Talk:Adam Becker

What belongs on a wikipedia and what belongs on a CV?

@XOR'easter: Hi, I understand the page shouldn't read like his personal webpage, but I think his work other than the book is significant. Also I found awards sections on similar people's pages, like Philip Ball and Carl Sagan. All his awards are related to his book, but the Sloane grant was prior to him writing his book, so it was essentially based on all his other work. As to ""appearances"" I'm not so sure, so I put them here for discussion. Thanks for making the page better. DolyaIskrina (talk) 15:47, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Google talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2K9Mobldtw

KQED Forum: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101866820/adam-beckers-what-is-real-explores-the-limits-of-quantum-physics

Nature Q&A: http://blogs.nature.com/onyourwavelength/2018/03/26/interactions-conversation-with-adam-becker/

Physics Today Q&A: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20181130a/full

Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (podcast): https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-skeptics-guide-to-the-universe/e/54447360

Talk Nerdy to me (podcast): https://www.carasantamaria.com/podcast/adam-becker

Story Collider (live show + podcast):

https://soundcloud.com/the-story-collider/adam-becker-how-to-save-your-phd-supervisor

A tally of brief publications, a grant of uncertain prominence and a smattering of podcast appearances are not encyclopedia material. Carl Sagan's list of honors includes multiple Emmys, a Peabody, the Hugo and Locus Awards, medals from the American Association of Physics Teachers and the National Academy of Sciences, a Pulitzer, etc. Philip Ball's article mentions an award that is given out by the Royal Society and is worth £25,000. Neither of those articles give a bulleted list of mass-market articles (for example, Sagan's essays in places like Parade magazine or Ball's dozens of pieces). See also, for example, the article on Isaac Asimov, which lists awards on the level of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus, Fellowship in the AAAS, a crater on Mars, etc.

In addition, much of this article was copied from Becker's own website and his literary agency bio. Please read Wikipedia:Copyright violations. Thank you. XOR'easter (talk) 16:12, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I think the question at hand is not: "Is Becker equal in stature to X" The question is "Does a page for someone such as him normally include awards and other works?" If you think the page should be deleted, you can nominate if for that. Otherwise, how about we allow for the fact that he is young and early in his career and his book is being taken seriously by people like James Ladyman and Sean Carroll. Podcasts are just how things are done now. And he is, after all, a popularizer of science. So of course he'd stoop to do podcasts. I'm sure Sagan would have done many a podcast if he could. The Sloane award is for $50k if money is a metric here. Did you look at any of his articles? They are really quite good. DolyaIskrina (talk) 16:41, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think the article should be deleted. He is undoubtedly notable by the usual standards Wikipedia applies to authors. The question is whether our job here is to host a CV-style miscellany; it isn't. If Sagan were alive today to do podcast interviews, we wouldn't bother to tally them, either. Wikipedia biographies of academics seldom include mention of specific grants, because getting grants is what academics do. I'm getting paid right now by one I earned that's larger than $50K, and I'm not wiki-notable. There's a big difference between a book winning a prize, which can mean a lot, and doing what everybody in the business does to keep a roof over their head, which seldom means much anything. Nor do we have a sliding scale of merit that makes the awards won by the young count for more. XOR'easter (talk) 17:03, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

I generally agree that we should not list grants. The line I have always heard is that they are inputs, not outputs. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:27, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, thanks to both of you. I'm relieved you don't want to delete, XOR&#39. I didn't realize grants were the norm. Let's remove that.DolyaIskrina (talk) 18:12, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

What does EPR really show?

