how do I know if this science thing is a scam

I just realized that we're fucked if malevolent real aliens showed up and the first reports on that came from Avi Loeb.

... like, *what* is "terrifying at CERN you fucking losers?

Thank for making the video I was looking for.

Double red flag: it's MOND.

On the “end game” for companies like Wendy’s. I think you described the core of the problem but perhaps don’t appreciate how significant it is because it seems so counterintuitive. In the corporate world the decisions that matter are for a one year time frame. That determines if the people like the CEO, CFO, CIO will get their bonuses which is all they care about. They will have probably been promoted or moved to another company in a few years so the decisions that matter are all made on a very short time frame 1-2 years. It’s why I think a rational capitalist society needs strong regulations to force corporations to not screw the world for short term profit, because they will inevitably do that if they can. It’s just the nature of capitalism.

Regarding Wikipedia If you find examples where someone inserts a reference that seems like their own work and doesn’t seem important you can just edit the page and delete it. It’s also a good idea to write an entry on the Talk page as to why you deleted it. In general en editor shouldn’t write about or reference their own work. Of course one can’t be certain if that’s what’s going on, but the criteria that really matters is if the citation is significant in terms of the topic. If you don’t feel comfortable editing the page, then just putting a comment on the Talk page (also there are various tags like needs citation… there must be one for “this isn’t important enough to merit discussion”. If you document the problem chances are good some editor will take notice and fix it eventually. Of course the original editor may put it back but if that happens eventually there will be consensus to remove it. As an example this happened to me with the article on the Chomsky Language Hierarchy. Someone (possibly the author) kept adding an unpublished paper as a reference and kept saying it was called the Chomsky-and-Some-guy-no one’s-heard-of hierarchy even though I’ve read about it in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Philosophy and never heard it called anything but the Chomsky hierarchy. I kept deleting, he kept putting it back but eventually other people chimed in and it was removed.

A good example of something that was revolutionary but at the time only a very few people knew about and even though those people thought it was very important they didn’t realize the significance is Turing’s paper where he proved there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem and invented the concept of the Turing machine for his proof. He had created the mathematical foundation that all digital computers, even to this day, are based on decades before the first such computer would be built.

Also... The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North

Dark matter 2.0, then Time please!

@23:00 That retracted paper: Ranga P. DIas at Rochester. It's not the only one, there's been a bit of a scandal there and investigations of almost all his work.

If you are looking for more sci-fi, I think you may find Gene Wolfe's books intellectually stimulating. It's generally not hard sci-fi, but it's often concerned with much deeper observations than day-to-day life. His work generally has many layers to think about, and re-reads are sometimes like reading a totally different book. Shadow & Claw is a good starting point, as is the Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Two high points in this video for me: “I don’t believe a word that comes out of [Kaku]’s mouth” and “guillotines”. 🤣

Didn't do the quiz on Pearl Jam's "Dark Matter" smh. :P

And on science fiction two recommendations from me. In both cases I'd suggest going for short-story collections to begin with: Cordwainer Smith and Stanislaw Lem.

There is a great - possibly apocryphal - story of an exchange between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, the auto-union leader. The story is that they were touring a plant and admiring some robots. Ford is supposed to have asked Reuther how he was going to get robots to pay union dues. And Reuther was supposed to have replied “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?".

Some feedback regarding your video format: I watch your stuff on my phone during bits of spare time throughout the day and when you use the inset boxes for the slides and camera feed everything is too small to see clearly. If you left one corner of the slides empty you could overlay the camera feed over the slides so the space can be used more efficiently. Thanks, I always love your insights.

1) I can add a 6th person to your Station Eleven list. That it was basically meta Hamlet would've gotten me there way sooner if anyone had mentioned it tbh. 2) Sounds like people just didn't watch the dark matter video and just read the title, no?

I don't know what's going on with Stephen Wolfram but I can recommend some funny material about him. Years ago game developer Chris Hecker wrote a piece on his blog called "Kurt Gödel is Laughing His Ass Off Right Now" that is well worth the time. In it he links to another blog, saying, "Anders Sandberg wrote a wonderful article proposing the Wolfram as the unit of ego measurement". Sanberg's piece, "Monumental egos", is somewhat more serious than Hecker's. But it does get amusing when Sanberg brings up Gene Ray, who was apparently the crackiest crackpot that ever potted. For a good time follow Sanberg's link to Wikipedia's "Time Cube" entry, and when you're done with that check out RationalWiki's page on Gene Ray!

Do Bergson vs Einstein also it covers two things. Scientific debate and Time.

