After all, before LLMs, there simply was no way to pretend to do physics (beyond the play of literal children) without sitting down to learn a lot of advanced math and, well, physics. LLMs haven't invented a new way to do physics, but a new way to pretend to do physics. 4/
I will always make my math and physics friends sad when I tell them that what I got from studying Maxwell in college was the deep understanding that I don’t understand physics and never will. I can only understand natural language metaphors for physics.
(academic voice) There is an insight here, but my perspective is somewhat different. People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example: math.ucr.edu/home/baez/cr...
I don't think the slopbots provide a qualitatively *new* kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.
Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an "explanation" which uses none of that.
I think @pookleblinky.bsky.social had a great thread about this, if you haven't seen it already I strongly recommend looking it up. Very cathartic.
i remember memorizing physics equations so i could write them down and look like a big smarty, i did not comprehend them at all. i was also in third grade and not a grown ass man
This is why I'm so thankful of being a graphics coder. Because they try this stuff in coding as well. And you know for like web apps and stuff, they can kinda get away with it, kinda make it work. But graphics coding? Nah - faceplant every time. Trivially falsified. Go home.
That's what you're missing in history and theoretical physics. A nice quick ground truth test. Which - yeah - most fields don't have them. Art? Literature? Good music? Although, you know, for physics... hmmm...
Except theoretical physics doesn't exist in a vacuum... To even be considered remotely valid, any new theory must, at the bare minimum, produce results that are consistent with existing observational physics, either by matching existing results or by explaining previously unexplained observation.
We all agree on this.
However because the humanities are largely done in plain language - a cutting edge work of history is entirely legible to a non-historian reader, even if they may not fully understand it - we've been dealing with the practitioners of 'vibe humanities' (in my case, 'vibe history') for a long time. 5/
which classical authors were doing vibe history??
I cannot tell you how many comments or emails I get which are the history equivalent of Collier's example 'dark matter/dark energy' question, where it is "what about my theory?" where the theory doesn't even make sense because it lacks a fundamental understanding of the foundations. 6/
Hate to tell you, but as someone who used to do a LOT of public-facing outreach (and someone who publishes on black holes…) people have always contacted (astro)physicists with their ‘theories’ which are exactly ’vibes physics’. The movie ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?’ Is exactly the sort of thing we
Get (with worse production values, usually), when someone decides they understand the words we use… and they do not… but then goes on to use those words. They’ll insist that speed is made of light or something similarly bogus, without understanding those terms HAVE DEFINITIONS… As someone who has
Dabbled in the humanities (& who has a great deal of respect for them), I know damn well that terms used in history papers might seem like plain text, but they have meaning & connotation that takes time & attention to learn. Dunning-Kruger means plenty of folks don’t notice, in humanities OR STEM.
Yes, I'm only an undergraduate-level history student, but I'm already having to explain to my PhD-in-Physics partner who proofreads all my papers that some words are "terms of art." Fortunately he's interested in understanding and is a helpful pair of eyes.
Physics cranks also got really out there with their crankery. I think many of us have the misfortune of remembering Time Cube (Not that history cranks don't — Ancient Aliens and Ancient Giants crackpots abound)
the funny thing about this is this sort of pseudohistory shows up in for example neil degrasse tyson's Cosmos because the contempt for humanities is pervasive
Can you give an example of such a question in the context of history?
And what occurred to me is how the anti-intellectualism that is at the core of this is enabled by the ability to interact or *pretend* to interact with a field in plain language. Folks assume if a field requires its own language, it is hard and those who do it are super smart...7/
the same dudes who are assuming this have entire vocabularies for discussing cartoon pornography
Quite an 𝘢𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘮! Anyways, while I cannot confirm or deny whether that's true, I'll just note something unrelated - that, surely, if it were true, then, regardless, anti-intellectuals like that would only make up a tiny minority of cartoon pornography enjoyers and conversationists.
