Supersymmetry Bet Settled with Cognac | Hacker News Reader

Supersymmetry Bet Settled with Cognac

quantamagazine.org

43 pointsokket32 comments

Good, appropriately cynical take on this from Peter Woit:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8708

That was very good. The concerns on how funding should be posited is really interesting.

So did Gross really effectively say "OK so there's no evidence for this theory, but I'm going to continue believing it anyway because I'm too old to start looking for a new one?"

I empathise, but also consider it grossly* unscientific. Shouldn't there be some kind of penalty for this obviously "wrong" stance?

*yes I know. I couldn't resist.

Well, the bet has a time limit.

Yes, I think that SUSY is showing up to not be the way forward, still, we don't know about tomorrow.

No, no penalty needed. We shouldn't worry whether individuals are scientific or not, we should worry about whether our institutions are scientific.

Just like in politics, people are people. If your solution to political problems is for politicians to start always acting ethically in the interests of the greater good, you've already lost. The challenge is to design institutions that can take in people as they are and still function.

Scientists are people. They are going to have confirmation bias when they look at results. If they've worked on something for forty years, they (probably) aren't going to change their minds. Luckily, physics doesn't care what Gross thinks. It moves on. The journals start preferring other papers, young scientists don't look to make their careers in the same old stuff.

I think the institution of physics is fine. Well, except for the fact that the LHC hasn't found anything new yet and everyone is left hoping they build that really big accelerator in China.

If the institutions' only methods for checking the insanity of men is experimental data, and that data only arrives on multi-decade timescales, then the institutions are broken. Furthermore, there are several intuitional changes physics could make to make better use of the meager data they have, but they do not. For example: forcing physicists to go on the record specifically and publicly about predictions (not just the one-off bet), and making hiring decisions based on it.

Making hiring decisions based on bets may not work: time horizons are long and you may decrease bold experimental work. (There is a 1 in 100 that this works...)

I do agree about your underlying idea of having them put skin in the game. That forces better thinking in most fields though even financial markets are susceptible to irrational thinking.

You can make 1% predictions.

Yes - an odds bet. But you need to make an awful lot of them to get one that hits. This is similar to why it is hard for employees to get the benefit of power law returns. There isn't enough career time to work for 100 companies. (Easier to invest in the outsize outcomes than work your way in)

Except that individuals do have a lot of power in academia. Gross's papers will be published because he is who he is. The papers of the unknown kid who comes up with a better explanation will not get published because they disagree with the establishment, even though the establishment know they're probably wrong.

I'm not involved, but it seems to me a more intellectually honest approach would be to start actively helping the unknown kids with weird but plausible explanations get some attention.

I'd have more respect for academia if it could collectively say "OK, super-symmetry didn't pan out. Who's got a better idea?" and start looking at the weird ideas. One of those weird ideas is going to be the next orthodoxy.

The penalty will be reality, but I believe science really progresses on the gut instincts of scientists.

Imagine you're presented with the data of an experiment, you can either publish the data resonably objectivly "the mean is 5" or you can hypothesise a cause and invent a new experiment to test it. There's no scientific method for how this hypothesis comes to you. That's a result of your lived experience.

So your stance is absolutely essential to the form and direction of research, even if wrong then the experiments performed can give valuable data for people with more or less different stances.

This situation appears to be an expression of what Micheal Wheeler called the Heideggarian philosophy-science nexus. Which is explained in a single paragraph on the page I see when I go to this link.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UKsf3Zziar8C&lpg=PA166&o...

"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck

Twas ever thus.

> Shouldn't there be some kind of penalty for this obviously "wrong" stance?

To the contrary I believe that Nobel prizes should be awarded for not only ground-breaking discoveries, but also for successful rejections of widespread hypotheses and theories.

Penalties instill fear, which is not the effect that you want when the mind is the most valuable asset to science.

The evidence for it is that gravitational phenomena occur, and QM makes accurate predictions. Supersymmetry is one family of theories that can provide a coherent explanation of these two facts. It is not yet unreasonable to believe that one of the less-accessible variants of supersymmetry is the true description of reality, because there is no clearly better explanation of those two phenomena.

