by r721 on 9/12/25, 5:46 PM with 132 comments
by jihadjihad on 9/12/25, 6:15 PM
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
by Terr_ on 9/12/25, 6:04 PM
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
by javier123454321 on 9/12/25, 6:07 PM
by nilkn on 9/12/25, 6:17 PM
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
by jcalvinowens on 9/12/25, 5:53 PM
An error occurred during a connection to
www.math.columbia.edu. Peer’s Certificate has been revoked.
Error code: SEC_ERROR_REVOKED_CERTIFICATE
EDIT: Chain: https://pastebin.com/raw/Mch2XTiQ
by micromacrofoot on 9/12/25, 6:10 PM
They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
by samename on 9/12/25, 5:58 PM
by AlfredBarnes on 9/12/25, 6:03 PM
by JackYoustra on 9/12/25, 6:35 PM
by arduanika on 9/12/25, 10:17 PM
That's a good general takeaway, not just for physics drama. I can think of several people whose books are great or at least pretty good, but their social media presence is...Flanderized, would be a kind way of putting it.
by hrnnnnnn on 9/12/25, 6:17 PM
I also just finished a four-and-a-half-hour defence of modern physics by Sean Carroll which has some really good counterarguments in it, as well as a whirlwind history of the last century in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
I am conscious of the irony of responding to this post by posting podcasts.
by OutOfHere on 9/12/25, 6:25 PM
by the-mitr on 9/13/25, 4:47 AM
by seydor on 9/12/25, 6:07 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism)
It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science
by mikert89 on 9/12/25, 6:11 PM
by Animats on 9/12/25, 6:23 PM
by refulgentis on 9/12/25, 6:10 PM
by nullbyte on 9/12/25, 6:02 PM
by f137 on 9/12/25, 7:21 PM
Error code: SEC_ERROR_REVOKED_CERTIFICATE
Something seems to be wrong...
by buyucu on 9/12/25, 6:14 PM
by lupusreal on 9/12/25, 6:06 PM
Okay, then this blog post was essentially useless. The WSJ is wrong about something, but the author can't be bothered to tell us what. Pity.
by hobs on 9/12/25, 5:56 PM
by bawolff on 9/12/25, 6:30 PM
There is a huge gap between - we should change funding priorities vs "Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science". One is a reasonable but potentially controversial viewpoint. The other is batshit insane. These 2 views should not be grouped together.
by TriangleEdge on 9/12/25, 6:19 PM
In short, I'm predicting port 80 and 443 as we know it today will see much less usage because of LLMs. Or that it'll move to more curated one off blogs like it used to be. Stack Overflow died because of LLMs. I'm not certain if other social media is next or not. Anyone want to guess at when HN will be a hot mess of bots and garbage?
by sockbot on 9/12/25, 8:28 PM
Who cares what Trump says. Responsible reporting would be getting the information from primary sources, not fettering responsibility for determining newsworthiness to whatever Trump says.
by legitster on 9/12/25, 6:29 PM
Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:
- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.
- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.
Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.
by balozi on 9/12/25, 6:16 PM
by sevensor on 9/12/25, 6:07 PM
by electric_muse on 9/12/25, 6:04 PM
by hn_throw_250910 on 9/12/25, 6:20 PM
This all reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia which is an absolutely real thing, and this turn of events with regards to WSJs capability (if it can be called that) shouldn’t surprise anyone.
by tracker1 on 9/12/25, 6:14 PM
Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
by jeffbee on 9/12/25, 6:01 PM