"Whether or not AI is the way to make progress, right now it’s certainly the way to get paid."

I HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE that we are going to soon have an economic and financial catastrophe that will probably be bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.   While I believe it will have a number of different contributing factors the thing that will push the whole corrupt system over the edge will likely be the "AI" bubble that is fueling the artificially soaring stock market that the most criminally corrupt AG in American history - well, if you don't count those involved in the slave power - was touting instead of answering questions in front of the House a couple of weeks back.    "AI" is so hyped and it is exactly the kind of flashy,  sci-fi themed techological PR based con job that the richest and greediest can be suckered with by the even richer and greedier among them - the ones whose bitches the billionaire Epstein class are - that it will probably make the famous historical financial bubbles like tulips and the South Sea bubbles look like the ones blown to entertain toddlers.  

I will point out that both of those historical bubbles,  centering in Holland and Britian, respectively, were part of the same "enlightenment" cultures that those who are suckers for such things today like to believe they're a part of - if they have even that much historical or cultural awareness. 

Last week when I  quoted and linked to the estimable Peter Woit's blog,  "Not Even Wrong"  I was tempted to go into the other item under the "Various and Sundry" post in answer to someone who didn't like me dissing the secular-religious article of faith natural selection.   The formerly hard-science issue that Woit started with was the problem facing particle physics,  now that one of its most wildly successful research projects has reached its flashiest phase of discovery and confirmation and the way forward faces some of the most serious obstacles that a scientific project can face,  the extreme difficulty of obtaining further experimental or observational confirmation of hypotheses or even the impossibility of doing that.  

I will note that, though I didn't ask him,  I strongly suspect that Peter Woit wouldn't welcome the use I'm about to make of what he said,  this has nothing to do with what he may or may not think about a science that he,  so far as I'm aware, has had little to nothing to say about. 

He starts out:

Natalie Wolchover has a very good article at Quanta with the title Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying or Just Hard? Where I come down on the question is that fundamental theory is all of the above (Hard, Dead, and Dying).

Some of the themes she covers were ones I was trying to write about already 20 years ago here in the blog and in my book. A major theme of that book was that, in retrospect, the Standard Model that fell into place in 1973 turned out to be spectacularly successful: everything that it predicted turned out to be exactly what was measured, and no “new physics” that it doesn’t describe has turned up (beyond the minor addition of neutrino mass terms). So, in 1973 all of sudden, finding something fundamentally new in particle theory became very hard (the experimentalists had lots of challenging work to do exploring the 1 GeV to 1 TeV mass range, checking that what the SM predicted was there and nothing else was).

The crisis that developed in fundamental theory was not just that it had become hard, with new progress a difficult, long-term effort. It’s that the field could not change its way of doing business to accommodate this. Instead of encouraging a long-term effort to attack the remaining fundamental problems, what was rewarded was pursuit of easy but wrong ideas that were coupled with an efficient hype machine. . . .

One of the first things I ever remember reading about the methods of and philosophical basis of science was from one of my mother's 1930s era college textbooks (she had a degree in biological science).   It said that the methodlogy of science was base, in the first instance, on careful observation,  second, the accurate measurements that could be made of whatever phenomena were observed and, third, the rigorous analysis of those observations.   I think I was around eight or nine when I read that,  I think it was in a book on quantitaive analysis - they were a lot more rigorous back then at the under-grad level at the land grant university she attended.   That has probably colored my evaluation of every claim of scientific discovery I've ever read or, heard of or seen being promoted since then.   Theories are fine but without the actual observation of them they're just stories.*  And one of the problems with basing scientific claims, or, really any supposedly factual claims on story telling and seeming plausibility is that you can make up a limitless supply of those and, as you'll read if you keep reading this,  there's no way to choose if you're going to believe one of them or, really, even which one of the seemingly plausible ones is more plausible. 

To answer that objection,  that problem has been an intrinsic part of the supposedly scientific study of the evolution of species from the start - that proposed field of scientific study hasn't only been hard, it is in every way impossible to scientifically study the evolution of species, in the dead past of which we have an infinitessimally tiny amoung of physical evidence from and you have to fill in the gaping chasms with story telling.   I have repeatedly quoted one of the most respected geneticists of the late 20th century,  Richard Lewontin when he put the problem the hest way I've ever seen it put:

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.