It doesn't sound like he believes it one way or another. He's just saying it's time to hedge bets by pushing the next generation to look for new frameworks. That is a long term endeavor, and he's just admitting that he's too far into his career to accomplish much in that direction. At this point in his career with a Nobel under his belt, he's probably doing more mentoring type duties than purely research.

It depends what you think 'believe in it' means. When there are several different possible explanations in science, when a scientist says they 'believe' one of them they're not saying the same thing as when a religious person says they believe in their religion. They're just saying they think it's the most likely explanation and are prepared to expend time and energy exploring that explanation to see where it takes them, on the working (but not literal) assumption that it is true.

In particular they are not saying that they will ignore and attack any evidence against that explanation and act in every way as though it's proven truth, no matter what. At least, not if they're good scientists.

Full quote is a bit more nuanced:

“In the absence of any positive experimental evidence for supersymmetry,” Gross said, “it’s a good time to scare the hell out of the young people in the audience and tell them: ‘Don’t follow your elders. … Go out and look for something new and crazy and powerful and different. Different, especially.’ That’s definitely a good lesson. But I’m too old for that.”

Personally, I see quite self-aware comment on conceding defeat and contemplating on not having enough time for second take on the problem. I don't think it's really possible to become a top ranking physicist while being "grossly unscientific".

Especially since a lack of evidence can't be taken as a proof of anything. It's not like they discovered irrefutable proof that supersymmetry was nonsense.

> Especially since a lack of evidence can't be taken as a proof of anything.

So you claim that a lack of evidence for the existence of the flying spaghetti monster is no proof that the flying spaghetti monster does not exist?

It definitely is no proof, not in classical logic.

Classical logic is a structural science, physics is an empirical science.

As long as you talk about proofs, you operate in domain of logic.

As long as you talking about objects in structural sciences. When you read "scientists prove ..." and it is ... is a statement about some topic in empirical science, you clearly are not operating in the domain of logic (in the sense of logic as structural science).

There are no good reasons to believe in the flying spaghetti monster. OTOH, there are some good reasons to believe in supersymmetry, just not enough for us to be persuaded yet.

The same can be said for God. Belief in God can provide people with a sense of meaning and purpose they might otherwise lack. The Flying Spaghetti Monster, at least in its current - most noodly - form, does not. As always, a useful truth is better than a useless fact.

Of course there's no way to prove that the flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist, that's the whole point of the flying spaghetti monster.

> that's the whole point of the flying spaghetti monster

and a point illustrating empirical science: If we don't have strong evidence that something holds, by Occam's razor we should not assume that is holds.

When should you start collecting evidence then? Wouldn't Occam's Razor make you halt at the outset of the process?

Occam's is an abstraction, and a leaky one at that. It is not a hard and fast rule and should not be evaluated as such.

That reminds me, because of the various negatives, of Hempel's paradox [1].

Suppose you wish to test the theory that all ravens are black.

The conventional approach would be to examine ravens. If you ever find a non-black raven, the theory is busted. If you keep finding only black ravens, that doesn't prove the theory but it does make it seem more likely.

But the conventional approach is inconvenient and annoying. You have to go out and find ravens, which are often in place that are hard to reach and you have to deal with the weather.

There is an easier approach. "all ravens are black" is logically equivalent to "all non-black things are not ravens". Proof of one proves the other. So why not test the second, equivalent formulation instead?

That is much more convenient. I can do that without even going outside. The keyboard I am typing this on is non-black, and it is not a raven, so without even finishing this post I've already found evidence to support the "all ravens are black theory"!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox

> There is an easier approach. "all ravens are black" is logically equivalent to "all non-black things are not ravens". Proof of one proves the other. So why not test the second, equivalent formulation instead?

This equivalence only holds in a logic in which the law of excluded middle is assumed. For example in intuitionistic logic this is not true.

Given the title, I was hoping that cognac somehow provided the evidence necessary to settle the supersymmetry bet.

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