I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
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I've also seen smart people tie themselves into knots trying to defend the original claim.
"He just means big science is expensive."
"He just means that AI can help with data analysis."
"He just means that string theory is a dead end."But that is not the claim, and the efforts to justify it only make the argument even stranger.
@coreyspowell
I'm not sure why anyone would take notice of anything Musk says? His wealth is largely by luck or subsidy and is theoretical (based mostly on share values) and not due to his expertise at science or engineering? -
I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell @dahukanna I'm just thinking about all the discoveries that came from observing using those telescopes and then someone thought "hmm, that's weird".
And now we know about pulsars, that light has a speed, quantum mechanics, and whole bunch of other apps for which there was no precedent for LLMs to autocorrect on.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell The most amusing thing about this is that LLM are incapable of imagining anything new. They are literally regurgitation machines. So if we relied on "AI" without new data coming in, scientific discovery will sooner or later come to an end.
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AI knows nothing more than what we already know. What an idiot.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell Some people have thoughts on their heads. Musk just has voices. And, ego and greed.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell that's also ignorant on how the scientific process works.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell why are we bothering with this idiot?
Ah. Yes. Money.That just allows him to keep bullshitting and access to important people.
To all governments: Have a *real* scientist on hand when Musk starts his spiel.
Document the conversation. -
@coreyspowell well, for analysis of ever increasing amount of astronomical data, some kind of automation is needed anyway. So maybe it would be better use of AI, than all this chatbot nonsense.
The huge colliders are special case, that now there is AFAIK no special prediction in physics, which can be confirmed or falsified at higher energies. Somehow it is probably not the direction to find any new physics (which would be cool). Also the dark matter detectors are somehow infamous as spending huge amount of money for (predictably) finding nothing.
The situation in astronomy is very different and of course we need new telescopes and new ideas for telescopes. Lot of them would have to be placed in space, probably.
So, somehow the discussion "what next in science" makes sense, and I would not probably bet on particle colliders to be the right answer. Still, over-relying on LLM-líke AIs si ridiculous. Of course, science needs new (not necesarily "more") empirical data and also, for huge amounts of data, some automation to process them.
@xChaos @coreyspowell Yeah, machine learning, image recognition, all those things are way less expensive than LLM. And they work. And don't plagiarise the whole world's art...
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell @benroyce I think that article missunderstands what he is saying. He propbably means that instead of wasting money on things that take up vast amounts of physical space, it would be better to line his pockets instead.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell ketamine is a dissociative.....
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@xChaos @coreyspowell Astronomers have been using automated data systems for years and these work very well at finding patterns in data. These are not general programs but finally honed analysis software. The issue is, and always has been, to work out what you want to look for. This always needs human intervention and I doubt very much whether any LLM would contribute anything beyond what we put into it.
As you say new telescopes are needed but I would not rule out the wish for a new larger collider. There is still a lot of good science to be done at higher energies even without any new major findings. Although I suspect there are some things lurking out there....
In all cases the cost will be high but relative to the cost of all the weapons expanded in the last few weeks it's not that big.
What's next in science is always a problem when the question tries to pit one side of science against another. You simply have no idea where the next breakthrough comes from. My bet is somewhere in biology and brain science.
If it were me and here we are talking physics I would scrap all manned spaceflight and put that money into science missions and telescopes as well as basic science.
@SamanthaJaneSmith @coreyspowell I am fan of manned spaceflight, but maybe, the funding should be different from science. Manned spaceflight is more or less extrapolation of great voyages, mountain climbing, polar expeditions, and such. I would compare it rather with great sport events... excepts is too ambient (most of the time) and the risks are of different type then risks undertaken in sports, so the funding model of great sport events would not work. It attracts attention of few people and in different way.
The TV show paradigm is definitely more worth replacing, than science.
But when talking about understanding universe, both large and small... you know, I am not scientist, just huge fan of science and history of science, but on amateur basis. It is exciting to invent concepts about how the universe works and be able to do something new, based on these new concepts. Sometimes, save lives.
The intuition, that there may be more to learn when looking at night sky at higher and higher resolutions and more frequency bands, than by smashing particles together at higher and higher frequencies is maybe wrong, who knows.
Definitely, trying to guess things without any input data means doing pure math. You can construct mathematical objects without input data... but why?
There was this strange case of string theory in physics, which thrived even without predicting any observation or suggesting any experiment. No future collider would prove or disprove this. Some theories are too far off....
I feel like there are two major approaches in natural sciences: one is this belief, that if mathematical object is possible, it simply exists somewhere in nature (so we see all this spirals and ornaments in plants, and so on) and the second approach is statistical analysis of gathered data.
Human language is not mathematical object, but LLM AIs somehow treat it as if it was. I seriously doubt, that searching through "all possible conversations" can replace science...
