The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately.

The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold:

1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.

2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.

Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution.

In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.

There’s a huge mismatch between people who are science fans and people who are doing physics anywhere near particle physics. It’s quite hard to explain how the field is spinning it’s wheels squared against what people consider scientific progress.

Edison’s “I found 100 things that didn’t work” is a nice parable but it doesn’t work across an entire field.

(former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an expert)

> While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is based of years of experimental data and coming up with a consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended up with the standard model.

The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective theory of something more, almost by definition. The problem is we have absolutely no data to drive predictions of higher order theories (which could also turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves). Without data, there is a very real chance that the standard model is the best model we're going to have for particle physics.

> the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.

Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other forces, is that 'natural'?

I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely at this stage that given only the data we have right now, someone would be able come up with a theory that would be fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but it is very unlikely.

Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions. Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit, converting that to real predictions (either on the lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for calculations of single processes to take a decade or more.

I think a lot of commentary on this thread is losing sight of what the world "model" really amounts to in a scientific context.

It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

Much of particle physics is simply exploring the parameter space in which various models might be applicable. In the most exciting case, the model crumples in some new, unexplored region.

The value of bigger accelerators comes down whether the higher energies, in which we have not yet explored, are worth exploring, relative to the cost of doing so. That is certainly debatable.

But it's not a "desert." Nobody knows what higher energies will reveal.

> It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

But philosophy is not knowledge, and it is in fact math that is the only form our knowledge can have in this area, whether we like it or not.

Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value. The operations have become more abstract over time, but they're still more complex variations on the same underlying concepts - for example generalising 3D Euclidean space to the abstract ideal of a set of relationships in a mathematical space defined by some metric.

There's nothing absolute about either the math or the metaphor. Both get good answers in relatively limited domains.

One obvious problem is that reality may use a completely different set of mechanisms. Physics is really pattern recognition of our interpretation of our experience of those mechanisms. It's not a description of reality at all. It can't be.

And if our system of metaphors is incomplete - quite likely, because our experiences are limited physically and intellectually - we won't be able to progress past those limits in our imagination.

We'll experience exactly what we're experiencing now - gaps between different areas of knowledge where the metaphors are contradictory and fail to connect.

This is all wrong, unfortunately, and that’s because it is based on a wrong premise. Experience and knowledge are two different things, and whether we are capable of experiencing certain aspects of reality or not, math is how we know things. In the areas we cannot experience directly the ability to form mathematical images and ideas can even be thought of, if you will, as an extension of our ability to “see.”

>Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value.

If you experience pushing this object that feels to weigh 1kg with a force that feels like 1 N, you are going to experience seeing it accelerate at 1m/s^2.

My point is that there is nothing magical about this model or that model.

HEP experimentation is just exploring parameter space and seeing if our models hold up.

I think we probably agree on the core issue, I just kept things a bit too brief.

There are people who feel like I described, and there are people who disagree to varying degrees (physicists, amitrite?). But I do think we all kind-of agree that we'd prefer to find experimental results that break the standard model vs proving it right now, but it seems unlikely we're going to find that smoking gun anytime soon. The model is an attempt at fitting data and like you said it works in the regime it was designed for, but it can't be _the_ theory of everything. It would be great if it broke somehow so we could investigate _why_ and drive new avenues of research based on that which might be more promising in resolving gravity and the other forces (or the anti-matter mystery, or shed some light on what dark-matter is)*

As the OP said, it's still good science if we prove that the current theory holds up, but no one is really happy with it at this point because everyone knows it's not going to be the final unified theory that we all want to see

---- * personaly I have a gut feeling those three are going to be resolved in rapid succesion if they're ever solved

You can just fine. The nay-sayers are, frankly, just repeating old-wives tales for the most part.

I've been running my own mail server from a VPS (vpsdime) for somewhere around 6-7 years now and the only issues I've had were related to general sysadmining headaches.

Postfix+dovecot(+mysql) setup, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and reverse-pointer record set. Both microsoft and gmail happily accept my emails and give them all the little checkmarks. Checked just a few weeks ago as I added an new domain.

It's a bit of set-up, but email is ancient tech: once set-up it doesn't need much tending.

Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or less, large bots need approval) can see every message event in every channel they have access to using the websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API.

From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.

I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).

I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.

And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.

However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.

> However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.

Slack doesn’t have a self hosted option either. This doesn’t stop literally every company on it from using it. This argument is a purist mentality. At some point you have to use someone else’s servers, or invent everything yourself.

Self hosting doesn’t even give you control, the app owner can easily put command and control software in the server image and still do whatever they want. Don’t pay your license fee? Good luck getting the keys to your encrypted data store.

As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to the defense of Discord here.

First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).

However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.

Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says

> And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.

which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say

> I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.

Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.

And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.

But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.

That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.

But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.

It is possible to maintain the benefits of competition without the level of duplication and profit motives that we struggle with today.

Large scale collaborative scientific endavours like CERN show us that it is possible to both publically share knowledge and still explore multiple avenues and competing designs. There's also no financial profit motive and while CERN receives a lot of public funding, it has to pump that funding back into the economies of the funding countries so it serves more like a high-tech industry stimulus and technological incubator.

I see no reason why a similar aproach for the development of (specific) therapeutics could not work.

I agree that it's possible to preserve many of the benefits of competition under a more centralized and explicitly cooperative structure. You see this sometimes within large for-profit companies that have competing products, which are siloed from each other in the workplace. This works fine, because there is still a profit motive at work and the identical evolutionary forces that will kill a particular silo if it's underperforming, and the same competitive pressure to perform.

Much larger cooperative structures are less proven to work and are more hypothetical, though, even if CERN is an example of such a structure working. The risk, mainly, is that there isn't a good corrective mechanism if the whole thing becomes corrupted or rotten from the top. The other risk is that the cooperation is actually detrimental to progress because it correlates outcomes via group think. Some decorrelation is nice. I am happy that Musk et al. weren't forced to become cogs at NASA, and could explore their own ideas, which was easier to achieve by then being explicitly separate entities (even if they were reliant on contracts).

> This works fine, because there is still a profit motive at work and the identical evolutionary forces that will kill a particular silo if it's underperforming, and the same competitive pressure to perform.

the profit motive in a multinationally funded system is still there in the sense of 'we have a budget of X, what's the best way to spend it?'. And research avenues that fail to yield the expected results can be terminated. In my experience, disagreement between researchers or groups were also far from uncommon. But maybe that's just physicists being exceptionally knowitall^H^H^H hard to convince :)

It's not flawless, but I don't think it could be less efficient use of public money than the current system where we publically fund early research and the succesfull projects get snatched up by the industry, patented, and sold for large profits. Even if a lot of pharmaceutical research ends up going nowhere (or a competitor beats them to it), we still end up paying for it trough the profit margins of the parent companies.

Raising healthcare costs are a serious concern for many countries, and part pharmaceuticals are a non-trivial part of the cost. Researching and producing them locally might help reduce that cost and stimulate a broader healthcare industry.

I do fear that pharmaceutical research might be to politicized for a multinational approach(e.g. HIV, what disease to prioritize). And there's bound to be some backlash from certain groups over a large 'shadowy' multinational body doing human trials.

that's just a thread of paid picrews. What is the value-add that Web3 offers here? That your avatar comes with a digital slip of paper you can use for speculation?

In terms of ownership, so far, I haven't seen any NFT space that actually adds any value over picrews let alone comissioned artwork. There's no legal framework binding the blockchain ledger entry to the copyright of the images and even if it existed, what's the value add over traditional proof-of-purchases?

Take a look at their community, it's quite interesting.

Tokenization opens a lot of doors that traditional models otherwise don't.

I took a brief look at it and saw nothing to suggest that 'web3' added anything of real value.

If you believe there is, then I'd love to hear what it adds that's 1. unique and 2. actually desirable.

you replied to a comment saying "[t]he Ponzi hallmarks are getting more obvious by the day" by... reguritating the typical reply given by Ponzi/scam artists when called out as scams?

>but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens

In the short-term, you're absolutely right. In the long-term, no one will continue to invest in Chinese businesses if China gets a reputation for banditry like this. Is it in the best interests of Chinese citizens to ruin their reputation for the next generation?

It's likely that China will use illegal or underhanded techniques to get ahead today then clean up their act and claim rehabilitation later. You can see the mental groundwork being laid in the whataboutism rebuttals comparing the US today vs past history.

> in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

Of course you can do that but that is not how you do trade. Trade requires trust and a move like this undermines trust. And I find it difficult to argue that it's in the best interest of citizen to undermine foreign investors' trust in the marketplace. In the end it means that less money will flow in.

> Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

If somebody came into my house, ate my food, set themselves up in a bedroom and enjoyed the comforts of my household, then when I told them to leave declared everywhere they had lodged and dined in my house an independent territory, that would be an immoral act. Blatant theft in the eyes of anyone.

Allen Wu was removed from his post. Not only did he decline, he took off a chunk of the company with him. That is a move of douchery in business I've never seen anywhere in the Western world in my time alive.

If the company I work for fires me, I will leave the premises. I may not like the decision but I respect it. And in Denmark we have courts of law that ensure one vacates the premises by the date of termination.

The CCP is playing fast and loose with whatever it likes. That's bad behavior, whether you're a business or a human being.

And facebook also tracks what you browse. (And Amazon lets people die in a storm.)