I wrote the following sentence and I'm not sure I got it right " Rather, Einstein's thought experiments are apt critiques of action at a distance, one of the ramifications of the Copenhagen Interpretation." Becker is arguing that Einstein's problem with QM was not the "god doesn't play dice" randomness thing, but I'm not sure I'm stating what the actual problem was accurately.DolyaIskrina (talk) 18:17, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Well, "the" Copenhagen interpretation is rather ill-defined (a point that Becker notes but isn't consistent on), so it's tricky to say what the ramifications of it are or are not. I don't think "action at a distance" can be counted among them, though. In fact, a common thread of those views lumped together under the "Copenhagen interpretation" banner is to regard the quantum state as some sort of calculational device, not granted physical reality in the way that, say, the electromagnetic field is in Maxwell theory. Thus, abrupt changes of state due to distant events, like in the EPR experiment, aren't physical "action at a distance". Moreover, "Einstein" and "EPR" should be distinguished, as Einstein himself was not overly fond of the EPR paper, which was primarily written by Podolsky. Einstein wanted to insist upon the impossibility of action at a distance, and thereby argue that quantum mechanics was an incomplete theory; but he didn't have a "Copenhagen interpretation" to argue against, because Heisenberg hadn't retroactively invented it yet. The simplest course of action is probably just to shorten the sentence. XOR'easter (talk) 18:45, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

References

"Other interests"

I re-removed the "Other interests" section, which I first cut in this edit for copyvio reasons. The first sentence was still an almost-verbatim duplication of the cited source, and essentially redundant with what the article already stated: if someone worked for PLOS, we can take it as read that they have some level of interest in open-access publishing. (And so, "open-access publishing in the sciences" isn't really an "other" interest, either.) The second sentence was a trivia item that would hardly belong in anyone's bio and, honestly, read like scrounging for notability. Quite often, a coatrack of minor accomplishments or recognitions looks less respectable, rather than more. (For that matter, since a primary part of his current career appears to be outreach activities, then being a guest on Story Collider isn't an "other" interest any more than OA publishing is. "Other" interests are mountaineering, BASE jumping, playing in a band....) XOR'easter (talk) 15:37, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm also not convinced that the "California Quantum Interpretation Network" is an organization worth mentioning. I don't have strong feelings about this, but looking them up, one finds that they're a baker's dozen of academics who have had two long-weekend meetings in three years. Nothing against them for doing what they like to do, but it's really just scholarly business as usual. (I could probably organize a group like that myself over the weekend if I e-mailed all the attendees of the last few workshops I helped put together and asked them if they wanted to form a "Network" retrospectively.) Nor can I turn up coverage of their meetings, even of the university-PR sort. Compare, for example, the coverage that meetings of an only slightly larger group can obtain. Again, I've no strong feelings against including a mention of it, but its current phrasing and placement might be giving it just a smidge too much weight, and it does play into the coatrack-of-minor-activities problem. A curriculum vitae can list all such affiliations, while a biography ought to be more judicious. XOR'easter (talk) 15:58, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Portrait of Adam Becker.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 14:22, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Comments and suggestions from the subject of this article

Hi there! I’m Adam Becker, the subject of this article. (I’d be happy to prove this through whatever means other editors deem appropriate.) I have two comments on the article. I'm extremely reluctant to edit the article myself, and in the case of my second comment doing so would clearly be a violation of WP:COI. Given that, I would be grateful for any attention that other editors could bring to these issues, even if it’s just in the form of a reply here on the talk page.

1. First of all, there’s a handful of factual errors. I don’t work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and haven’t for quite some time. Note that my website doesn’t say I work there, nor do I appear on the LBL website. I am currently self-employed, as I have been for most of my career. Also, I was not “intermittently” employed at PLOS. I worked there full-time for a year, from late 2013 to late 2014, and have not worked there since. Nor would I say that I was working there as a publisher — PLOS is a publisher, I’m not. And unfortunately, I'm fairly sure PLOS never incorporated the Rich Citations framework into their pages. (I could be wrong about that, though. I haven’t kept up with what’s going on over there.)
2. I am hesitant to mention this, as I’m obviously quite biased, but I do think that there’s a WP:NPOV violation in the section of the article discussing the reception of my book. Specifically, there is undue weight given to the minority of critical reviews of my book. The overwhelming majority of specialist reviews were positive, as were the non-specialist reviews. Yet there is more space given to the negative reviews, and the framing of that section implies that most specialist reviews were negative. For example, saying “not all specialist reviews were negative” gives the impression that most specialist reviews were negative. But this simply isn’t the case. Here’s a complete listing of all published reviews of my book that I’m aware of, broken down by whether the author of the review was a specialist or not, and by whether the review was positive or negative:

Positive specialist reviews (10): NY Review of Books, Boston Review, Nature, The Quantum Times, Physics Today, Physics World, New Scientist, MAA Reviews, Isis, HSNS

Negative specialist reviews (3): American Journal of Physics, Inference, Science (I would argue that this last one is a mixed review, rather than a solidly negative one like the other two listed, but my point stands either way.)

