I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, at a time when fundamental physics was making huge dramatic progress and Western democracies were changing in equally dramatic ways, mostly for the better. It truly did seem that the Age of Aquarius was upon us, and that human societies were on a consistent route to progress, however uneven. By the late 1970s and early 1980s things had started to change, but that humanity and my chosen field of science were sooner or later moving forward still seemed self-evident.
By the late 1990s the situation started getting more disturbing. The likes of Newt Gingrich started taking over the Republican party, with a highly successful propaganda arm called Fox News running 24 hours a day, pushing lies about the Democrats, especially the Clintons (remember Whitewater?). For some mysterious reason, even the New York Times joined in. In theoretical physics, proponents of a failed theory dominated the subject, putting out endless propaganda to the public such as Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace.
Around this time I started spending a lot of time trying to understand how these things could be happening. If someone is saying obviously untrue things, logically there are only two possibilities: they’re ignorant and believe what they’re saying, or they’re dishonest, know very well that they are lying. Watching this kind of thing for many years, I started to realize that a better way of thinking about what was going on is that for many people (mathematicians being somewhat of an exception) the issue of truth just isn’t very relevant. Newt Gingrich and Michio Kaku likely weren’t thinking at all about whether what they were saying was true, they were thinking about what would get votes, sell books, or otherwise further their goals in life. Gingrich was doing what he was doing to save the republic, Kaku to pursue the dreams of Einstein, but both had enthusiastically entered a post-truth environment.
Over the last decade or two, things have gotten much, much worse. Those with a lot of influence in fundamental theoretical physics have driven the field to intellectual collapse by continuing to heavily promote failed ideas. The scientific method is based on abandoning failed ideas and moving on to better ones. As an undergraduate at Harvard I watched Glashow, Coleman, Weinberg, Witten and others quickly abandoning that which didn’t work and moving on to impressive new ideas, with more of the same at Princeton during my graduate years. These days Harvard Physics features a group of people devoted mainly to propping up the failed string theory program (Vafa with the “swampland”, Strominger with “A+++” and Jafferis with the wormhole publicity stunt). The situation at the IAS/Princeton isn’t a lot better.
On the American democracy front, the Trump phenomenon embodies post-truth in its purest form, with the full triumph now of a movement devoted to saying whatever will get them to power, with less than no interest in whether any of it is true. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why voters in the US voted the way they did in this latest and recent elections. Taking a look at last night’s exit polling, the answer is pretty simple. Rich and poor voted much the same way, but those with the least education voted for Trump by a 28% margin, those with the most education voted for Harris by a 21% margin. The polite term for the first group seems to be “low information voters”, but what’s going on is that education is exactly what gives you the tools to look for the truth and not get taken in by lies.
The situation has gotten dramatically worse in recent years, as people get their information from social media, with the rise of powerful algorithms designed to generate outrage and “engagement” (sometimes designed and funded by bad actors). These send even some of the smartest people around deep into rabbit holes of lies.
So, given all this, how does one live a fulfilling life in a post-truth world? I’m 67 years old, now see little chance I’ll be around to see a return to the sort of world I once knew where what was true mattered. On the citizen in a democracy front, over the last few days I’ve adopted a new policy. When I’m reading anything, at the word “Trump” I stop and move on to something else. Other terms will get added to that algorithm as needed. What’s going on is all too clear, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I need to stop wasting time and energy thinking about it more. I’ve deleted the Twitter account I was using (@peterwoit, not the @notevenwrong blog post announcement account) and won’t anymore waste time in that sewer. I’ll miss stringking42069, but one has to make sacrifices.
On the theoretical physics front, I’ll give up wasting time paying attention to what string theorists are up to, and try to concentrate on more worthwhile intellectual activities. The blog will continue though, since it’s one of the main positive things I can do to make a small dent in the post-truth information environment. I’ve always benefited greatly from the many readers who write to me to tell me about things I may not have seen. Keep those cards and letters coming, especially since I’ll be spending less time looking for something new on the physics side of many of the usual topics I’ve covered.
Due to massive increases in the volume and sophistication of trolling, blog comments are now all moderated. If you want to argue that it’s all the Democrats fault (yes, I know that they have their own post-truth problem with identity politics), or that theoretical physics is doing just fine, please go away. If you have an insightful and constructive suggestion about how to live in the post-truth world, I’m willing to listen.
Update: Violated my own new policy by reading the following two analyses of where we are, which are better informed than my own:
https://newrepublic.com/post/188197/trump-media-information-landscape-fox
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/trust-mainstream-media-2024-election-20241110.html
Now shutting off comments and attempting to stick to more productive activity.
