pastebin.com/raw/Mch2XTiQ
Their reaction is probably "what do you mean, a number expired?!"
Firefox on Debian here as well (installed from Mozilla themselves, not the .deb), and it loads fine for me.
> If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts.
That's a good general takeaway, not just for physics drama. I can think of several people whose books are great or at least pretty good, but their social media presence is...Flanderized, would be a kind way of putting it.
High energy physics and cosmology have been kind of stuck for years, generating untestable theories. But low energy physics, down near absolute zero, has had a steady stream of new experimental results. Real progress down there. Optical tweezers, attosecond lasers, quantum condensates...
By coincidence I just listened to the Decoding the Gurus episode on Sabine https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/sabine-hosse...
I also just finished a four-and-a-half-hour defence of modern physics by Sean Carroll which has some really good counterarguments in it, as well as a whirlwind history of the last century in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
I am conscious of the irony of responding to this post by posting podcasts.
The internet has allowed anyone to build a voice/following. Whether they should or not.
The focus on technical and scientific studies here shouldn’t dissuade anyone from questioning more approachable subject matters, namely anything involving studies or scientific inquiries should be placed under suspicion. Moreso when it relates to hot headed topics of the moment that drive clicks and engagement (outrage).
This all reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia which is an absolutely real thing, and this turn of events with regards to WSJs capability (if it can be called that) shouldn’t surprise anyone.
In the past it was the postmodernists attacking physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism)
It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science
> this new generation of professional antiestablishers [...] would vehemently [attack] postmodernism
I can think of two ways to interpret this, and I'm not sure which one you intend:
1. They hold modernist views, that there is a distinct and meaningful direction/progression for how societies must change over time.
2. They don't know what postmodernism means, and consider it a generic bad-word to attach to things they don't like. (Comic example: [0])
[0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289
"the postmodernists attacking physics"
The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.
The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).
It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.
The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other than a party trick of philosophical philistinism. He showed that a journal that "covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture" doesn't perform adequate peer review of theoretical physics papers.
The fact that sokal was wrong doesn't mean that science criticism has offered anything more useful throughout all these years
The problem is that his motivation was to critique "science criticism", but nothing about what he did did anything of the sort. He went about it with the same scientific rigor that one would expect from Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.
Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.
WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
Journalism is kind of a weird thing... it's often been about truth to power and reporting even what the govt/establishment doesn't always want to see. Of course this also attracts a lot of activism. I think they've, for a long while, crossed over to more propaganda over truth in general. This combined with infotainment news business trends in general is a bad mix.
I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
> I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
Or maybe this was a rhetorical point? Even today, there are articles that are trying to piece together who informed on the plant and what the basis for an ICE raid was. It seems you and the authors retain a similar understanding of the situation.
My understanding is that the workers are actually contractors and not direct employees of Samsung and were left to make their own Visa arrangements and instead of getting the correct Visas to be able to actually work in the US, they used business travel (B-1) Visas which are supposed to be for temporary travel in order to enter the US for a maximum of 6 months.
This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.
I likely have read at least one of the articles you were citing (or similar work) and my sense was that information was obtained later that was unclear at the time of the event. I see your point - especially when a journalist writes about an area where I have personal experience - but I guess I don't equate this to a decline in journalist quality given the confusion around an event like this.
To me, it's just a core part of "Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How" as basic tenants of what a news article should cover in terms of an event. Part of this in terms of professional reporting (not twitter) is to reach out to sources or agency contacts for comments/statements. Even a "ICE has not yet returned a request for comment." placeholder would have helped significantly. It's just a matter of due diligence, and with online reporting there should be some follow-up/editing as new information presents or responses do come in.
> WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.'
When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make much of the odd era of doublespeak we endure (when is a 'special military operation' a 'war'?). But it's hard to imagine that there has ever been a time where even the selection of a descriptive phrase carries political weight. My imagination may be limited, I suppose.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument and you mean that content meant for general consumption has always (read since its inception) been 'generic' and with '[injection] of political opinion.'
I’m saying that modern journalists are in many cases careerists, in a way that was not true 50 years ago
I actually think the opposite is true. TV did not exist in the same way 50 years ago, so journalists played a more important role in transmitting news.
Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?
It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').
1972 - ~39,000 ( https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/occupational-outlook-han... ; a great resource to find out about what journalism was like)
2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)
because no one here seems to have said it yet: I actually think experts and academics, by and large and especially in physics, are the most likely to know what they're talking about! Personalized mavericks are rarely right, and the mavericks people hold up as mavericks are usually just conventional (researchers, leaders, etc) who either are right place right time (jack welch, for example: good ceo, but what catapulted him to myth wasn't him, it was being in the spot where law was such that he had the opportunity to make the first real shadow bank before people realized the consequences) or just have charisma so they seem different.
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Something seems to be wrong...
Joe Rogan had Michio Kaku on once, it was a fun episode
I’m not sure if this is the point you mean to make, but Michio Kanu is one of the bigger cranks in physics communication. He said ion an (maybe the Joe Rigan interview?) that quantum computers would be able to act as a truth detector for AI. He wrote a whole book on quantum computing in fact despite clearly not understanding it at all[0].
[0]: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321
> I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless
Okay, then this blog post was essentially useless. The WSJ is wrong about something, but the author can't be bothered to tell us what. Pity.
The WSJ and other outlets are also completely failing at understanding the "chronically online" messaging from recent mass shooters, and are unintentionally spreading the memes and attention that the perpetrators are seeking out, thus feeding the cycle.
They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
The media has been failing at this since Columbine, if not before. They don't take the contagion effect nearly as seriously as they ought to, given that so many shooters have been documented now as idolizing previous shooters.
When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
I've never heard of Eric Weinstein, but he sounds like a crank. I don't think he should be grouped together with Sabine, whose primary message is that she believes science funding priorities are out of whack, and are currently funding things she believes won't be fruitful or are over explored at the expense of things she believes are more promising.
There is a huge gap between - we should change funding priorities vs "Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science". One is a reasonable but potentially controversial viewpoint. The other is batshit insane. These 2 views should not be grouped together.
Sabine has been recently supporting Eric Weinstein. She started off criticizing research, but has been following the path to grift. Now she appears on podcasts with fellow Weinstein and other cranks.
I'll admit i've watched some of her videos from time to time, but don't follow her super closely. If she's giving air-time to full on cranks, that is disappointing.
> Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.
In short, I'm predicting port 80 and 443 as we know it today will see much less usage because of LLMs. Or that it'll move to more curated one off blogs like it used to be. Stack Overflow died because of LLMs. I'm not certain if other social media is next or not. Anyone want to guess at when HN will be a hot mess of bots and garbage?
The critique is somewhat misplaced. There have always been terrible, ignorant newspaper articles. There sometimes used to be good, informative ones, but this is getting scarcer and scarcer.
If anything, "yellow journalism" has been the norm. Being a journalist used to be a step above parasite and ambulance chaser in popular opinion. You didn't need a college degree, let alone an Ivy league degree like today, to do it. Most papers were blatant mouthpieces of owners or certain political parties. Everyone knew that. "Objectivity" was laughed at by reporters.
That shifted with Watergate, which, afterwards, journalism began to have a certain prestige as "crusading truth seekers." Journalists doubled down on that view, cultivated it, and began to believe in it. Nowadays, journalism (at least in major markets) is more about prestige and access to power. Some journalists have a complex and believe that they have the access to the truth, leading to much handwringing about its "professionalism".
In reality, journalism is closer to writing in a journal after a party: they just offer accounts of events. That we expect better from them is, in part, a creation of their own making that is now starting to bite them in the ass.
That is a lot of words to communicate a very simple truth: WSJ is trash. (so is NYT btw)
You’ll be downvoted for this and my comment will be marked as off topic or whatever but you capture the gist of it. These news outlets shouldn’t delve into anything requiring the use of word “epistemic” their “collapse”, when they fail to report on much more basic things.
This shit is infecting every news source. Even CBC yesterday put out this garbage headline "Charlie Kirk shot dead at university event, Trump says".
Who cares what Trump says. Responsible reporting would be getting the information from primary sources, not fettering responsibility for determining newsworthiness to whatever Trump says.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6897816
By nature, journalists are not subject matter experts. Even in the height of our technological progress during the space race, the best they could do was call up a nationally recognized expert, get an oversimplified explanation, and publish a summary of that. The true knowledge was locked into a small set of researcher circles running out of exclusive labs and in whatever they published or lectured about.
Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:
- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.
- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.
Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.
The bias in favor of "dark matter" is a strong example of why academic physics is corrupt. There is absolutely no astrophysical evidence for dark matter, only gravitational anomalies of regular matter, yet significant money has been funded into it for decades, at the expense of ignoring other simpler satisfactory theories. The alternate theories have been prematurely rejected on false grounds without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development.
> corrupt
What do you mean when you say this?
> prematurely rejected
What does this mean?
>> prematurely rejected
> What does this mean?
I'm assuming it means rejected "without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development," as stated in the rest of the sentence. What do you think "prematurely" means?
Hear hear. One of my red alarms the last 6 months has been saying anything about Sabine less than parise is verboten on HN is controversial, no matter how kind and couched and calm and cited.
Huh, I am getting an OCSP revoked certificate for *.math.columbia.edu
I'll argue that this Woit post is no better. Its lazy. What was the point?
Professor Dave actually fights back against anti-science hacks like Weinstein and Hossenfelder. I dont mean to say he is some ultimate physics authority but I think its silly to name him here in this context
He's named because his rebuttals are weak and Hossenfelder actually makes legitimate points that "Professor Dave" just evades.
He also isn't a professor. He did an MA in chemistry apparently.
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Reading books is A-OK but you can't ignore online, and especially the online-offline nexus. Witness this week's escalation of a 4chan beef into a real-world assassination, another thing that the WSJ misreported.
What?
Allegedly, Charlie Kirk's killer, Tyler Robinson, may have been a groyper.
What's the evidence for this claim? Seems at odds with the details reported here: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
You don't think writing Helldivers memes on shell casings means anything?
"Hey, fascist! Catch!", "Bella ciao" and three arrows are all antifascist. I would assume that the shooter is motivated by antifascist political ideology at odds with Kirk's political ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows
The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.
If you have Spotify you can look for the years-old (so not invented today) playlist called Groyper Wars.
Actually you don't even need an account. TIL. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ais7KJXx8Gyd0hsrbakKW
ETA: And you have the wrong "three arrows" iconography.
Ok, the song exists on a playlist with a few hundred saves. I don’t think it’s a widespread groyper meme though. I’ve never seen them reference it on Twitter.
Maybe the arrows are a video game reference? I still don’t see a groyper tie there.
Meanwhile mainstream sources are reporting that the shooter appeared to be motivated by left political ideology.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/12/charlie...
You seems to be trying to cram this into an inapplicable left-right frame. This is intermemetic warfare. That's why major newspapers need extremely online editors to fact-check their reporting.
I know it's hard to be this online, and I don't blame you for not being. Charlie Kirk was shot by a Nick Fuentes Groyper in the ultimate escalation of an online meme war that has been leaking into the real world for at least the last 6 years. The WSJ is unable to report on this effectively, because they are insufficiently online. They need a meme culture desk.
I'm not sure why the author is making digs at Joe Rogan so much... I mean, his podcast isn't really a deep dive into anything, its more conversations with generally interesting people from a number of different backgrounds. Sometimes MMA, sometimes conspiracy nuts... It's not a scientific podcast and I'm not sure that anyone is claiming it is.
Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
> I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though.
I regularly check Fox's website along with CNN and NewsNation, which gets me ostensibly right/left/center views on things. Having not seen much TV Fox, I assumed Fox News Digital put more spin on things. It could just be the stupid little quip taglines they put over all of their image thumbnails that made me think that, as opposed to the actual article content, though.
Yeah, I tend to do similar to check article subjects from a couple different sources. It's amazing how many times bits of information are straight out missing from one or another that changes the context of things a lot. There's really no excuse for it with online reporting other than twisting/propagandizing events.
On Fox content, yeah I'm more referring to the written news content (not editorial).
All said, I'm probably going to unplug for a couple weeks regarding social media, news and politics... some of the posts on Bluesky and Reddit the past couple days just make me feel a bit ill.
They're not making dogs at Rogan so much as lamenting that so many people use him as a primary source of information.