TechTakes

Physics was actually a dangerous sinkhole for my young undiagnosed adhd brain. There's always something else to learn, some new rabbit hole to dive into, some cool research testing the limits of yet another poorly understood frontier. It's like tvtropes but with the mysteries of the universe.

I was fascinated to learn everything, but could never hold a single subject long enough to comprehend it fully. I realized I would never hope to make a meaningful expansion or contribution to the science. You start out with ball bearing cannons and air hockey tables, and next thing you know you're reading about string theory and supersymmetry, dark matter mathematics, the effect of gravity on time, bosons and gluons and photons, Oh my! Then you get an advisor who's been studying the same formula on the same whiteboard for 60 years, trying to trisect an angle with naught but a compass, and if they are kind they tell you to run. If you're smart, you listen.

One time I tried explaining to a colleague that a particular paper using an ML model to determine sexual orientation based on selfies was stupid as shit. Sexual orientation is not something you can confirm (gender is a social construct and sexual orientation is self-reported), nor it it encoded in a person's face, so hello ontological error^[1]^.

This colleague's response was "that's how science works." Assuming that he knew that computer science isn't really a science^[2]^, I told him it suggested a fundamental misunderstanding of science, which resulted in the following exchange:

Colleague: Well, I have a PhD in Computer Science
Me: I basically do too^[3]^ and Computer Science is not a science. You could argue that it's a branch of math
Colleague: OK, but my undergrad was in Physics

It's like these dorks saw this one amusing xckd comic, missed the point entirely, and then decided they wanted to be the physicist in the panel?

[1]: The model is also less accurate than

def sexual_orientation(person):
    return "straight"

ignoring the ontological error.

[2]: I have never once heard a single part of the scientific method brought up since I started computer science. When I was hanging out with the pure mathematicians, they seemed to generally get this: A formal system alone is not fucking science, even if you're using it to model the real world.

[3]: I was at the "all but dissertation" stage of my PhD. Now I'm at the "starting from scratch" phase.

It is a field that attracts a lot of cranks (who are pretty recognizable as being cranks via various patterns). Being a well known physicist must be hell.