It is like being in open water with no land in sight.
I think your book on symmetry and quantum theory is one of the best things to happen in this world you describe. I look forward to recommending it to, and buying it for, my son.
I don’t fully agree with your conclusions here, but I understand them, and I respect them. Something began vanishing when we were young men (I am 8 years younger than you). Not Even Wrong is almost always the first thing I check when I reach the internet. Don’t abandon it. It is a sandbar to many. Courage, my friend.
Peter—all I can say is we love you— always a commentary that goes to the core.
Hi Eric,
Thanks, although one problem with teaching the course that book is based on again this semester is that I’m very aware of problems with it and how it could be improved, more so each time I teach the course. One more positive project I should work on is a rewrite.
In “Microbe Hunters”, Paul De Kruif has these words from Louis Pasteur:
“…..Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouraged by the sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves first: What have I done for my instruction? and as you gradually advance, What have I done for my country? until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and good of humanity….”
If that seems far-fetched, I quote you Vaclav Havel:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
I interpret this as doing the right thing is always meaningful no matter how futile it may seem.
IMO, you’re doing the right things.
Amen, brother.
I would like to point out that there is plenty of theoretical physics outside of particle physics–condensed matter, nuclear physics (my own field), astrophysics, biophysics… I love this blog, but am disappointed when physics is so narrowed to a single subfield.
And recently I was at a nuclear physics conference, the fall APS conference, which was full of excited and energized young people, talking about their research and their schooling and networking with each other. There was a lot of positive and productive energy there, and it gave me considerable hope for the future.
(Though I do worry terribly about the prospects for science funding in the immediate future.)
I completely agree with you — preserving sanity increasingly requires significant filtering. But too much filtering can mean losing touch with the world as it is, so where does one draw the line?
FWIW (probably not a whole lot, given the current state of things), these are a few of the things I’ve done.
1. We already have enough societal division, and I don’t want to contribute to it. I’ve found most people who I suspect strongly disagree with me on important political matters (e.g., whether Trump is mentally or dispositionally suitable for the Presidency) can be quite pleasant, humorous and even reasonable outside of politics. So I try to stay away from hot-topic political discussions unless I know them well, and regardless, I try not to define people by their political views (no matter how much I disagree). It’s sometimes really tough to do.
2. I try to keep in mind that reasonable people can disagree on important issues, even after a lot of though and with the same background information, when they start out with different premises. And since one’s premises are not entirely objective — they are influenced by environment while growing up and “coming of age,” what we have been exposed to (or sheltered from), etc. — I don’t think it is fair or even morally justified to judge people because of their views if their views are honestly held and not purely self-serving. Some people just think some things are more important than other things; I know I do.
3. I also try to remember that a lot of people just aren’t well equipped to think critically about what they hear, especially when it would require disagreeing with their friends and family and risk being pushed “outside” their social group. How much of that is their fault; to what degree are they responsible for their gullibility and willingness to embrace lies when they support what they want to believe? The answer isn’t clear to me; a lot of it seems like human nature combined with inadequate training in critical thinking. Are these flaws of human nature that will make non-authoritarian governments ultimately fail, or at least the variety of them that allows equal participation by all? I sure hope not.
4. I stay away from social media content and news sources that are strongly biased in either direction, and especially avoid commenting on them. If someone sends me a link to an analysis that doesn’t look well thought out, I won’t read it. And in my experience it’s almost always (but not literally always) pointless to try to change a person’s views when they already have things All Figured Out. But you already know that much, much better than me I’m sure.
That’s probably an already-too-long enough list from me.
A sad part of the whole exercise we have just witnessed is that all the economy-related things people are angry about — inflation, interest rates, debt, etc. — will almost certainly become somewhat worse under a Trump administration than a Harris one. That on top of indifference to climate change and power vacuum/instability in the world that authoritarians can freely exploit…
Marty.
My problem isn’t knowing how to deal with people who think Trump is not a liar. They’re few and far between where I live and work. Problem is, how to live comfortably in a society where truth doesn’t matter, one that is becoming more and more degraded with each passing year?
Dear Peter,
yes, something has been going very wrong at some point in the ’70s-’80s, although the roots of the problem probably predate its visibility (also in theoretical physics).
I do understand and share the disillusionment … often I even wonder if there has ever been a meaning for those “values” of the ’60s that we see now so irremediably compromised, or if it was all just propaganda as well. Paying less attention to the “annoying material” is for sure of great help (and I am using this strategy too) … but even more effective is to increase the communication with those few (?) that still have some constructive attitude and understand the current dysfunctional situation.