RFK jr seems like this kinda guy
...whereas if a field is largely done in plain language, the assumption is that it is easy, that it requires no special skills. "Anyone," they assert, "can be a historian(/classicist/art historian/etc/etc)" with no real training. The insight of the not-even-amateur valued with the expert. 8/
the apotheosis of this might be the pervasive derision of "English majors"
The strange part is that the derision mostly comes from people who would have to take a month to read a novel, but wouldn't even start one in the first place
A supporting note to this: a lot of people think that they can *write* fiction because they can *read* fiction. Or that they can *act* by replication of an emotion because they *have* emotions. Those skills are opaque but distinct from what the expression of them feels (or 'vibes') like.
Amen. I've been writing for a good few years now, and I'm still doing what I can to refine my craft.
Or assuming they're musical because they own a lot of CDs
Particulary pertinent to singing (well, either you can or you can't, and I can...) and conductors (yeah, anyone can wave around at a playing orchestra, easy peasy)!
But how well can they wave? 🤔 💭
And what - if anything - and when does the orchestra play in response to their wave?
This is not unrelated to how Gen Z has become completely entranced by what is a very objectively evil company as not a company but a medium of information (YouTube)
But it turns out 'anyone' cannot just do that. To take a field other than mine, a capable art historian comes to a problem having honed their eye for artistic methods & styles, with a huge catalog of motifs and references that even as a historian, I don't have. There's skill & training there! 9/
But without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt - @acollierastro.bsky.social hits this when she talks about how little value these folks had for art, until a machine could do it. 10/
As an aside, you can see this blustery incompetence on display any time you see, for instance, the Spartans held up as examples of the very best soldiers - a position held by functionally no actual expert on Sparta - or in something like Musk's regular Roman hot-takes, invariably not even wrong. 11/
But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/
I'm intrigued by this table of strange symbols. Where can I learn about them, their development, and other such info? I'm asking as a hobbyist that loves writing systems, and symbology. I probably haven't the knowledge needed to grok the symbols in context. So I'm interested in the "Cliff Notes."
History requires a wide range of skills, across a number of disparate fields and most importantly a burning contempt for your subject.
Can you digress and tell me about the tables of strange historical symbols?
Oh, sure. My thought here was jumping to things like pay records on papyrus from the Roman period, where you have an accounting document in Latin written in Old Roman Cursive, or something like ship registers inscribed on stone in Greek.
To return to the topic of the video then, I wonder if what @acollierastro.bsky.social is reacting to is the experience of having physics, for the first time in a long time, (fake) pulled by LLMs into that plain-language-breeds-contempt space that the humanities have been in for a long time.13/
Though also her Feynman video goes into detail on one such crank who the creep had to deal with, who reminds me very strongly of vibe physics/history guys
If so, that seems pretty bad because like the humanities, physics (and science more broadly) is important, but one clear impact of the plain-language-breeds-contempt interaction is that it makes people both hostile to actual experts and hostile to funding the development of expert knowledge. 14/
Sadly, good popular science can have a similar effect. People like Feynman or Hawking make clear that physics *is* the equations, and popular science is only a poetic description of what it feels like to understand the equations; but some readers ignore that and insist they understand the physics.
I think it may also annoy the sort of man who cares about these things that there is no genius shortcut in history. And sometimes, the smarter you are, the harder the work is - because you do that to yourself.
one of my mentors in grad school pointed out there are no prodigies in historical studies. actually, i knew a few, but for the most part it’s not like, say, mathematics where some geniuses flower early and then wilt.
It's hilarious that the "Norsemen" comedy Netflix series made by & starring actual Scandinavians was cancelled because White American men were upset that it didn't portray "Vikings" as brave & heroic. Everything is now just pandering to inferior White US men. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpMv...
If you're interested it's available on Apple and Amazon. Genuinely one of the funniest comedic series ever 😂 Especially the Viking with a collection of dildos 😂
Do you have any recommendations of books for a non historian to learn how to study history properly?
I remember my brother telling me not to write so clearly, because if engineers can understand what you're writing, they won't take you seriously.
