posted on January 15, 2022 11:47 AM by
u/thicknavyrain
29
u/thicknavyrain37 pointsat 1642247393.000000
I think in many respects, this article, though critical is actually a
little too flattering of Cummings, but it’s written by someone
with a political background. I’m an (ex) PhD physicist and Cummings
treatment of technical subjects has always seemed wooly, imprecise and
presumptuous to me but apart from that, I think the piece nails a lot
about him.
The problem is Cummings has been enough of a twat about the "type" of person the author is that he is hesitant to give a really robust critique without seeming like he's holding a grudge. In a way it's clever, but in another, more accurate way, it's just being a twat.
I think the problem most scientists have with Cummings's world view as described here, is that even genius scientists need to make their work reproducible by non-geniuses. That means protocols, processes and paperwork that sometimes annoys us and slows us down. I'm not an expert on governance, but even in a Cummings technocracy I would like the work of genius governors to be reproducible (in case someone is either ill, or not as clever as Cummings thinks).
And any scientist who can name a genius in their field can, nearly always, point to a time when that genius completely fucked up. Einstein never trusted quantum mechanics, made a series of mistakes about gravitational waves, and went haring off after a Unified Field Theory. Bohr could have predicted the neutrino if he'd trusted the conservation of energy. Feynman failed to explain superconductivity. Galileo was wrong about the tides. Newton predicted the speed of sound, got the wrong answer, and fudged his calculation with extra assumptions until it matched experiment. And so forth.
I think in many respects, this article, though critical is actually a little too flattering of Cummings, but it’s written by someone with a political background. I’m an (ex) PhD physicist and Cummings treatment of technical subjects has always seemed wooly, imprecise and presumptuous to me but apart from that, I think the piece nails a lot about him.