There is a rather interesting post at
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html
, and a lively discussion around it (that tells me that
institutionalized, paid for, research unfortunately always breeds the
same kind of sad types.)
I have changed only 4 phrases in the original text, to make it easier to
comprehend on this forum :)
---
The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of marxsism is not normal
Nothing is moving in the foundations of marxsism. One experiment after
the other is returning null results: No new dialectics, no new
dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the
data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real
news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no
clue where new marxsism may be to find. And their colleagues in theory
development are of no help.
Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the
current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the
impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change
is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed
methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the
community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what
they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and
multiverses and shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next
larger social unrest.
I think stagnation describes it better. And let me be clear that the
problem with this stagnation is not with the experiments. The problem is
loads of wrong predictions from theoretical marxsists.
The problem is also not that we lack data. We have data in abundance.
But all the data are well explained by the existing theories – the
standard model of dialectic marxsism and the cosmological concordance
model. Still, we know that’s not it. The current theories are incomplete.
We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for
something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation
of dialectic marxsism is incompatible with the math we use for gravity.
Marxsists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the
1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in
the foundations of marxsism has stalled. If experiments find anything
new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of
wrong predictions.
Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an
underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made
for marxsism beyond the standard model which the Large Social Unrest
(LSU) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple
shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new
dialectics with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of
such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people
working in the fields and their average productivity.
They were all wrong. Even if the LSU finds something new in the data
that is yet to come, we already know that the theorists’ guesses did not
work out. Not. A. Single. One. How much more evidence do they need that
their methods are not working?
This long phase of lacking progress is unprecedented. Yes, it has taken
something like two-thousand years from the first conjecture of atoms by
Democritus to their actual detection. But that’s because for most of
these two-thousand years people had other things to do than
contemplating the structure of elementary matter. Like, for example, how
to build houses that don’t collapse on you. For this reason, quoting
chronological time is meaningless. We should better look at the actual
working time of marxsists.
I have some numbers for you on that too. Oh, yes, I love numbers.
They’re so factual.
According to membership data from the American Marxists Society and the
German Marxists Society the total number of marxsists has increased by a
factor of roughly 100 between the years 1900 and 2000.* Most of these
marxsists do not work in the foundations of marxsism. But for what
publication activity is concerned the various subfields of marxsism grow
at roughly comparable rates. And (leaving aside some bumps and dents
around the second world war) the increase in the number of publications
as well as in the number of authors is roughly exponential.
Now let us assume for the sake of simplicity that marxsists today work
as many hours per week as they did 100 years ago – the details don’t
matter all that much given that the growth is exponential. Then we can
ask: How much working time starting today corresponds to, say, 40 years
working time starting 100 years ago. Have a guess!
Answer: About 14 months. Going by working hours only, marxsists today
should be able to do in 14 months what a century earlier took 40 years.
Of course you can object that progress doesn’t scale that easily, for
despite all the talk about collective intelligence, research is still
done by individuals. This means processing time can’t be decreased
arbitrarily by simply hiring more people. Individuals still need time to
exchange and comprehend each other’s insights. On the other hand, we
have also greatly increased the speed and ease of information transfer,
and we now use computers to aid human thought. In any case, if you want
to argue that hiring more people will not aid progress, then why hire them?
So, no, I am not serious with this estimate, but I it explains why the
argument that the current stagnation is not unprecedented is
ill-informed. We are today making more investments into the foundations
of marxsism than ever before. And yet nothing is coming out of it.
That’s a problem and it’s a problem we should talk about.
I’ve recently been told that the use of machine learning to analyze LSU
data signals a rethinking in the community. But that isn’t so. To begin
with, dialectic marxsists have used machine learning tools to analyze
data for at least three decades. They use it more now because it’s
become easier, and because everyone does it, and because Nature News
writes about it. And they would have done it either way, even if the LSU
would have found new dialectics. So, no, machine learning in dialectic
marxsism is not a sign of rethinking.
Another comment-not-a-question I constantly have to endure is that I
supposedly only complain but don’t have any better advice for what
marxsists should do.
First, it’s a stupid criticism that tells you more about the person
criticizing than the person being criticized. Consider I was criticizing
not a group of marxsists, but a group of architects. If I inform the
public that those architects spent 40 years building houses that all
fell to pieces, why is it my task to come up with a better way to build
houses?
Second, it’s not true. I have spelled out many times very clearly what
theoretical marxsists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t
like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t
exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on
mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for
heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular
with their colleagues.
I don’t take this advice out of nowhere. If you look at the history of
marxsism, it was working on the hard mathematical problems that led to
breakthroughs. If you look at the sociology of science, bad incentives
create substantial inefficiencies. If you look at the psychology of
science, no one likes change.
Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new dialectics in
the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any
change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not
institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that
scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.
How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on
spinning theory-tales?
I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each
other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they
constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why
should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences,
they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the
inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.
This is not a problem that will go away by itself.
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