Your blog is of extreme relevance as a point of reference and information exactly for this kind of researchers in mathematical physics … and personally I am always looking to see further activity here … especially about the important ideas on Euclidean unification that I follow with great interest … hence my strongest encouragement to continue the good work here.
The same pathologies in academia that enabled string theory to survive have also enabled a set of campus born political ideas to survive for about the same length of time that are now seriously outdated. What you saw last night was a rejection of many of those ideas, mixed up with a lot of other toxic noise. Given your insights on the sociology of string theory survival perhaps use those insights to analyze that political phenomena as well.
Truth always wins in science — that’s pretty much tautological — it just often takes a distressingly long time, with much wasted time and anguish before it arrives. This blog has been a bright beacon of sanity above a turbulent sea of misguided high-energy physics ideas and publicity. I deeply hope you will not only get to continue to document the fall of string theory, but get to describe the multitude of ideas that come next — maybe even one that turns out to be true.
I think there are many people who share your feelings and I guess you won’t be surprised that I have had similar thoughts. You probably don’t hear much about what is going on in Europe but the major difference, it seems, is that the Europeans aren’t as loud, not that they are any better.
I think we could be more deliberate about community building. I know there are some communities among readers of some blogs or other outlets/newsletters which are doing well in the sense of rational discourse, but it would be worth collecting them. And, yes, I mean that as an exclusive community because, as we have all noticed I guess, everything else gets overrun by trolls eventually.
I have talked about this many times before with other people and nothing ever came out of it, so I’m not holding my breath, but maybe an academic underground of sorts is what the world needs at this point.
Isn’t this a conquest of postmodernism, Foucault (power replacing truth), Derrida (applying this to language), Butler (to sex), … to dispense with the rather Christian concept of a universal truth? Then formal (school and academic) education, forms your mind rather to the worldview of the ruling class. Here we are.
Book recommendation re this topic: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann.
A lot in your post resonates, and I ditched Twitter earlier this year too and miss parts of it. Glad to read, though, that the blog wil continue
Humans love to form groups, and one of our favourites is “We are the group that believes X”. Think about it: this really works best when X is something that no reasonable person could believe. If X were actually verifiably true then you’d get all sorts of riff raff claiming to be in your group.
See the first minute of https://youtu.be/0tQTqOar7yc?si=GnE88cY5FwxoTKmR where Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, explains how self criticism is America’s secret strength. Most scientists and mathematicians are so polite that we never find out who they think is wrong, let alone who they think are frauds. The world needs more like you and Sabine Hossenfelder. To get more scientists involved in the struggle for truth we need some mechanism which maintains anonymity until critiques are blessed by a significant group. Which doesn’t mean such groups will always be right, but at least the conflict will be out in the open.
I’m just going to throw in some historical perspective.
Isaac Newton was born at the start of the English civil war, the king was executed when he was 6 years old, and the country was extraordinarily turbulent politically until his 20s.
The generation who discovered quantum mechanics grew up during the first World War, then had the German civil war (Heisenberg had to sneak through the lines at night to get food for his family).
High levels of political turbulence is not uncorrelated with throwing up scientists and science of the absolute highest quality.
Diogenes/Enno,
My reference to post-truth problems on the left was largely to excesses at universities that those who work there are well aware of. But, those have nothing to do with the post-truth problems in physics or American democracy. The identity politics excesses were much worse in 2020, when Biden narrowly won. Foucault might have something interesting to say about the triumph of post-truth politics, but it’s not his fault.
Sorry, no more about this. It’s another waste of time.
I really enjoy seeing someone talk about the amount of disinformation out there, and why people are willing to believe whatever comes their way as long as it suits them. I am a young graduate student in theoretical physics at the moment and I want to comment that I would conjecture that many of us who even think about studying string theory is because we want a good post-doc position somewhere.
Admittedly, I took a string theory course, and I can tell you I only took it to prepare myself, if I must be put into a position, to do research in strings. I doubt anyone in that course thought what we were studying was a deep fundamental truth, and that we were all just trying to either (a) prepare for research in strings (sadly for a post-doc) or (b) pretend we were mathematicians. Of course, there were those also who wanted to simply learn what was string theory (in which typing that out sounds ironic to me), and then never wanted to look at it again.
You are being a bit too quick in believing that education would somehow help people get to the truth. After all, our string theory colleagues are some of the most educated people in the planet and they have no problem following whatever comes out of Harvard and Princeton. Indeed, if Physics PhDs can look you in the eye and say that they really believe that wormholes form when you entangle spins simply because Maldacena and Susskind say so, why should you be so surprised that people get taken in by demagogues?
