Thursday, October 21, 2021
Why "science replaced by hodgepodge" is even worse than alchemy
Maritime hodge podge
For two days, I wanted to write another text about the evil trend of "pretending that some chaotic playing with computers is the new science" and Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the IAS, pushed me above the critical threshold when he wrote
The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
in the Quanta Magazine. The title looks bizarre, the normal thing to describe the body of his essay would be the opposite, "the usefulness of useless knowledge", a title that was picked by several authors in the past. Isn't it a typo? At any rate, Dijkgraaf argues that the "hocus pocus AI-based quasi-science" is analogous to alchemy which may look bad but it was very useful. And the periods of chaotic expansion of science and the epochs of systematic consolidation are equally important and they alternate which was good and it is good now, too.
Note that his article takes the approximately opposite position than my
Worshiping of complexity is junk physics, junk computer science, junk neuroscience
that I wrote six weeks ago. Also, I have some feeling that Dijkgraaf decided to become an apologist for the totally atrocious choice of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics that ended the epoch of credibility of that award among sensible people.
https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/10/why-science-replaced-by-hodgepodge-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+(Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame)