Positive non-specialist reviews (10): NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Scroll India, The New Atlantis, Entropy, Open Letters Monthly

Negative non-specialist reviews (1): Science News

Given this breakdown of reviews, I don’t think the “reception” section accurately reflects the consensus of the actual reviewers, expert or otherwise. I’d be very curious to hear other editors’ thoughts on this.

Thank you!

—FreelanceAstro (talk) 22:54, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Freelanceastro, point 1 reworked, let me know if you see anything worth changing. Point 2 still not done. — AdrianHObradors (talk) 08:23, 27 August 2022 (UTC); edit: changed part 2 a bit, should be a bit better now, although no major changes AdrianHObradors (talk) 08:29, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

This is certainly an improvement. Thank you! I have a few further suggestions for balancing out the “reception” section:

1. The characterization of the review in Science is deeply inaccurate. The article currently says: “A review in the journal Science declared the project to be the sporadically accurate presentation of an "oversimplified" summary of either imaginary or merely ostensible conflicts between very complex schools of thought.” That really doesn’t seem to be what the review in Science is saying at all. Have a look at it and see what you think, but I think the current summary of that review is a fairly blatant NPOV violation, created by selectively quoting the word "oversimplified" and giving it a totally different context. I believe it would be more accurate to replace that sentence with the full quote from the review itself: “A review in the journal Science said: “Despite an oversimplified presentation of the philosophical issues at play, What is Real? offers an engaging and accessible overview of the debates surrounding the interpretation of quantum mechanics.””
2. The beginning of the first sentence of the Reception section currently reads: ““What is Real?" was given mostly positive reviews by lay and expert audiences alike in literary and pop-science panels, such as…” It’s not clear what “literary and pop-science panels” means. I think it would be more clear and more accurate if that were cut and the rest were slightly rephrased: “What is Real? received mostly positive reviews by lay and expert readers alike, in publications such as…” It might also be helpful to include a couple of professional publications in the subsequent list, like Physics World or Isis.
3. The mention of Woit’s blog post is puzzlingly arbitrary to me. There’s plenty of other online content by serious people discussing my book. For example, Sean Carroll and David Albert said many kind things about my book on Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. By what measure is Woit’s post deemed more worthy of inclusion in this article? It seems to be there simply because Woit is one of the few people who said he doesn’t like my book. (Furthermore, the summary of Woit's post is itself biased: for example, nowhere does Woit say that I don't understand quantum mechanics.)

FreelanceAstro (talk) 03:45, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Also, a few more small unrelated things:

In the infobox, I don't think it's accurate to say that I'm "known" for much of anything other than my book.

In the infobox and the "Academic background" section, it says I did my PhD in computational cosmology, but then links to computational astrophysics, a very different field that I never worked in. Perhaps it should just say I did my PhD in physics. That's what the degree says, and the next sentence in the "Academic background" section explains what my thesis was about. Also, in that next sentence, "Primordial Non-Gaussianity" should be capitalized as "primordial non-Gaussianity."

There's a weird extra space before the last paragraph in the "Career" section. And the links in the "Selected publications" section are inconsistently formatted (and one of them has an extra < in front of it).

Sorry to be a bother. Thanks again. FreelanceAstro (talk) 04:13, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

These all seem to me to be uncontroversial minor changes, so I have made them. The previous changes also seem to have made this article more balanced. I'm glad I stumbled over this: now I'm reading (and enjoying) the book. 172.82.47.242 (talk) 23:45, 30 August 2022 (UTC)