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/
'Vibe physics' may be utterly useless - but 'vibe history' wasn't any more useful and it still took over bookstore shelves and is used to justify stripping funding from history departments and hostility towards actual good-faith trained historians. I fear the same coming to the STEM fields. 15/
I'm hoping for the reverse, that actual good work and good science will be respected as the slop now also overcrowds the fields that STEMbros care about
Because LLMs haven't even pulled physics really into plain language (as the video explains), they've merely pulled *pretend* physics into plain language (just like non-expert plain language history is mostly pretend history). The 'tool' is a toy to play at physics like a child plays at house. /end
📌 vibe physics
Addendum: Of course folks will get grumpy if I do not clarify that not every history enthusiast is a 'vibe historian' (a term I love and will now use for this idea). Generally the distinction here is about the relationship with scholarship produced by others.
One certainly encounters folks 'on the road' to training, as it were, typified by a willingness to rely on the consensus of the field outside of their narrow interests and a desire to obtain and develop the skills professional historians have.
I wonder to what degree it's falling back to antiquarianism. Disjoint factoids without any connective theoretical underpinnings.
The thing is, the road to training is long! Most enthusiasts will not proceed very far on it, because they have other things to do (nothing wrong with that!). The 'vibe historian' instead takes the easy path of dismissing the training itself, of insisting they don't need it, and falls into folly.
One thing that might contribute to this problem specifically with history is that popular history writers often take such widely divergent positions on very interesting issues. Im thinking specifically about new testament studies and Judaica which might be a special case where scholarship itself…
can be difficult to trust given the often quite transparent special pleading or at least motivated reasoning. If you are an interested amateur in that area, it’s occasionally difficult to take seriously the claims by some scholars that the “consensus” even exists let alone that it’s well-founded.
The hype around LLMs is very much a desire for a category of people to rid themselves of experts who have authority derived from hard work and knowledge rather than luck and vast fortunes.
agreeing very much
It is certainly the case that sometimes an enthusiast without formal training does, in fact, walk the 'road to training' in its entirety and reaches the edge of our knowledge - a rare bird indeed; my standard example is the late Peter Connolly. But the 'vibe historian' is a far more common bird.
What I note a lot of these very rich, very daft fellows share with the vibe historian is the assumption that they are so 'built different' that with just a few hours a day they can successfully exceed the skills and work of very talented people refined over decades. And...no...you can't.
Wait until you find out about vibe biomedical science - and I don't just mean RFK and his merry band of quacks. Pick some medical guidance that matters to you, and is supposedly evidence-based. Find out who's on the committee, and count up how many have advanced (PhD level) science training. 😬
Oh, so you've written a few papers. Big deal. I have ten thousand hours in Hearts of Iron 4.
There is a popular historian I otherwise quite like who got exited he had discovered an entirely new interpretation of a text, entirely because he didn’t speak Latin and he was reading a bad translation that rendered a clearly derogatory isti as a “these guys right here” isti.
Wow. That's a huge error to make as a professional. If you can't assess the accuracy of a translation, you need to rely on the consensus of the field at large about said translation's accuracy before using it. This is true outside academia, too. We're in for a world of hurt.
Which is to say, if extremely well meaning popular historians can fall for these kind of traps, total amateurs with an axe to grind are doomed.
I don't get how people who don't consult with the original language text or at least critical editions would ever claim anything but the most surface knowledge on any source.
I have a good story on that… too long to thread, though.
Sorry but you’re telling me…
Robert Forczyk and Rich Frank were both military officers who became excellent historians in retirement. But then they mainly wrote about military history.
This scares me as a civil engineer, that people will trust a computer to design buildings, bridges, roads, or other complex items without understanding all the complex interactions that are involved in design. Math, Physics, codes, environmental analysis, permitting, and review are all needed.
If Twitter posts are to be trusted, some numbnuts hooked up their AI Agent (LLM based) directly to their production database and it deleted the database and couldn't accurately report on what it did or why (two well known limitations of ANNs) So, yeah, I'm equally concerned.
Of course, I also see some real howlers from professional historians as well, my proudest moment as a history buff was getting some posts by professional historians deleted from r/AskHistorians for spreading utter nonsense.
I agree with most of the thread, but what are examples of ´vibe history´ taking over bookstores and, more importantly, being used as a reason to strip academic funding? I haven´t seen direct examples of either, so I´m curious.
My field is computer science and… yeah, definitely starting to see this happen (I think ‘vibe coding’ was even the first use of the ‘vibe ___’ terminology). Nothing wrong with code being more accessible to everyone, of course, but there’s been a real shift in recent years where suddenly people think
that because they can get an LLM to spit out a script or tell them what some piece of code is doing that they’re as good as a seasoned programmer. It’s been odd watching the profession/field being progressively devalued since everyone got their hands on chatgpt.
Yes, though we've arguably had vibe coding much longer than we've had GenAI. So many professional coders devaluing the field for decades, scoffing at documentation, processes, any actual engineering, as superfluous. "We just want to code!" they said, and now with GenAI they don't even want that.
I would say I'm interested in history, but am not a professionally trained historian. How do I know if I am reading "vibe history" or not? Should I just assume that everything I read that wasn't from an academic press was all vibes? I know you've discussed the place of popular history in the past.
