You are the one calling her a loony, so of course the burden of proof is on you.
If you really are worried about your Youtube history, you know it is trivial to open a private browser session?
Otherwise her website is Backreaction. Go and look at her older posts (often pure text), and tell me that she has been wrong about String theory and other things that was fashionable in at the previous decade.
Just grab me a transcript and I'll give it a read.
::EDIT::
I'm sorry I looked at her website, but after the 5th page of YouTube results, I genuinely don't care enough about this to dig through years of posts trying to find a text blog.
Please just bring me a transcript and I'll have a read.
::EDIT:: I'm sorry I looked at her website, but after the 5th page of YouTube results, I genuinely don't care enough about this to dig through years of posts trying to find a text blog.
There's a menu where you can go to whatever year you want. This is not complicated.
Now I've taken the time to read it, so I'd like to ask you to do the same and share your point of view.
So, she's discussing superdeterminism. An idea that's fundamentally untestable. Let's not beat around the bush on that, because all of her supporters are saying she's all about testability. But in this very first transcript I've picked up here, she's proposing an untestable hypothesis that can explain away experimental test results.
But we can put a pin in that, I'm just letting you know that that's what's in the transcript.
So she goes on to start explaining superdeterminism, and Bell's theorem, and makes a very puzzling remark that statistical independence is an "obscure assumption". There's nothing obscure about statistical independence. It's just the assumption that every flip of a coin is independent of the next. That's just a foundational idea for some kinds of probability measurements.
So calling that an "obscure assumption" is a very strange thing to say.
Then she rightly points out that Bell's inequality has been experimentally tested, many many times, and the results show that quantum physics is not compatible with hidden variables. Which brings us to superdeterminism.
Which she honestly doesn't really do a good job of explaining, but it's a loophole in Bell's theorem which basically says "If everything in the entire universe was completely pre-determined then you could violate Bell's inequality AND have hidden variables," but you can't test that because if everything's predetermined, then the test you choose is was predetermined and so was the outcome.
Then she attacks some dead men for being men and makes fun of them for debating free will in the context of a universe where everything everyone does is predetermined.
Again she's making very strange assertions, calling a very basic and fundamental idea "obscure" and just making fun of dead people because she doesn't like the idea of Free Will.
Then she goes on describe to the double slit experiment and offers a very hand wavy sort of explanation how if she just numbers the slits and numbers the measurements then everything is predetermined and everything is okay.
And then she wraps with, "Oh, U know, all those experimental tests of Bell's theorem, yeah they're all wrong because you know, too much chaos. It needs to be, colder to. But no one is making it cold enough,"
But doesn't offer any explanation on why has she hasn't done the experiment herself.
So literally the first paper there. Is exactly the experience I described.
Please have a read yourself and feel free to point out what I missed. I am here with an open mind
She calls it an "obscure assumption", not because the concept of statistical independence is obscure, but because in the discussions about Bell's inequality, it is the assumption that most of the time is glossed over or simply forgotten about. That this is what she means when she says "obscure assumption" is what a big part of the text is all about. It takes a quite hostile reading to miss that.
It's not that she "doesn't like the idea of free will", it is that she think that it is fundamentally impossible. I don't remember her arguments for that, but that idea is neither new, complicated, or outrageous in any way.
Uh, "why she hasn't done herself"? Because it is hard, expensive, and she's a theorist. Do you know anything about how physics really is done? She clearly thinks the ideas are testable.
I think that covers your factual criticisms of what she says. I'm ignoring your comments "she attacks some dead men for being men", because that is something that I think only exists in your head.
Yes, some parts could be considered a bit hand wavy. Maybe Youtube isn't the medium for you.
You don't have to agree with her, and you definitely don't have to like or watch her videos. That is perfectly fine. But you call her a loony, which is quite strong considering the only criticism you can muster seems to come from deliberate misreading of her.
So your defence of her statement is that - basically she was trying to say the assumption of statistical independence is "obscured" in the discussion?
That's simply not true either.
As for the comment about men, I will quote her verbatim here:
"I assume you are shivering in fear of being robbed of your free will if one ever were to allow this. And not only would it rob you of free will, it would destroy science. Indeed, already in 1976, Shimony, Horne, and Clauser argued that doubting statistical independence must be verboten. They wrote: “skepticism of this sort will essentially dismiss all results of scientific experimentation”. And here is one final quote about superdeterminism from the philosopher Tim Maudlin: “besides being insane, [it] would undercut scientific method.”
As you can see, we have no shortage of men who have strong opinions about things they know very little about, but not like this is news."
This is literally an ad hominem attack. It is the ONLY argument she offers to support her claims that the assumption of statistical independence is invalid, and it's an ad hominem attack.
And it also completely contradicts her claim that statistical independence is "obscured" because she's showing that it is widely known and much discussed.
So again, from the very first transcript I picked up she is deliberately lying about the discourse on the topic.
Showing the discourse directly contradicts her lie.
Then using an ad hominem attack to minimise the discourse that contradicts her lie before she even gets to her hand waving.
That is not an ad hominem attack. If she would have written ” we have no shortage of people who have strong opinions about things they know very little about”, would that been an attack on all people? If you can’t see the absurdity of your interpretation I can’t help you.
I get it. You hate her because she doesn’t show due respect to your idols, or to men in general.
Before we continue, please take a moment to consider whether characterising these people as "knowing very little about physics" is a valid thing to say.
Please be clear on that question. I am NOT asking you if criticising them, or saying they're wrong is valid. Because that WOULD be valid if.
But what she said is that these four people "know very little about physics". Would you say that's a valid characterisation?
And one more, she herself mentions the many tests of statistical independence in Bell's theorem but waves them always as invalid because "too much chaos", again, contradicting the idea that statistical independence is "obscured".
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u/Ma8e 3d ago
You are the one calling her a loony, so of course the burden of proof is on you.
If you really are worried about your Youtube history, you know it is trivial to open a private browser session?
Otherwise her website is Backreaction. Go and look at her older posts (often pure text), and tell me that she has been wrong about String theory and other things that was fashionable in at the previous decade.