Professor Dave was enjoyable when he was going after flat earthers and creationists. It was not easy tbh. I wonder if we got used to having antiscientific morons as opponents and he just imported that attitude.
Absolutely. His tone is the same going after string theory deniers as evolution deniers. I don't know if he missed all the other critiques of string theory or he saw them and figured they're all flat earth type figures. Leonard Susskind had just joined the string theory deniers a few months before.
He's truly fascinating. It's like watching a cartoon character saw off the limb he's standing on.
My more facile analysis of this situation is that it reminds me of how New Atheism went off the rails.
I was not aware that string theory was being held up on the basis of garden variety equivocation. This is a Logic 101 issue. It's baffling. But it's also very reminiscent of, if not completely parallel to, the way that deconstruction has poisoned the humanities.
Both are apt analogies. I think about the comparison to religion a lot and I agree it's hard to tell which side is for empiricism. It seems to change decade to decade.
This sounds exactly like the hard sciences' version of critical theory... We are living in a time of such anti-empiricism that contrary evidence is now labelled "epistemic violence".
There is simply too many people scrambling for too few tenures and this has produced a generation of thinkers manufacturing "knowledge" just to look like they are actually being productive.
They absolutely all seem to have the same root cause, which I agree is the desire for a paper machine. We would be better off if everyone understood how strong that desire is.
I watched a bunch of Sabine Hossenfelder's really boring videos until she started to just sound like Professor Ellis looks in the picture above. This article helped me figure out what that was all about. Thanks.
Professor Dave was enjoyable when he was going after flat earthers and creationists. It was not easy tbh. I wonder if we got used to having antiscientific morons as opponents and he just imported that attitude.
Absolutely. His tone is the same going after string theory deniers as evolution deniers. I don't know if he missed all the other critiques of string theory or he saw them and figured they're all flat earth type figures. Leonard Susskind had just joined the string theory deniers a few months before.
He's truly fascinating. It's like watching a cartoon character saw off the limb he's standing on.
My more facile analysis of this situation is that it reminds me of how New Atheism went off the rails.
I was not aware that string theory was being held up on the basis of garden variety equivocation. This is a Logic 101 issue. It's baffling. But it's also very reminiscent of, if not completely parallel to, the way that deconstruction has poisoned the humanities.
Both are apt analogies. I think about the comparison to religion a lot and I agree it's hard to tell which side is for empiricism. It seems to change decade to decade.
The Bible is always on the side of empiricism, of course.
This sounds exactly like the hard sciences' version of critical theory... We are living in a time of such anti-empiricism that contrary evidence is now labelled "epistemic violence".
There is simply too many people scrambling for too few tenures and this has produced a generation of thinkers manufacturing "knowledge" just to look like they are actually being productive.
Science reform has had its own brushes with the postmodernist version of non-empiricism: https://www.redteamofscience.com/p/i-believe-in-true-things
They absolutely all seem to have the same root cause, which I agree is the desire for a paper machine. We would be better off if everyone understood how strong that desire is.
I watched a bunch of Sabine Hossenfelder's really boring videos until she started to just sound like Professor Ellis looks in the picture above. This article helped me figure out what that was all about. Thanks.
Thank you! Very much appreciated.