FIRST, in lieu of a real post, here's a comment I left at Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube channel, it contains a real question one which I hope someone answers though I suspect no such study of the reliability of mathematical speculation within physics or any other science has ever really been done.
I'm curious, has anyone ever made a list of the predictions made by theoretical physicists on the basis of mathematical speculations to see what percentage of those which were later confirmed by physical observation were wrong? The success of such speculation seems to be based on what would almost certainly be a minority of those which were made and published with great confidence. I started calling this "science fiction written in equations" when Hawking and Mlodinov insisted that the equations about "other universes" alone were what legitimately should be considered confirmed physical theory, something which you seem to have noticed, as well. It seems to me that this whole matter of confidently made theoretical claims made without either physical observation or even the possibility of that (especially true of claims made of such lost information as comprises evolution within biology and mulit-verse story telling) accounts for a lot of the decadence of science. I think this also has a dangerous effect in the general culture as can be seen in the "genetic" speculations of neo-fascist and racist politics and legal theory.
I could point out that this is especially seen in the racist Republican-fascist party right now in the United States and in similar politics in other countries. I wish I could find out the percentage of criminally billionaire tech-bros who read The Selfish Gene as part of the smattering of ignorance they gained during their so-called educations and believed it. I suspect the percentage might closely match the percentage of them enthusiastic for or at least not bothered by the flagrant, crude, vulgar, white supremacy of the Republican-fascist party they are funding and using and trying to keep in power. I suspect the percentage of those in the media and legal profession and judiciary might be at least as high if not higher.
Considering the part played by the kind of racism that a naive affluent, white liberal c. 1970 stupidly felt confident would soon be a thing of the past in not only U.S. but world politics and given the prediction of a number of dissident biologists, geneticists, etc. that the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology would lead to a renewal of the kind of racist, very potentially murderous eugenics that has flowed out of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, it seems to me to be one of the most important unexamined problems with politics and how to keep and protect egalitarian democracy. I will point out in relation to that that the liberal democratic ideology which was championed by so many a naive, affluent, white liberal of the 70s and now has proven to not only be entirely comfortable with the renewal of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its equally indigenous form of that in white, especially affluent male supremacy, the question of that libertarian liberalism as a direct contributor to the current flourishing of fascism is as pressing a question.
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It was obvious that sooner or later I'd get Covid again as I went back to teaching in person - it being impossible to distance while teaching an instrument - but I wasn't expecting it to pack such a wallop . Still tired but back on my feet. I'm going to have to learn how to teach without showing the fingering on the keyboard. With a ventilation fan going.
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