A Thread for:
Luddites
Tinfoilheads
Antivaxxers
Big Pharma haters
Goyslop haters
Big Tech haters
NASA haters
Technocracy haters
Global warming skeptics
Oldschool Treehuggers
Butlerian Jihadists
Sabine Hossenfelder fans
Physics stagnation conspiracy theorists. Spinoff from >>>sci/1 - starts past the Cheshire cat
Discussion of murders, coverups, and tech suppression
Science as a priesthood propping up Government
Man-Made Horrors Beyond Our Comprehension, i.e. the Doom Brain, >>>sci/475
Academia's sacred cows and how to butcher them
Stories about academic waste, busywork, knob polishing, grifting and straight-up fraud
Stories about getting kicked out of academia due to woke witch hunts or other BS
Stories about academics being herd animals, disconnected from reality, and sometimes quite dumb outside of their narrow fields.
Post your redpills and stories here.
I'll start:
>Famous physicist wants a short paper to plant a flag with his latest theory.
>Easy publication. Probably because he was famous?
>Turns out the theory was seriously flawed due to one false assumption.
>These things happen, which is why flag planting is risky, but so is waiting. It's a gamble either way.
>Back to the drawing board.
>He and his student spend years re-working the theory, making it much better, and running computer simulations to back it up.
>This was the student's Ph.D. thesis. They try to publish two big papers with the student as first author.
>Reviewer slaps his dick on the table and says he's not approving anything without a total rewrite of the simulations to include 3D magnetohydrodynamics and radiation transport.
>Student suggests publishing on arXiv anyways because he thinks the new theory is pretty good.
>Famous physicist says no; says there is peer review for a reason, insists that the reviewer's concerns can be addressed (this was never going to happen)
>Student leaves academia after getting Ph.D.
>The papers, and the famous physicist, get old and die.
>End result: One bullshit paper, one disillusioned young physicist, and a whole lot of wasted time. No clear villains, just a failure of the system.