That’s why I have such mixed feelings about Wikipedia
This is why it is important that the real experts share what they know on Wikipedia
Yes, I try to contribute in my area, but I find it frustrating when my edits are overridden by amateurs
Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" tagline was fairly accurate 20 years ago, but it's misleading now (except as a cautionary warning). Modern Wikipedia is itself a fairly specialised type of writing. I rarely edit in the specific areas I have real expertise because it means going head-to-head with myth
Much of that myth stems from the coverage of ecology in general biology textbooks, and plant ecology in general ecology texts I'm no historian, but trying to improve Caribbean history I see the same pattern - myths and misunderstandings are repeated by actual scholars writing "background"
Still, one of the best things about Wikipedia is the rule about "no original synthesis" - report what the sources say, don't draw conclusions. Because conclusions should be drawn by (cited) experts. And when you're writing Wikipedia articles, you're not writing as an expert, even if you are one.
The draw in the business world is similar: you are an amateur in whatever part of the business you're trying to llm your way into, but it doesn't make you *feel* like it
This happens a ton with computers and programs, something about it being on a computer makes people think that its all just like, easy, magic, and the ideas are the hard part. So many people coming to you telling you their app idea like they should be instant millionaires. The work is the thing!
You're going to end up inventing the 'History' version of the Crackpot Index: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackpo...
You surely have a point, but if it’s any comfort, people are not really stopped by maths, code, engineering knowledge or chemistry either 😂🤦♂️
I agree on a philosophical level but doing half-understood physics bio ect is a core part of sci-fi writing lmao
I don’t think this is true. Mathematicians and physicists have been dealing with cranks for a very long time. They have minimal knowledge of the subject, but they are convinced they have found a trisection of the angle or a simple proof of Fermat using what they mislearned in high school.
The thing is that crank math/crank physics used to be trivial to reject and it's harder now - it's not any better but it's correctly formatted so you have to actually read it to know it's crankery instead of being able to reject it from the cover letter.
It'll also empower a lot more people to become cranks I think. The more these people show up in articles and on podcasts and TV with their well formatted crank theories, the more other people will think "hey I can do that."
Yeah, exactly. The problem is that even if practitioners know that it's all math, the cranks don't. They've always thought writing stupid stuff like "Electrons have feelings" is doing theory.
Timecube is the eigen example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube This is what cranks think Physics is.
I came to say much the same thing: people have actually been "pretend physics" for a long time, and "vibe physics" is an example of the machines coming for Deepak Chopra's job (and it couldn't happen to a more deserving gibberish-merchant.) But "pretend physics" is a bit different from "pretend...
...history" in that rather than having to learn to "sound historian", gibberish merchants in the sciences have to learn to generate, well, gibberish. Their gibberish just has to sound "sciencey" for the particular science in question. So while no-doubt LLMs have made gibberish generation much easier
Create sciencey gibberish for a science fiction drama and they call it "technobabble" *g* AFAIK, we do not yet have warp drive and FTL travel.
Also known as “handwavium”. 🤷😀
...it isn't a new phenomenon. But like anything that is make much easier by a machine designed to do it (like killing, for example, which is made much easier by having oodles of firearms around) we aren't just going to have Deepak and the Woo Li Masters to contend with, but every bro with a keyboard
Agreed completely. The problem is that they have a bigger mouthpiece to tell people about it and not nearly enough people telling them their ideas are hilarious: youtu.be/lWAyfr3gxMA?...
Gee thanks Birdie! After watching Terrance Howard YouTube video I have lost several IQ points and feel tge need for major psychotropic drug therapy!😒🙃🤣 To quote Barney Fire "He's a nut!".
You need a palate cleanser of something intelligent, stat!
Velikovsky was before TimeCube and definitely better known (you could buy his books in regular bookstores). Going back to the 1920s, Alfred Lawson gave us Lawsonomy (it's just a theory of everything. Space. Movement. Food. Swirlation. Everything). Cranks go way back.