At the end of the day, people are tribal – it is far easier to simply follow rather than to question. Very few people do what you do – which is to publicly air criticism. This is because people then worry about having to spend time defending the criticism and then dealing with the potential blowback. They secretly hope that the nonsense they are criticizing will die on its own. But, String Theory, Trumpism and Left-wing Identity Politics all show that this is not the case – bullshit doesn’t die without a fight. It grows. The only way to end it is to actively fight it and I am doing it in my own way.
I have personally learned a lot from your blog – largely in terms of keeping me current on various physics news and updates on mathematics. So, thank you!
When Congress changed the rules on foreign ownership of news organizations – opening the door for Murdoch & Co, the writing was on the wall. As you said, post-truth gained a huge vector (the infection kind) in FOX. Citizens United ended the chance of meaningful opposition.
I’ve asked historians for examples of cultures who have come back from our current state – a major power in thrall to a demagogue – without massive bloodshed, and I’ve yet to hear of one. In 2016, I felt that the only thing that will matter is, when the tanks surround the White House, will the guns be pointing in or out. In 2020, the Joint Chiefs supported an orderly transition of power. Next time? Who knows…
“Watching this kind of thing for many years, I started to realize that a better way of thinking about what was going on is that for many people (mathematicians being somewhat of an exception) the issue of truth just isn’t very relevant. Newt Gingrich and Michio Kaku likely weren’t thinking at all about whether what they were saying was true, they were think”ing about what would get votes, sell books, or otherwise further their goals in life.”
“On Bullshit” (2005) by the Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt is a witty and insightful exploration of this theme.
I have one sad data point to add towards the claim that level of education does not matter in how one’s brain can be reorganized to operate within a post-truth framework, which seems to be strongly correlated with exposure to the social media brain virus. Both my siblings are also highly educated (PhDs + postdocs in a hard science + scientific careers). Both have disappeared in deep rabbit holes of lies and are of one mind. The inability to have a basic reasoned discourse with them is shocking to me.
The question that I really would like to have an answer to is: What makes me and others apparently immune? Presumably a similar level of exposure to the virus did not lead to the same outcome in me. Is there something that makes one’s brain naturally resistant? Can such an ability be cultivated? Or is it innate? I am not a psychologist, but I suspect there must be a correlation with traits that are found in addictive personalities and brain changes that result from drug addiction (or religious conviction, which I consider being basically the same thing). There is no other way that I can explain the seemingly unbreakable attachment that manifests.
I’m 62 and I also have the feeling that things gradually started to go wrong over the last 30 years. Maybe it is a sign of age, but I certainly lost the positive outlook on the future.
@Enno: truth certainly is not a christian concept, that would rather be universal belief. I think it owes much more to the ancient greeks.
I have followed you for years, and appreciated your scientific perspective greatly. But I would like to offer a humanistic perspective: Humans only sometimes value truth as a virtue in itself. It comes and goes. We are not entering a post-truth world because we were never in a world profoundly devoted to truth. It’s a constant struggle. Like ice age glaciers, there are simultaneous advances and retreats in different places. Optimism is at root an attitude, not a response to particular events. It is especially important in adverse circumstances, which occur frequently in human life. Despair is an indulgence, a humanly understandable one, but not useful to dwell in more than briefly. Others have faced and are facing great challenges, and so can we.
I’m not willing to throw in the towel on truth yet.
I think this pervading feeling of “post-truth” is part of the reason so many people are attracted to the “abc conjecture” story. How can we arrive at truth, when ultimately, for practical reasons of time and ability, we have to rely on consensus at times? How do we recognize if we are stuck in a Kyoto bubble? It really says something when a field rooted in logic itself struggled with the straying from embedded norms for discussing work. It just really struck a chord.
“Appeal to authority” is not a correct way to search truth, but without using consensus as a proxy, it would be near impossible to usefully share knowledge and progress individually or as a group / field / society. It seems, as usual, the answer is not at either end of the spectrum, but in messy nuanced moderation.
Returning to the topic at hand, yes, we probably should not waste as much time engaging with things we cannot individually change. But if none of us ever engage, nothing will ever change. Moderation is sadly almost always the answer.
Attendee:
You say:
Do you know whether they actually believe this, or whether they’re just saying this so that their job prospects aren’t torpedoed by Maldacena, Susskind, and their buddies? Either way, it’s a very sad state of affairs.
Thank you for this post.
In history, people who had to live in, shall we say, a-truthful societies have resorted to various strategies, among them:
(1) Monasteries such as Lindisfarne or St. Gall’s.