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell The general rule here is that if Elon says something is either:
completely wrong,
factually incorrect,
ignores details and nuance (and empathy) or
he's lying to make money. -
I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell He's a ketamine riddled idiot who believes he knows everything but knows very little. It's pathetic. Classic Dunning-Kruger effect.
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@SamanthaJaneSmith @coreyspowell I am fan of manned spaceflight, but maybe, the funding should be different from science. Manned spaceflight is more or less extrapolation of great voyages, mountain climbing, polar expeditions, and such. I would compare it rather with great sport events... excepts is too ambient (most of the time) and the risks are of different type then risks undertaken in sports, so the funding model of great sport events would not work. It attracts attention of few people and in different way.
The TV show paradigm is definitely more worth replacing, than science.
But when talking about understanding universe, both large and small... you know, I am not scientist, just huge fan of science and history of science, but on amateur basis. It is exciting to invent concepts about how the universe works and be able to do something new, based on these new concepts. Sometimes, save lives.
The intuition, that there may be more to learn when looking at night sky at higher and higher resolutions and more frequency bands, than by smashing particles together at higher and higher frequencies is maybe wrong, who knows.
Definitely, trying to guess things without any input data means doing pure math. You can construct mathematical objects without input data... but why?
There was this strange case of string theory in physics, which thrived even without predicting any observation or suggesting any experiment. No future collider would prove or disprove this. Some theories are too far off....
I feel like there are two major approaches in natural sciences: one is this belief, that if mathematical object is possible, it simply exists somewhere in nature (so we see all this spirals and ornaments in plants, and so on) and the second approach is statistical analysis of gathered data.
Human language is not mathematical object, but LLM AIs somehow treat it as if it was. I seriously doubt, that searching through "all possible conversations" can replace science...
@xChaos @coreyspowell Hi again. The problem with manned spaceflight is that it sucks out the funding from the science program and tbh it is not good value for money. It may be "adventurous" but is that what taxpayer money should be spent on? I think not.
So theories in science are only theories if they are testable otherwise you have beliefs. (this is why the existence of a "god" is a belief - it can't be proved). So progress in science relies on (a) theories that can predict observable data you can observe either now or in the future (b) data to test these theories on or develop new ones from. These go hand-in-hand. Either data or theory may start a new field of research.
So lots of people do construct theories based on mathematical constructs only. Some may become useful some may not. Not all mathematically possible objects can exist or do.
No, you intuition about looking in more detail or different bands is correct which I why I believe they will build more colliders.
Not sure you are right about string theory tbh. It was a candidate for the strong force but it didn't work - however, it did seem to open possibilities for gravity. So it was actually trying to explain a physical phenomena. It is still very much in the - not sure phase of whether this works - but do remember that it is trying to explain the fundamental nature of the world which is observable..... it did however seem to provide some help in some very esoteric ideas that have implications in the real world. But these are way beyond my understanding as I am not a particle physicist or string theorist.
Sammi
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I also have to point out that the most expensive space telescope (JWST) cost about $500 million/year. We spent 1000x that much on AI development in 2025.
Data collection is essential for discovery...and it's remarkably cheap compared to many other things we do routinely.
@coreyspowell please don’t point it out as it’s super depressing to think what could’ve been achieved in general with all the dollars squandered by big tech on shite.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell https://youtu.be/GmJI6qIqURA?is=53J7iAt50wu_tU6u @acollierastro puts it nicely - these guys could easily take time out to go get a PhD in Physics but they’d rather spout uninformed nonsense.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell he's tripping his tits off again.
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I keep seeing versions of this post, which imply a bizarre misunderstanding of how we know the world.
Do people imagine that if we'd never observed galaxies or neutrinos or exoplanets or the cosmic microwave background, we could have *imagined* these things & that would be just as real?
Or that we've magically reached the point, just now, where we no longer need to observe the world?
@coreyspowell He clearly has no idea how science works. We need all this "expensive" hardware because theories need to be verified by experiments and observations. New theories are useful to shape new experiments, but are useless if they cannot be verified. AI cannot substitute experiments, particularly in its current shape. And it is not even cheaper than colliders and telescopes.
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@coreyspowell He clearly has no idea how science works. We need all this "expensive" hardware because theories need to be verified by experiments and observations. New theories are useful to shape new experiments, but are useless if they cannot be verified. AI cannot substitute experiments, particularly in its current shape. And it is not even cheaper than colliders and telescopes.
@coreyspowell And physics is hardly stagnant; there have been many important discoveries in the last few years. And that is happening despite efforts from people like Elon Musk to destroy funding of anything that is not benefiting them personally.
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@coreyspowell I mean, he's the guy who, despite being head dude of the largest satellite operator in the world, argued satellites couldn't be a problem for astronomy because they'd be in darkness at night… so yeah, I'd agree there's a much more straightforward explanation for his apparently nonsensical statements https://mastodon.social/@reedmideke/113817738470795433
@reedmideke @coreyspowell he says everything to support his own ideas and science (facts) is dangerous for him. That's why he's making these statements.
