Woit's Fantastic Blog

Woit's fantastic blog:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

A sample of his humor: "Perhaps the LHC will revive the subject of particle theory, by producing a wormhole that will take the world back to its other end, opened up in 1985 by a DeLorean in the movie, from there setting us off into a more promising part of the multiverse."

The man writes superb prose, dishes plenty of ubergenius gossip, it's just a great blog. I just discovered it, but I'm already thinking it may be the mindhacks of mathematical physics blogs.

Comments

[TGGP]

You just discovered it? I think his blog was linked/mocked at Overcoming Bias a while back, and he's well known for his take on string theory. I suspect that orthodox string theorists are correct, as part of my general defer-to-the-experts heuristic.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

I'm not saying he's correct in his contrarian stance (I myself am skeptical on how perfectly contrarian it is) I'm just saying the prose, gossip, and physics explanations are all unusually good, in my opinion. In that way it's like mindhacks.

If you can find the link where OB mocks Woit's blog, please share it here.

[TGGP]

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/pseudo-criticis.html

I didn't expect you to be into gossip, but I suppose it makes sense given your interest in the status games behind idealized insitutions/behaviors. I can't recall much physics explanations there, but that might just be because I haven't read enough.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, you really didn't expect me to be into gossip? It has less to do narrowly with status games than my desire to understand reality (aka what the fuck is going on), stated in the tag line of my blog.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Thanks for the link. Actually this particular link causes me to like Woit's blog all the more. Perhaps he overreached a little in his criticism, but I think he nailed Bostrom (and Hanson) on one of their stinkiest bad propositions -that perhaps we should try to be interesting in order to keep the creators of a simulation we're in from turning it off.

I think I nailed them independently in one of the earliest posts to this blog.

It was a dumb argument, badly argued. I was pleased to see that they seem to have dropped it recently.

That doesn't mean that the simulation hypothesis itself is dumb, untestable, or religion rather than science. I think it has some probabilistic merit, and deserves more careful scrutiny. As for the percentage of resources that should be devoted to exploring the simulation hypothesis as opposed to Woit's preferred research areas, probably a lot more should go to Woit's preferred research areas, but I think more than zero should go to the simulation hypothesis.

After reading that exchange, my enthusiasm for Woit's blog remains.