“and you'd be taking the feminist/radical gender abolitionist position to protest any of the above points.”

You’re goddamn fucking right I am, those points are fucking stupid

[Of course, the question of what exactly your prior should be starts getting into thorny epistemic territory.]

Do you mean free parameters? Hidden variables are the things ruled out by Bell's theorem.

But yeah it's just a dimension in a search space. All else equal, theories with fewer free parameters are going to be more impressive when they fit the data, just for Bayesian reasons.

I don't think anyone has a good answer for how tightly constrained the landscape is relative to the swampland. I'm inclined to say "very" based on how easy it is to bootstrap EFTs, but reasonable ppl disagree.

But, if we find axions, the axion mass will provide constraints on the compactification.

So it doesn't really seem like it's going anywhere, but of course I'd be happy to be wrong on that front.

Honestly, I don't even think it's the leading non-stringy candidate anymore. Most people are way more excited about asymptotic safety.

Yeah sorry I was getting to that but had to go do a thing.

I don't follow LQG super closely, but AFAIK I think people are still having trouble showing that they get Lorentz-invariant QFT + GR at low-energies, beyond some suggestive perturbative expansions for graviton propagators.

and, of course, the Strominger--Vafa paper on reproducing Hawking entropy by counting string theory microstates (the LQG crowd claims to solve this by, uh, setting a free parameter)

e.g. There's some recent S-matrix bootstrap results showing that, if you make some fairly reasonable assumptions, high-energy scattering amplitudes* have to look like the string theory ones (or a slight deformation thereof).

* at tree level

I would describe the case for string theory today less as "beauty" or "consistency with experimental results" and more as "consistency with things we know about QFT, including things we learned well after string theory was invented."

nah you're fine. I did not mean that sarcastically.

I love that this is increasingly becoming my thing on here.

please tell me the Vissani position is something no one (besides him) actually takes seriously

This is why, despite being a "bring back civic virtue" guy, I think "virtue" is a bad word for it.

Virtue suggests effortlessness! It suggests moral failings are due to aptitude, not choice. Sometimes the right thing is just hard, and trying to convince yourself otherwise will drive you insane.

Okay, so Faine asked why this is the case. My theory: there is a Calvinist streak a mile wide when it comes to how a lot of the more militant COVID conscious people approach these questions.

Virtue is supposed to be its own reward, proof of your worthiness; to complain is to prove one's sinfulness.

If an additional 10% chance of missing my flight means I get 8 hours of sleep instead of 6.5, and I'm not at risk of missing a conference/wedding/other major event, the extra sleep is absolutely worth it.

The missing variable in the late-to-the-airport debate is "is there a tradeoff between arriving early and getting a full night's sleep?"

I'm gonna keep beating this drum: While there are cultural factors that make scientists more liberal than average, the only reason we're D+90 is that the other party is actively opposed to science and trying to destroy it.

(2) is only true for photons and other single quanta. For a sound wave, energy is proportional to amplitude^2 and independent of frequency.

Your other points are correct, though.

But yeah, while I understand that quite a few people did rather like the social isolation aspects of Covid, I found it to be absolutely horrible and I basically just disassociated for a year and change. Also I don’t like to think about the damage it did to my career at a pretty pivotal time too much

Easy to refer back, lots of margin space, Im more likely to get distracted by the text itself than by something else on my desk. Feels like reading a newspaper.

Actually, this ended up being a great way to read things!?!

Hey, say what you will about air travel, but it has 1% the energy requirements of an equivalent mass of mice.

There also does not appear to be a stapler anywhere in this office building.

I have managed to find blank CD-Rs. And transparency film for overhead projectors. But no A4 paper or staplers.

this fucking country, man

Our offices are out of A4, so I have to print things like this now.

That's right. I will be teaching Quantum Field Theory with the (-,+,+,+) metric signature. The students can pound sand for all I care.

Hell yeah, don't let the woke mob silence you.

this is so cool bestiary.ca