On fast food: Dick's Drive In in Seattle takes about 30 seconds to get your food costs $13 or less for a full meal, and is paying their employees $20-26/hr plus benefits. Again this is in Seattle where everything is shockingly expensive and they make it work somehow. It's pretty good for a burger/fries place and they're open until 2. There can be a pretty long line, but that's about it. It's pretty similar to In and Out? I think if you limit your menu and like, care about things it's still a workable business model

Are you telling me that the research on an interdisciplinary pharmaceutical intervention of puppy barks, barked directly into a capsule, sponsored by phizer, may not be accurate or the right treatment to treat my crippling fear of cats? But it only costs 3000 a treatment 🥺

You may have just independently rederived the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

I think you have said that you wanted to focus more on the positive, I wonder if having a quick video on the top X papers you enjoyed over the N amount of time might be an idea. I'd be interested in a couple minute blurb on why green galaxies are more prevalent than we thought, or whatever, every so often!

@ 42:40 I don't think the quiz is flawed, we can think of it as any one of these things can green, but it takes all of them to be real.

If you’re reading sci-fi novels, I strongly recommend the Murderbot books, starting with All Systems Red. The first four are novellas so they’re not a major commitment. SecUnit is also the most character in all of fiction 🙂 Side bonus: lots of prose about why giant corporations aren’t a good thing! But in a fun way!

Hey, you are hilarious... Thanks for making a chemist-turned-particle physicist laugh

About the fast food and robots -tangent: AI. It's not just robots replacing humans on manual labor, but AI (not necessary AGI, but just a specialized AIs for one task each) will also replace a lot of white collar jobs very *very* soon. We, as a society, will need to figure out new ways for wealth distribution when the current income tax based model just don't work when people don't have jobs and thus no income. The best outcome is a star trek -like utopia where people are free to do whatever they want to and still live at least decently, but I have not idea how we could get there from our current capitalist society without, well, a revolution of some kind. A bloody one, I fear, but I really hope someone could figure out how to do it in a clean way. Maybe an AI might find a humane solution...

To me, the productivity gains that allow us to use robots to do mundane work such as fast food preparation inevitably lead to a universal basic income.

We might use the term dark scientist to refer to those who randomly and anonymously put out stories about dark matter.

Growing up we had two encyclopedias. I considered the Collier's a more reliable source of information because the Collier's had entries for WWI and WWII. I forget what the other encyclopedia was called but it didn't have any entries related to World War II. It just had an entry for The Great War.

About economics & endgame, the thing that came to my mind is the book Bullshit jobs by the one and only one David Graeber. Of course it's kind of esoteric, so don't take it too seriously. The point is late stage capitalism also has mechanisms for creating jobs (like administrative jobs where you can bully people who are doing real work and can imitate the ruling elite in your mind while getting peon wages). So no worries, the Mega Machine has its ways to keep people off the streets. About science and scams, although this is a banal statement, when real things are in the baby stage, like the internet or the first airplane, fusion energy, they work exactly like a weird cult. The difference between a prophet and the scammer must be only in the quality of the craftmanship, the former sells strange, unprecedented, haunting new ideas while the latter sells age old and very very (very very very) cheap stories.

What concerns me about the LK99 fiasco is that there must be some "we need to get clicks" contingent in Nature (and possibly other journals). There has to be the same kind of skepticism you describe within their ranks, but some other kind of thinking won out, in that situation.

My approach to evaluating scientific news is admittedly silly. It's tantamount to figuring out how to dress for the weather by looking out the window and seeing how other people are dressed. I ignore science news until several news sources report the same story.

The point about small steps is so important, and unfortunately we train people to believe the exact opposite -- the myth of the revolutionary idea. Science may sometimes progress through paradigm shifts, but even paradigm shifts happen over a thousand papers. Einstein built on Lorenz, Maxwell, etc. Newton built on Barrow, Torricelli, and others. And yes, I had to look up Barrow and Torricelli. I didn't even remember their names because the idea that Newton single-handedly invented calculus has so thoroughly erased them. Good luck with the eclipse weather! It looks like it might be cloudy for me, but at least I'll get a family visit out of the deal.

On the fast food stuff, the surge pricing clearly has no end-game in mind. It's just to boost shorter-term profits. It might be interesting to compare short(er)-term profit oriented industry based science vs long-term more risk oriented academic science. (Although I think the long-term high risk research is slowly disappearing from academia as well)

About to watch the video but I assume if the announcement of a new thing involves "This changes everything!" or YouTube Thumbnail Face, it's immediately suspect.