Eric and Bret Weinstein: The Prediction and the DISC [audio]

Constant meta talk about what is allowed to say and what not, Eric framing himself as a sort of outcast and renegade as if he's a north Korean dissident mostly because there's some schism within arcane academic or public intellectual circles and so on, and on occasion almost venturing into conspiracy territory.

It's good when he's talking to someone about issues leaving all the constant drama out, the episode with Tyler Cowen was quite good mostly because Tyler has a very good sense of shutting this stuff down and just focussing on interesting stuff.

Eric has a personality that is very disagreeable. So he can be hard to listen too at times. He is probably hard to work with. I suspect a lot of his trouble in his scientific career stem from this.

But his disagreeableness also what makes him a good dissenter. The world need people that will say what they believe to be true and important, even if everyone in the crowd don't want to hear it.

The peer review discussion was interesting. Peer review sounds so good in theory. But it really just gate keeping. No wonder controversial or revolutionary ideas don't get through. Better is for some kind of system where peers can have their say after publication.

Even still I found the points of discussion very interesting. I think Eric is raising some very important points of discussion, and I listen to The Portal regularly, but I find his personality to be a bit abrasive (on the podcast and on Twitter).

Eric claims that he, his brother, and his wife have all made important scientific discoveries in theoretical physics, biology and economics which were either ignored or stolen by the establishment. Most of the episode is about his brother who found that selective breeding practises in laboratory mice produced animals that due to long telomeres, were more likely to get cancer and were better at repairing tissue damage. The implication being that mice are not good animal models for medical research. One of the world's leading researchers on telomeres, who won a novel prize for the work allegedly helped Bret Weinstein in the initial stages of this telomere study, then tried to block publication of Bret's article through peer review suppression (which didn't work, the article was published anyway), and also published on the same data, interpreting it differently but not acknowledging Bret at all.

I can tell you that the idea that mice are not great models of disease is hardly a groundbreaking realisation. Eric and to a lesser extent Bret try to inflate the significance of this discovery as much as possible, which gets quite cringeworthy at many points.

Eric berates scientific peer review as a highly flawed system, which obstructs science and stops people with good ideas that aren't part of the establishment from making important contributions. This fits into his broader narrative that the boomer generation holds all the power and aren't interested in letting anyone else thrive. This is hardly anything new. His personal example doesn't actually involve peer review per se. He says he discovered something important in theoretical physics as a graduate student, but some senior physicist brushed him off, so he didn't work on it or publish anything. Some time later Ed Whitten apparently came up with the same thing, which was lauded as a brilliant discovery. I mean, doesn't everyone have a story like this? Science just isn't a system which rewards people commensurate to their cleverness. Many clever people don't do science for this reason I suspect, going off to be chess masters or quant traders (which is fine).

Of course you could say to Eric, well, you shouldn't have been deterred and published your work anyway. He tries to see off this quite legitimate challenge by saying that because of peer review, there was no point in trying to do this. This is a fairly circular argument. The Portal is a very interesting podcast and I will keep listening, but hopefully there aren't too many more self-entitled diatribes like this one.