>nothing is "interesting" (something you'd see in the frontiers)

Sure, but this is philosophy, not physics. Judging philosophy that is looking for new interpretations of physics by the standards of physics itself is missing the point.

>nothing is controversial

There's controversy regarding even more "basic" features of reality, like whether a chair that's disassembled and put back together is the same chair.

What it really sounds like to me is that you just don't like philosophy. Philosophy is largely about taking "common knowledge" and trying to find new ways to look at it. In other words, to create controversy and interest when there normally wouldn't be any.

So, yes, in that mode of thinking, I completely agree. There may very well be nothing interesting or controversial about any of this in the realm of physics itself, just like there isn't anything interesting or controversial about chairs within the realm of general, practical thinking. But the point of philosophy is to challenge those modes of thinking, and it very much sounds to me like the issue you have is with that process itself.

I think, to some extent, this wraps around to this point:

>most of the time it's just "A and B are both fanciful ideas journalists made up and actual professional philosophers somehow confused for real physics". It gets annoying.

I can't speak to this without knowing a specific example, but it's quite possible that in these circumstances the physicists and philosophers are simply talking past each other. They're two different fields with some things in common, and that means that physicists can sometimes disagree with a philosopher and call them wrong simply because they're talking about it in a different way. Physicists do disagree amongst themselves, so saying that someone got the physics wrong because they're an ignorant philosopher instead of a physicist is a particularly convenient way of dismissing a conflicting view that isn't available when debating with another physicist. I personally have had discussions where a non-philosopher said that one thing isn't real physics, it's just a misunderstanding by philosophers...only for me to find that the idea in question was actually a physicist's interpretation, not a philosopher's.

But ultimately, I see this attitude even when none of your points apply. Someone simply says "consciousness" or "quantum" and people will storm in saying it's BS.

Yeah, I kind of tacked that part about Thomas Kuhn on without going deep enough into it, but I agree. In the cases we're talking about on this sub, there isn't even any incommensurability at all, and there's still polemic. It seems that when something hints at potential future incommensurability, people react strongly, and that's probably to protect those economic factors and the ego as well.

>Also this sub isn't indicative of what scientists think.

Definitely, I just meant that you can start to see the seeds of it. But I have seen far too many scientists that ultimately try to push away anything that doesn't fit their current model by saying it's BS, doesn't fit with common sense, etc. The strange thing is that some of these points can very well fit in with the current paradigm, it's just that they aren't explicitly contained within it, but somehow that's enough to trigger these sorts of responses.

I mean that even if they're aware of something, they'll find some way to say that the other person is wrong about it, which can end up making them wrong about basic things. Take the top comment about the speed of light being "wrong" as an example: the author said "around 300," meaning it's rounded, and rounding 299 to 300 is correct rounding, yet people say he's wrong, which ironically makes them wrong.

It doesn't necessarily have to be connected with a philosophy degree, but I think philosophy is an easy target since it talks about scientific fields, and it's especially easy to say "ha! This is all wrong — such an inaccurate philosopher's take!"

EDIT: Just saw that the commenter I referenced said it was just a simple mistake, so this wasn't a great example.

It's a genuinely interesting phenomenon, and I've wondered about it for a while. Every time I see any type of post that mentions physics in any capacity on this sub, I almost inevitably see a bunch of short comments saying things like "bullshit," "_____ Deepak Chopra ____," etc. My take is that there's either:

1. Some type of ego stroking or defense going on ("I have a STEM degree, this person only has a philosophy degree, thus I can feel good about myself by demonstrating how much more knowledgeable I am than them.").
2. A fear of an unknown reality that stokes strong feelings against anything that could fundamentally change our view of reality. Sort of like the driver behind conspiratorial thinking.
3. People that are so anti-religion that they'll decry anything that has even remotely mystical undertones or could in some way lend itself to a mystical interpretation, even if that interpretation is ultimately based in physicalism.
4. Simply being unable to understand the material.

I say this not to rag on anyone here but because it's a genuinely interesting and important social phenomenon. This is essentially the same mechanism that Thomas Kuhn wrote about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — when new science comes out, people think of it as nonsense because it goes against the current paradigm. Of course, some things that go against the current paradigm are nonsense. But when you extrapolate the comments here to an academic setting, it kind of serves as an interesting example of the broader social mechanisms that can hinder fruitful discussion and progress.

EDIT: Reading through more comments, I think 3 is the most likely cause. People don't take articles like this at face value because it's possible to use them for woo, so they're preemptively shot down. That ends up meaning that anything that isn't a blatantly pro-physicalism argument gets these types of comments because anything else leaves room for other possibilities and can be used to support woo.