Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…How well-calibrated are the best physicists? It doesn't necessarily pay to be well-calibrated, and that incentive structure is perhaps reflected in the poor calibration of many of the best physicists. First of all, because physics is a sufficiently mature field, all the good ideas that look like good ideas have already been had, or many of them. Where we're at now is the good ideas that look like bad ideas. So in order to motivate yourself to get over the hump, get over the barrier, and actually explore them, you need a little bit of irrational optimism to ride out the initial discouraging things that you'll discover as you go along. I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well-calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories. Before the LHC turned on, there were certainly a lot of high-energy theorists making extremely confident predictions about what we'd see at the LHC, and it was typically their own favorite particle that we'd see. While I'd love to have found supersymmetry, it would have, in some sense, felt somewhat unjust to reward the hubris of people making overconfident and poorly calibrated predictions. So, yeah, that's definitely a thing that happens. But I wonder if poor calibration on the individual level is somehow optimal on the collective level.…

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