Richard Lewontin:  Introduction:  It Ain't Necessarily So

Unlike me,  Lewontin was a committed believer in the theory of natural selection,  I think in another of his NYT Book Review essays,  "Billions and Billions of Demons" exposing the nonsense of Carl Sagan he admitted the mindset that leads even those like him who should know better to choose to believe things:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Note this part o what he said:

. . .  in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

Anyone who went through the Sociobiology-Evo-Psy controversy of the mid 1970 to now with any awareness knows just what Lewontin, one of the warriors on the side opposed to those alleged scientific projects will know what he was targeting when he said "just so-stories, which is what his ally and colleague Stephen J. Gould called the story telling of E.O. Wilson,  Richard Dawkins, et al.  But it wasn't lost on me that Darwinists,  starting even before Charles,  with his Grandfather Erasmus (whose theory of evolution was the focus when the word "Darwinism" was first coined,  Charles' bull dog Thomas Huxley adopting it for natural selection c. 1860, sorry Orac, you boob).  And not only Darwinism but every single other part of the biological and allegedly social and behavioral sciences for which those actual observations, measurements and honest analyses were not really possible [For more,  see Lewontin's collection of such essays in It Ain't Necessarily So and his many other essays.]

I'm not competent to go into reasons to be skeptical of the current projects in physics and,  God help us, cosmology that give Peter Woit his content but I fully believe I'm rightly skeptical of any so-called science published for which the phenomena addressed - or even the made-up phenomena which so much of such science makes up without the possibility of observation - cannot be seen or even recorded.  But the reason I've given here for my complete skepticism of the scientific validity of such stuff, AND EVEN MORE SO THE CLAIMS OF FACTUAL OR TRUTH CLAIMS ASSERTED FOR IT,  seem to me to be soundly thought out.   No one's been able to tell me why they aren't except the asserted inconvenience to scientists,  their fan boys and gals and the theories that are their meal tickets. 

The quote from Peter Woit which I used as a title is the last line in his continuation, adderessing the claims that in the very close future, that such science won't be dependent.  I HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE  on human generation,  but will be the product of "AI."   Which I have every reason to believe will, actually, complete the total decadence that such theoretical sciencing is coming to.   I have every confidence that real science, done by human beings in experiments and actual observations of nature will continue,  I can't recall which scientist I read a couple of years back saying he hardly bothers reading theoretical papers because the most interesting things published in Nature, these days, came from materials science, physics, chemistry, etc.  

Here is the end of Peter Woit's post. 

While I find it highly likely that AI agents can do as well or better at writing the kind of bad theory papers that have dominated the literature for a long time, it seems much less likely that they can write the sort of inspired papers Witten was writing at the height of his powers (e.g. Chern-Simons-Witten, that won him a Fields medal). Since Kaplan tells me that they’ll be doing this in a couple years, not much reason to think about and debate the issue now, we’ll see soon enough.

Whether or not AI is the way to make progress, right now it’s certainly the way to get paid.

I think that's the real motive of such science,  to get published, to get hired or retaining a job,  maybe for the lucky few to get tenure and maybe that greatest disideratum, make money from some hot new company,  making a bundle from it before it implodes.   

* I've mentioned here before about how, when they were hyping the oldest so far found 35,000 year old statue of one of a very fat woman and the "experts" were hyping it as the ideal of female sexual attractiveness back then - I think some were saying it was prehistoric porn - I asked why none of them seemed to entertain the possibility that it was made by a woman and not some horny cave man.  Someone I was arguing with asked for alternative explanations and I instantly made up about seven of them,  including that it was a self-portrait or maybe a woman had made it to make fun of one of her enemies.  None of which seems to have occured to the allegeldy science-based discriptions of the thing.   It never occured to them that such an old object could have been worked on by any number of different hands, maybe by people who didn't know each other or have any more of an idea of the motives of the person who strated it than 21st century "scientists" who couldn't ask why it was made.   

NOTE:  I will say that Woit has shown unusual wisdom in telling his commentators that he is entirely unwilling to referee a discussion of the Epstein scandal in his comments.  Which is one of the wisest thing I've yet read concerning it.