To explain, I’m just a big old ignorant layman, but with other scientific fields I at least CONCEPTUALLY understand how they came to their findings.
Like if a Geologist tells me something about rocks I’m like: “Okay, idk how geology works, but I assume you did some kind of experiments involving rocks so you probably know what you’re talking about.”
Or if a neurologist tells me something about the human brain: “Okay, idk shit about neurology, but I assume you did some kind of brain scan or took some brain samples or did some kind of scientific experiment thingy to know this stuff about brains. I don’t know the exact details but I can at least abstractly understand the process by which you learned this thing you’re telling me now.”
Then I’ll see some news report about some finding a theoretical physicists made and it’ll be like: “The Universe is made of strings! And also the sun is a black hole! The universe is shaped like a doughnut!”
And my honky ass is just like: “How the fuck do you know that shit? What are you looking at? How did you figure that crap out?”
It’s a scam meant to keep academics employed. It’s all unfalsifiable but it leads to money and prestige for its followers. There’s your answer.
This explains most of the soft sciences, frankly. “We must protect our phoney-baloney jobs!”
Marxist-Pol Potism is alive and well it seems
Casting all theoretical physics as fake drivel is just anti-intellectualism. Read a book.
Theoretical physics is not “all unfalsifiable,” nor is it a “soft science” (?!), nor are most of the soft sciences useless or illegitimate. You are operating on chauvinism and vibes.
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Academics are workers.
They are paid a wage by universities to teach courses, which are the product the university sells, and write papers, which attract further funding and builds the university’s prestige, attracting more students (customers). The university pockets the (often OOM greater than their wages) surplus value produced by these academics and fires them if they are no longer producing surplus value. There are conversations to be had about the often exploitative and prone to abuse nature of the relationship between established academics and the graduate students and postgraduate researchers they supervise, and the role of first world academics can have (esp. in business & law, humanities, engineering) in maintaining capitalism and imperialism but it’s not disputable that (almost all) academics are workers.
Graduate students are basically slaves. Underpaid and abused. Total bourgeois behavior.
Aside from the fact that many professors are increasingly also treated like shit (look up “adjunctification”), do you think the professors are employing the grad students or decide how much they get paid? Also, many, many professors don’t have teaching assistants at all.
I know that it can be rhetorically very effective to just “say things” (i.e. to make assertions without needing to ground them in evidence or inference) and attack attack attack, but when you start out the gate saying things that are patently absurd, it makes you look like you’re grasping at straws. It also works much better when speaking rather than over text.
Whichever “it” you’re referring to (theoretical physics or soft sciences), humanity owes a great deal to both. Do you think the theory of relativity is just scribbles on a chalkboard?
I promise you that you can reverse course and you won’t be losing anything. There’s no need to dig in your heels over something so silly.
"Harrumf! Harrumf! Gentlemen! We must protect our phoney-baloney jobs!
So do you know any physics or are you just saying things?
This is the appeal to authority logical fallacy.
So no?
If you are being genuine then please leave the whining about fallacies back on Reddit.
Genuine? I am an actual commie propagandist. I make real-live propaganda for card-carrying members of the communist party. Of my own free will. I don’t even get paid! You really want to play this game?
Damn I didn’t realize Mao was committing a logical fallacy when he said “No investigation, no right to speak”
Whatever that is, the CPC doesn’t believe in it and hasn’t for a long time. Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. He was wrong a LOT. Eespecially Jiang Qing, who was a queen evil and member of the Gang of Four
…asking whether YOU know anything about the subject under discussion has literally nothing to do with an appeal to authority, are you OK?
As a commie propagandist you should be familiar with this old saw: no investigation, no right to speak! Was Mao doing an appeal to authority, too? Or is that just a reasonable expectation for any sensible person to have?
You are clinging to anti-intellectualism with no support for your position in the face of the fact that, again, the theory of relativity was the product of theoretical physics and it’s extremely important to the modern world.
Why are you so attached to your conclusion that it leads you to behave this way? How does it help you?
Because that theory fed SO many people. It created nuclear weapons which may yet end the entire world and poison the planet for millions of years.
It is also the basis for radiological medical imaging technologies, as well as basically all satellite systems, including GPS, which is vital to many systems beyond just navigation. Your objection is completely unserious.
I repeat: Why are you so attached to your conclusion that it leads you to behave this way? How does it help you?
This reads like thinly veiled Deutsche Physik bullshit about certain sciences being too abstract and Jewish. Relativity and quantum are not just theory of nuclear weapons. (Edited to dial this back slightly)