(2) Friendships of private conversations, where friends were sometimes entrusted with manuscripts that have to be preserved from the secret police, well known now from the Stalinist USSR.
(3) Where officially supported jobs are not to be had, working on one’s own time.
(4) Identifying those in power who are secretly sympathetic to a search for truth.
(5) Living and working far from the centers of power.
(6) Propagating real ideas in the form of satires and amusements.
(7) Being officially employed in one capacity, but actually doing one’s most important work in another capacity — does this describe you?
Michael Gogins,
The problem isn’t that telling the truth is suppressed or that truth-tellers such as myself experience terrible retribution. I’m doing just fine. My non-tenure track faculty position nicely encompasses multiple duties, some of which are closely related to my research work (teaching advanced courses has been very helpful). The people suffering under the post-truth regime in physics are the theorists forced to think about the swampland. Who knows what will happen with our new post-truth government run by cronies of a deranged New York City real estate developer, but I’m betting that those who will suffer will not be well-off New Yorkers with graduate degrees but the people he scammed into voting for him.
The problem I’m dealing with is a different one, having to change the story I’ve always told myself about the importance of trying to understand the latest theoretical physics research and understand what is going on in our society, in order to participate in the progress of humankind. Now that those things have turned to post-truth and humanity seems to be reversing gears to ever more stupidity and ever more tribalism, I need to find a different story.
Peter Shor,
I think some of them know that it is all nonsense but simply play along to get academic positions. But my sense is that a significant number of them genuinely believe it’s true – they mumble a bunch of “algebra” about gravitational path integrals and believe that the result has been mathematically established. The “algebra” is a joke since all they do is write down a bunch of ill defined expressions and pick terms that they want. Astonishingly, it does not occur to them that the sheer ridiculous nature of the result should make them question the “algebra”.
What can I say – this episode certainly made me question academia in general. In physics, experiment has provided a wonderful way to robustly establish the truth. We have now empirically seen a branch of physics go down a rabbit hole since this branch is explicitly uninterested in any kind of experiment. This has been lead by the so called “elite” institutions. Given this, what am I supposed to make of academic claims from other disciplines where experiments are practically hard to do?
Whether or not Trump won, the American public would still have a huge proportion of post-truth people to contend with, between 40% to 50%. This problem was not going away with a Democratic win. This problem is beyond the scope of an individual and IMO, beyond the scope of this blog. It is like the seawaters lapping at your doorstep due to the sea rise from climate change.
Nothing happened on November 5th that suddenly shifted the situation in science or academia. You’ve been doing the right things, so keep fighting the good fight. We still don’t have Lysenkoism, and these institutions still can recover, and maybe even be a bastion in the problem that I have deemed to be out-of-scope.
Italy has the dubious honor of leading by example when it comes to terrible statesmen: Mussolini inspired Hitler, and Trump is, in many ways, a repackaged Silvio Berlusconi. As an Italian, I think I can offer my 2 cents on why not engaging with Trump might actually be the right decision—and possibly even a solution.
From his debut on the right in 1994 to the crisis of 2012, the entrepreneur-turned-politician Berlusconi dominated the Italian scene, whether in power or not (and most of the time, he was). He was more con man than political leader—crass, populist, and self-serving. His promises were often blatant nonsense, and, as the owner of a large portion of Italy’s media, he turned it into a propaganda machine. He made short work of his opponents, except for one timid, center-left economics professor, Romano Prodi, who beat him… TWICE. Thoughtful, meticulous, and unshakably calm, Prodi projected quiet integrity and consistency. His lack of charisma was legendary: he was so reliably dull that even Berlusconi’s exemplary skill at painting opponents as dangerous communists couldn’t stick. While others on the left kept their megaphones blaring denouncing Berlusconi as a fascist autocrat (and thus often committed themselves to obvious or perceived exaggerations), Prodi didn’t take the bait. Politely outlasting everyone’s theatrics with a warm smile and a stack of carefully prepared notes, he patiently explained the finer points of his proposals and appealed to reason, earning a reputation as a competent and reliable alternative to his flashy rival—a reputation his anti-Berlusconi colleagues struggled to achieve. (For the record, both of Prodi’s terms ended when he was backstabbed by the usual coalition infighting on the left, which never capitalized on his strengths and is mostly still repeating the same mistakes with the current crop of politicians on the right.)
The moral of the story? I think that even at a personal level we shouldn’t tunnel-vision ourselves in opposing the worst of the “other side.” Instead, we should apply ourselves to building and proposing another model.
I think it’s essential to take note of the “education by race” statistics along with the plain education ones. It’s specifically white non-college graduates who went hard for Trump. Non-white voters went overwhelmingly Democratic with virtually no difference between education levels. White college graduates, while decisively Democratic, landed at essentially a midpoint between the aforementioned groups.
