Taleb writes about this with the phrase IYI intellectual yet idiot.
His primary concern is that these people don't take risk and become bureaucrats. Not that they are smart, brainy, or any other ad hominem attack masked as a compliment.
Taleb taught me how to protect myself in the face of uncertain situtations, the idea is not to take risks for the sake of taking risks. The problem with bureaucrats is that they are exposing others to huge risks and they don't feel it on their own skin. They are pushing the consequences of the risk on other people.
Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here
> You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.[1]
So this is really mostly about a "you had your chance with the toy, now it's time to let others play" argument, though she's very adamant that it's not. This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly.
> This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly.
Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics.
> Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on.
> No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.
Show we were she actually advocates for building any accelerator and you'd have a case. She violently opposes the FCC despite one of it's explicit goals being precisions measurements of the Higgs.
In fact in the very post you link to she dismisses the idea of high precision measurements: "Yeah, except that I am the one saying we could do better things with $20 billion than measuring the next digits of some constants"
Accelerators aren't the be-all, end-all of particle physics. She explicitly advocates for investigating particle physics in new ways, such as astronomical interaction observations.
Those aren't new ways, it's already being done by astroparticle physicists. You can look at Ice Cube, HESS and Pierre Auger Observatory for examples. Dropping accelerators simply leaves a hole, and those experiments all rely on cross sections from CERN for their predictions by the way.
> (a) Astrophysical and cosmological observations attributed to dark matter. These are discrepancies between theory and data which should be studied closer, until we have pinned down the theory. Some people have mistakenly claimed I am advocating more direct detection experiments for certain types of dark matter particles. This is not so. I am saying we need better observations of the already known discrepancies. Better sky coverage, better resolution, better stats. If we have a good idea what dark matter is, we can think of building a collider to test it, if that turns out to be useful
His primary concern is that these people don't take risk and become bureaucrats. Not that they are smart, brainy, or any other ad hominem attack masked as a compliment.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...