In any field of scholarship, the best way to tell vibes from scholarship is how people talk about uncertainty. There should be not just humility ("I may be wrong") but concrete details about how it's addressed ("I might have been wrong because X, so I did Y. I still might be because Z")
This. I'm not a historian, just a history teacher, and that's what I've learned too. Accurately reflect your level of certainty and be prepared to accept that you're wrong
I get asked this question a fair bit and there really isn't a good answer beyond 'seek out credentialed experts who are speaking within rather than against, the expert consensus.' I don't think there is a workable heuristic for a non-expert to easily evaluate scholarship.
What we really need is an @askhistorians.bsky.social monthly roundup of whatever pop history books have come out.
The reason is, when I read a historian's work, I am thinking in terms of 'what is the method, what is the evidence base, how do they handle topics I know well' and for the non-expert reader, you'd have to learn the historical method and the evidence in detail and that's just...building expertise.
The point at which you can read work by a historian and critically assess its sources, method, theory foundation and level of care with details, you have at that point walked the 'road of training' at least in that subfield. But that road is not short!
I am a physicist, and the steps you've described are exactly what I'd have to go through if I wanted to understand work outside my sub-field too. So, that's very fair. Thanks for answering.
Is there something to be said for the difference in experimentability between fields? You can't run experiments on Rome to see if a historical theory holds up, but physics supports experiments that will violently tell you if you're wrong (see: Titan submersible built with "vibe engineering")
after all, ignoring aeronautical engineers means you and your family die in a fiery explosion. ignoring historians means *maybe* you end up with fascism, and even if you do it's easy to say it wasn't because you ignored the historians
It's true that if you build a submarine or nuclear reactor based on vibe physics, you'll soon see the error of your ways. But in theoretical physics people can easily share misunderstandings, mystical notions and not-even-wrong takes. They've been doing that for ages but LLMs have given it a boost.
it’s definitely an issue that theoretical physics has become so esoteric and ungrounded that even the people doing it right have a hard time communicating that in a way that’s distinguishable from nonsense to a layperson
I mean, yes, but unless you want to reject the universe and move to another one with less confusing physical laws, I'm not sure there's a solution. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.
true, but are people using vibe theoretical physics to, like... do anything? chuds use vibe history to justify fascism; fools who use vibe engineering die. folks who use vibe theo. phys...? confuse the public about real theo phys, maybe?
Sure: quantum computing, quantum encryption, and similar are areas where vibe physics could at least result in serious mal-investment. The US military throws a lot of money at awfully stupid "advanced" research, and LLMs will make it easier for grifters to write hard-to-parse grant proposals.
It works great for selling wellness grifts. Buy these healing crystals, now with extra quantum! And, unfortunately, global warming denial is a thriving sector for not-even-wrong physics takes.
An easy answer is anything footnoted, which is typically the line between academic and 'pop' history. But 'pop' history, vibes history, and partisan history are three different things and the latter two are often coded in academic or pseudo- language.
So the realest answer is to read multiple works to understand an event. Like with a lot of things, if you single point of contact an event, figure, idea, you introduce a ton of noise and bias. If you multi-point the same thing and triangulate what you read, you start to see the true thing.
Which is time intensive and hard to do, and why its so easy for people to read half a book on a subject and conclude theyve become an expert. Or, even worse, they read two halves of two things one of which nobody else talks about and starts posting on Reddit about it.
Agreed. We also have "vibe law" in the form of so-called sovereign citizens and the like. The law is written in (mostly) comprehensible language, so not-even-wrong takes can proliferate, and meet the harsh reality of the courtroom.
There’s an intersection with research on reading where there’s a suggestion that more accurate understanding of the information in text requires ‘active’ processing but text written to be easy to read can induces a feeling of understanding that reduces active questioning approaches to text
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.
Yeah, I remember the point in high school physics where the teacher patiently explained that *every* explanatory model we were learning was a polite, noble lie and that the truth was a ton of math. And then I took AP Physics and learned math is *very hard.*
Good lord. I remember what that was like in my AP Physics class. So much math, and so much of it I barely understood at all. Frankly, I still have no idea how I managed to pass that class.
Yep. I did 2 years of undergraduate physics and left for the field of pure mathematics, which I found less confusing (I may be unusual in this respect).
I entered college thinking I might do physics, took two courses where the math was difficult to follow, and ended up graduating with a math degree with a focus on theory, discrete math, and computing algorithms, all of which I find *way easier* than the applied stuff in physics.
I stuck with undergrad physics for two whole years before I bailed and switched to computer science, which is SO MUCH EASIER.
I also have a degree in computer science but I didn't think that worth mentioning here because it was easier than the math degree 😆.
That is true...up to a point. The "Shut Up and Calculate" turn in physics has not ultimately been a positive one. It's remarkable how often fairly advanced grad students are completely incapable of articulating conceptually the physical processes represented by the equations. They have the math...
...skills to do them and the pattern recognition skills to know when to use one or another, but they're at a loss to explain *what is going on.* And this has bled into the published scholarship, where increasingly esoteric mathematical conjectures are put forward with no real empirical evidence.
I demonstrate my expertise in implied physics heat transfer every time I pulling something hot out of the microwave or toaster oven.