Another thing perhaps worth mentioning: a friend of mine doorknocked for Harris in Minnesota, speaking with (in his estimation) 150+ people, specifically union member households. Among other things, he found it notable that in his experience pretty much 0% of people–nobody, not even strong Trump supporters–actually believed any specific claims Trump makes. Basically, they know he speaks in meaningless word salad, but nonetheless believe that he/the MAGA movement are nebulously, somehow, going to return them to a world that felt more normal and comfortable for them. Obviously education still bears upon this to some degree, but perhaps not along the particular lines that we might instinctively expect.
With no disrespect intended, I’d tentatively suggest that a perspective from within academia may naturally tend to overemphasize the intellectual element of our political situation and its “post-truth” ideological manifestation (as well as encouraging a rather skewed view on “identity politics” through the demented and hypocritical version that has taken strong root in the soil of university administration). More specifically, I strongly believe–and I think this exit polling generally evidences–that the fundamental problems are to be found in this society’s as-yet unresolved stew of white supremacist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted attitudes which can be exploited to compel ideological allegiance to an obviously-doddering freak whose words you don’t even believe.
As to how to live in this catastrophically post-truth world, I personally believe that for those in relatively stable positions within academia or government bureaucracies in America (I work in one of the latter), the immediate imperative is to think seriously about our colleagues–particularly our junior colleagues and/or students, and particularly those who are most likely at risk from any rapid changes in federal policies come January (e.g., immigrants/temporary residents, anyone who’s “out” as transgender, etc.)–and consider how we might create countervailing or insulating structures/expectations within our own institutions, and how we might offer meaningful material support to those who might, regrettably, come to need it. This may seem different from what you’re actually asking about here, but I’d argue that it’s of primary and overriding importance in the near term if we want any chance of defending and growing institutions/communities committed to free and rigorous inquiry.
Dear Professor Woit,
Thank you for your work on this blog, your books and your interviews elsewhere, it’s really appreciated.
I hope you’ll continue with the same energy as before
Peter, thanks for this. Your thoughtfulness and decency make me feel better. I still believe truth will prevail, as will justice, haltingly, messily. I still cling to my crazy belief that war will end in my lifetime! But yeah, for now, I’m going to focus on doing what I love, with people for whom I care. I have no time for anger or despair. John
Please check out the polling that shows Republican voters were *far* more wrong on factual questions than Democratic voters. This is relevant.
Attendee:
I think a similar phenomenon may have occurred in artificial intelligence. There have been a number of experiments showing that the models of neurons used in neural nets are much too simplistic to actually be how the brain works. And yet computer scientists studying neural nets completely ignored these experiments and proceeded with their research undeterred.
However, using these neural nets seems to have experimentally produced machines with remarkable capabilities, so maybe there are enough similarities between the brain and the neural net model for the machines to work anyway. Or maybe the brain and neural nets work in completely different ways, but neural nets still work to produce useful programs.
The difference between neural nets and string theory may be that the AI researchers could test whether their neural nets were doing interesting things, and eventually figured out how to train them to produce remarkable results. As far as I can tell, the string theory and the It-from-Qubit people don’t have anything to ground their research in, and thus are straying farther and farther from reality.
D.H.
I don’t think this has to do with racism/sexism/etc. A lot of the same people now voting for Trump voted for Obama and elected him. A majority of white women have consistently voted for Trump. Even more of them voted for him this year (versus 2020) when he was running against a woman. If you look at the election results by county from North Carolina, rural heavily white counties voted overwhelmingly for the Black gubernatorial candidate.
The tribalism at work here is not so much racial or gender based. It is strongly rural versus urban. Yes, most US voters now are just like the string theorists who have entered a post-truth state where they are not interested in what is actually true or not and just go by tribe, following what they hear from the “leaders”. They neither know nor care about any relevant facts. Listening to string theorists justify what they are doing, it’s generally the same untrue talking points, most of what I’ve heard from Trump voters asked to explain their vote, it’s all Republican party talking points distributed by Fox News and other right-wing outlets.
Saying that now is post-truth is not true. You can freely write. If you are depressed, you can go walk at the beach. This was not allowed in the old world you miss, when Eastern Europe was under Soviet occupation, and only mainstream media existed. Now is a better world, despite residual problems.
