
Supersymmetry Bet Settled with Cognac - okket
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160822-supersymmetry-bet-settled-cognac/
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jessriedel
Good, appropriately cynical take on this from Peter Woit:

[http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8708](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8708)

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_polymer_
That was very good. The concerns on how funding should be posited is really
interesting.

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marcus_holmes
So did Gross really effectively say "OK so there's no evidence for this
theory, but I'm going to continue believing it anyway because I'm too old to
start looking for a new one?"

I empathise, but also consider it grossly* unscientific. Shouldn't there be
some kind of penalty for this obviously "wrong" stance?

*yes I know. I couldn't resist.

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gmunu
No, no penalty needed. We shouldn't worry whether individuals are scientific
or not, we should worry about whether our institutions are scientific.

Just like in politics, people are people. If your solution to political
problems is for politicians to start always acting ethically in the interests
of the greater good, you've already lost. The challenge is to design
institutions that can take in people as they are and still function.

Scientists are people. They are going to have confirmation bias when they look
at results. If they've worked on something for forty years, they (probably)
aren't going to change their minds. Luckily, physics doesn't care what Gross
thinks. It moves on. The journals start preferring other papers, young
scientists don't look to make their careers in the same old stuff.

I think the institution of physics is fine. Well, except for the fact that the
LHC hasn't found anything new yet and everyone is left hoping they build that
really big accelerator in China.

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jessriedel
If the institutions' only methods for checking the insanity of men is
experimental data, and that data only arrives on multi-decade timescales, then
the institutions are broken. Furthermore, there are several intuitional
changes physics could make to make better use of the meager data they have,
but they do not. For example: forcing physicists to go on the record
specifically and publicly about predictions (not just the one-off bet), and
making hiring decisions based on it.

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mathattack
Making hiring decisions based on bets may not work: time horizons are long and
you may decrease bold experimental work. (There is a 1 in 100 that this
works...)

I do agree about your underlying idea of having them put skin in the game.
That forces better thinking in most fields though even financial markets are
susceptible to irrational thinking.

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jessriedel
You can make 1% predictions.

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mathattack
Yes - an odds bet. But you need to make an awful lot of them to get one that
hits. This is similar to why it is hard for employees to get the benefit of
power law returns. There isn't enough career time to work for 100 companies.
(Easier to invest in the outsize outcomes than work your way in)

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jpfed
Given the title, I was hoping that cognac somehow provided the evidence
necessary to settle the supersymmetry bet.

