Scientific American Blogs

Along with a sibling, I agree that the concept of "Tragedy of the Commons" can be useful while its original author is a deeply flawed human being whose other arguments and extrapolations are insupportable and morally reprehensible.

Still, I'm grateful for your linking to this excellent critique of the source article which, among other things, provides a handy label for an ethically and morally dubious extrapolation the critique labels "lifeboat ethics" which I often seen deployed by the wealthy against the impoverished.

> an idea [Hardin] called “lifeboat ethics” [0]: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. [1]

[0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Hardin.pdf (link in OP)

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ (OP)

> Others here refer to the author as Dr. Hossenfelder. But to you she is Sabine. Would you refer to Brian Greene as Brian or Sean Carroll as Sean? It seems you are not even aware of your biases.

I doubt anyone is aware of all of their biases. I'm assuming you're making reference to gender bias - totally possible that I am susceptible to that, although I think:

a. Sabine is a more unique name than Brian.

b. In almost all discussions I see of her, she is referred to as Sabine - I was just following along with that precedence.

She also goes by "Bee" and dislikes her last name [0] [1]

[0]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-sabine-hossenfelder-fears-theorists-lacking-data-may-succumb-to-wishful-thinking/

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/09/name-game.html

The paper linked in that quote was from 2019, not 2014.

The paper is outdated because the DoD later addressed their concern about error bars. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/it-takes-a-village-to-declassify-an-error-bar/

> And then you jump from "...a paper that is slightly too old for my taste" to "highly suspect!"

It's worse than mere age.

The paper he chooses to "conclude" a major section is cherry-picked from the middle of the story, within a highly-publicized drama within the academic field. It's unlikely that anyone even casually following could be unaware of the real ending to the story.

The author is either incompetent at research or deceptive. Either way, "highly suspect" is warranted.

You can save yourself some trouble with a bit of math. Continued fractions are known to provide the best approximations under a reasonable definition of "best": https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/what-8217-s-so-great-about-continued-fractions/

Computing the continued fraction for pi actually presents some technical obstacles though - it has to be done numerically, since there's no known pattern to the sequence, and to do that, it seems like you need to compute higher and higher-precision numerical approximations to pi in order to accurately compute higher terms in the continued fraction expansion.

Turns out there is another way:
https://math.stackexchange.com/a/720082/

Avi Loeb's work was "validated" by his school's chair of astronomy, so we have to remember that to do science is to mitigate against being human. We all have different standards as to what is science as the anti-vax'ers demonstrate. What is interesting to me is that Loeb's chair notes that the object's trajectory differs from the expected by a statistical difference. While such difference implies a great deal of energy we can't account for, it's a hurdle to overcome in the search for understanding of this event/object.

Here's the chair of Harvard's astro dept.: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-facts-about-the-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua/

This gentleman is scaremongering at best. A good summary is here [1], but perhaps the most salient point is that we have not seen an increase in cancer rates or any other kind of related public health indicators commensurate with the proliferation of and increasing usage of cell phones. There is not even a correlation to be found, let alone causation.

There is a lot of crap science out there.

[1]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-prey-to-scaremongering-about-5g/

(Meta: what are the thoughts on flagging obviously crap articles like this one because they are misinformation at best, but possibly having a good discussion in the comments?)