Coming from the UK I have no skin in this game, at least not directly yet. It seems like the US is having its Brexit moment. When the UK population voted to leave the EU there was a very similar reaction that everyone who had voted for it was either stupid, uneducated, racist or had been duped by propaganda. While that is certainly the case for some, it certainly wasn’t the case for all. Also, similar to what D.H. said, most people didn’t really vote for what the campaigners on the leave side were saying but they believed that leaving was the right thing to do.
From the outside, it appears that no one on the democrat side has ever really tried to engage with those who had voted for Trump in the past, they just assumed that they wouldn’t be so “stupid” this time. This left them with no real choice but to vote for Trump again. In the end; if people are offered more of the same or a change, they’ll sometimes pick change even if it’s not necessarily the change they want.
I applaud your decision Peter to focus on what is important to you rather than waste time on that which isn’t. If nothing else, something good has come out of what is a bad situation for you.
Peter Shor,
I attended an It-from-Qubit conference at Stanford once to see what the fuss was about. They gave out delicious biscuits. I consumed a few and likely gained some weight. That is the only bit that I can say has quantifiably come from this collaboration.
I would say that the senior string theorists are a dejected lot these days. I have been in the field for a while and I can say that their body language visibly lacks the confidence of the past. The brash confidence of we-are-the-smarties-and-the-rest-of-you-are-dumb has been replaced with a sort of sad and dejected look. Thus Susskind’s recent meltdown about the state of string theory doesn’t surprise me.
But, none of this stops them from publicly lying about the progress in the field and so they continue brainwashing young people into joining it. I was raised Catholic and I have seen that defeated look in an old priest who has figured out that perhaps there isn’t an almighty after all but if he admits to it, he loses his job and has to find a new line of work. So they continue preaching – and that system has lasted nearly 2000 years.
Hi Alessandro,
One of the sadder things to see on Twitter in recent years has been your obsessive defense of the indefensible, as long as it was “anti-woke”. You, Bret Weinstein and some others I know clearly joined the post-truth brigade because of mistreatment at the hands of the woke. Hopefully, now you’ll feel much better, and your obsessive campaign to deal with the excesses of the woke by turning control of the world over to Trump and Putin ends better than I expect.
Alessandro Strumia,
Your characterization of traditional media of all flavors and political tendencies as „mainstream“, suggesting that they all follow a uniform and presumably „woke“ narrative, is a particular embarrassing contribution to the post-truth stream. Equating traditional media of the western world with the Soviet regime is a gross denunciation, especially when your hero is a big fan of the latter‘s dictatorial successor.
My knowledge of history isn’t what it should be. However, it does seem roughly accurate to characterize the brief stretch of time from the Enlightenment to now as highly anomalous. Only quite recently has value in “truth” as we humanistically define it been widespread, especially by those in positions of power. It’s not implausible that there could inevitably be a regression to the historical mean.
Around last Halloween I heard a summary of a study in some podcast, speculating on why people would choose to watch horror movies. Perhaps they help us cope with the real life horrors we may encounter. Like any form of play, jump-scares serve not only to amuse, but also to prepare.
Dystopian speculative fiction is nothing new, but there seems to be more of it around. When I was young we escaped into Narnia and Middle Earth. My daughter and all her friends love the Hunger Games. They stopped wanting to dress up like Hermione Grainger years ago. Now they want to be Harley Quinn. I think they’re getting prepared.
It’s hard for us who have lived long enough to witness the decline of the Enlightened West to imagine how such a thing could happen. But it’s nothing short of a miracle we were born in a time in which we could grow up to take truth for granted. It was nice while it lasted.
Alessandro Strumia,
“Now is a better world, despite residual problems.”
Not in all respects, and you know it. I studied physics and got my master’s in 1983. If you would have told me then what the state of HEP theory would be in 2024, I would have thought you were nuts.
I once interviewed Jean Bricmont (from Sokal & Bricmont fame) and he explained why he thought truth was important: “Because truth is the only thing the poor and oppressed have.” In the 1980s you still could voice those sentiments without being laughed out of court as a naive idiot. So yes, it was better then.
Being rather old now, I have the strange feeling that I’m living in a world where truth simply doesn’t matter any more. Perhaps civilization has reach that stage in which, in many domains, we don’t have to question anymore if statements are true. We can make up things as we wish, and a mythical thing called the “marketplace of ideas” will tell us who is right. Or who gets the money.
Is that a better world? I don’t think so.
Populists like Trump need an unhappy and alienated population and they then exploit them in a few basic ways. This is not new and I think the periods when debate has been based on truth have actually been in a minority through history, even recent history.
The first way is to tell people what they want to hear even if it’s completely impossible. People will believe it, or at least, give it a chance.
