That’s an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn’t show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn’t know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously.
I am not going to spend more than a few minutes here or there to give “speaking as a physicist” takes on random LW posts; I think convincing people that my views are correct in full detail would require teaching them the same things that convinced me of those views, which includes e.g. multiple years of study of QFT.
Instead, I tend to summarize what I think and invite people to ask specific questions about e.g. “why do you believe X” if they want to go further down the tree or test my beliefs more aggressively.
“That doesn’t answer the question because I am not convinced by everything you said” is not really a helpful way to do that imo.
That’s an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn’t show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn’t know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously.
I am not going to spend more than a few minutes here or there to give “speaking as a physicist” takes on random LW posts; I think convincing people that my views are correct in full detail would require teaching them the same things that convinced me of those views, which includes e.g. multiple years of study of QFT.
Instead, I tend to summarize what I think and invite people to ask specific questions about e.g. “why do you believe X” if they want to go further down the tree or test my beliefs more aggressively.
“That doesn’t answer the question because I am not convinced by everything you said” is not really a helpful way to do that imo.