The second is to blame outsiders and demonise opponents. Trump’s pronouncements on immigrants have been similar to those used by various dictators and racist regimes in the recent past. People, particularly if they have a sense of lost status, and particularly if they lean towards conservatism, are very willing to blame out-groups for society’s ills. Likewise, accusing democrats off all kinds of nefarious and untrue activities.
The third, which very much ties in with this, is to present simple solutions to complex problems.
The fourth is to legitimise dark-side thoughts and actions. This can be thrilling – wow, I can say or do these previously forbidden things, I can treat those people as less than human.
It’s amazing and horrific to look at some of the worst regimes in the 20th century, on left and right, and see how far people are willing to go when they buy into this stuff. Those regimes have been expert in the use of propaganda and lies, just as Trump and MAGA are.
What’s different now is that the propaganda is also being spread peer-to-peer rather than just top-down. But the messages are nothing new.
Naively, when the internet was taking off, I though it would be a way for people to spread the truth and undermine despotic regimes. Sadly it’s turning out differently.
Please feel for us working in the field of medicine. The anti-vax movement seems to have done nothing but intensify in a post-truth society. It is absolutely tragic.
Dear Professor Woit,
I would add a comment from a cognitive behavioural perspective, even though I’ve retired and left the profession, the profession is still in me.
As a therapist, I always accepted that what my clients told me was true. The question of therapy then became how to get the client to explore why their truth didn’t seem to work?
I’d like to say that all my clients came through with a better understanding of what was true, but the truth is that at best it was 50% of them. Homo sapiens are subject to seeing the world as they are, not the world as it is. We can rationalize this as the Dunning-Kruger effect, with a side-order of Gell-Mann amnesia , or as Robert A Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”
So, what I know is that refuting falseness takes work, and then the outcome is subject to confounding variables that psychology and neuroscience has yet to control.
One of the things I really like about this blog is the engagement of other scientists in the comments. I get a lot of value from multiple other practitioners going back and forth on ideas.
I used to get a lot of this benefit from edge.org comments, and their organized public debates — e.g. the back and forth between Susskind and Smolin on the anthropic principle. Does anyone know why edge ceased being that place that Sabine calls “academic underground”? Are there good alternatives, beyond blogs such as this?
PS I resonate with Peter’s thoughts on twitter. In fact, I don’t know how people engage in debates on Twitter in the first place. I tried. I couldn’t. It’s like trying to drink water by putting your head under the Niagara falls.
Philip,
A big part of the explanation of why US democracy is in a post-truth environment is clearly that most people are now getting their news not from sources optimized for truth, but from sources optimized either for the interest of electing right-wing candidates (Fox News, etc.), or for “engagement” (Twitter, TikTok, etc.). About this, I’m no expert and if you want to discuss the problem, you should find someone knowledgeable.
I’m much more knowledgeable about sources of information about theoretical physics. The trend in the last decade or so seems to have been for there to be fewer blogs on the subject, for reasons I don’t completely understand. Some blogs run by string theorists (e.g. Jacques Distler, Clifford Johnson, Lubos Motl…) have gone dormant or rarely used simply because the field is dead so there’s nothing to write about. Some theorist blogs have moved to youtube, which is where you need to be now to get a large audience. Why virtually no young theorists are trying to blog about what they find interesting is somewhat of a mystery to me. If people can suggest examples of such, that would be great to know about.
About edge.org. What happened to it is far off-topic and I don’t want to start a discussion of it here, but for those unaware, see
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
Thanks for writing this. It is indeed very interesting how phenomena found broadly in society (i.e. entering a post-truth world) also manifests itself in the sciences. People like to pretend science happens in a vacuum outside of societal forces, but that simply isn’t true. How attitudes in society influence the behaviour in the sciences is no doubt very interesting, and deserves much closer inspection (probably worth half a dozen sociology PhDs).
As for why people start to generate hype, my guess would be that it works. Compared to a group that doesn’t generate hype, the one that generates hype gets an added advantage, then eventually everyone starts doing it out of necessity. I would imagine a reasonable portion of the people heavily promoting their works are in private sincere and genuine individuals, but do it because they think everyone is doing it and they need to do it to survive. (this applies to young people, I’d imagine if you do this for 10-20 years you forget what it means to be sincere and genuine anymore).
A way to combat this, I imagine, is when large portions of the community reaches consensus that this kind of hype generation is harmful. Without this consensus, you have nothing to lose by generating hype: at worst some raised eyebrows, but if people buy in you get to win big (plus, if enough talent gets draw in the field may take on a life of its own living solely off of the talent of the young people). With such consensus there is an added social cost/penalty for raising hype, so I’d imagine you’d only do it if you think is worth it.