What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)
edge.org
edge.org
On the other hand, I think everyone would be better off reading Propaganda, by Bernays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
It's short.
From the Wikipedia article:
> On the other hand, writers such as Marvin Olasky justify Bernays as killing democracy in order to save it. In this way, the presence of an elite, faceless persuasion constituted the only plausible way to prevent authoritarian control.
That last sentence makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't authoritarian governments use propaganda?
Direct persuasion would be something akin to Weber's charismatic authority: the typical cult of personality stuff. A representative democracy, not having its identity tied to one singular leader, can't do that.
Right?
Anybody advocating affirmative use of propaganda will also be using it.
Unlike in professional wrestling politicians, corporations, etc have real conflicts over zero sum games. Of course, there are situations where there's are incentives to cooperate.
As for his critique of neoclassical economics' reliance on perfect information - that's already been addressed by many economists, Stiglitz, etc. It's frankly banal to even bring it up any longer.
I just don't see this concept adding much value to a conceptual toolkit. Whenever I try to apply it, it feels forced and it seems simpler concepts do the job just fine.
For example, it's easier to just assume that sometimes competitors finds situations where it makes sense to cooperate.
And it's simpler to assume that even staunch enemies want to appear "gentlemanly" at times, either in public or behind the scenes.
Kayfabe seems worst that useless to me. It seems to violate Occam's razor. It offers an elaborate explanation where a simply explanation would be just as good.
But even in the weak form of that conspiracy, it seems to me the exchange of people and ideas between think tanks, journalism, lobbyists, campaigns, consultancies and financial imstitutions does operate a lot according to this concept.
I guess regardless I think the idea is not to try to find exact examples of this but to understand that wrestling is a just a dramatic example of systems that operate more on fake information than real. I think the difference between this and economic models that incorporate misinformation is that those models tend to see misinformation as something distortionary and unwelcome in the system where this is considering systems that are basically predicated on false information.
But I guess that's still a bit banal and wouldn't be my first answer to the question what scientific concept should people internalize to be better thinkers.
It seems like the line is "The audience is misled about the actual social norms". When olympic wrestlers refuse to stab each other, it is not kayfabe because the audience doesn't expect that. The Christmas Truce and various anti-latrine-bombing truces were kayfabe because the audience was British and German high command and these were done behind their backs.
If thats the right interpretation, then in this example:
> Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis.
What injury would the audience expect?
Who even is "the audience"?
> Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis.
The Kayfabe element is that two "competing" schools of thought are primarily concerned with protecting the shared status of "orthodox" economics over outside theories.
That's where wrestling can be so brilliant though. Often much of that heat and intrigue was more than a little informed by what was actually going on back stage.
In some sense, everything competes with everything else. I could claim the gravity of Jupiter competes with my sense of justice and I can probably invent some convoluted chain of nonsense that justifies it. But to give some meaning to the word, there has to be some threshold of sustained competition before we call two things 'competitors'.
Kayfabe is a state of entities presenting as competitors when they are really cooperators.
In many senses politicians aren't competitors. They only compete on things that they think will win election - that isn't most things that pass through the political realm.
A particularly painful example for me was the way Trump said during his campaign that Obamas (and Hillary’s) policy of threatening to bomb Syria if they used chemical weapons was wrong because the US could not afford to police the world, and it was nothing to do with the US. Within weeks of becoming president Assad used chemical weapons on a civilian area, including a maternity clinic, and a Trump ordered air strikes. Clearly in reality he knew he had to do it, but during his campaign the priority was to distance himself from his opponents even on issues where he actually agreed with them.
I worry that we’re seeing similar effects over the response to the virus. The Labour opposition here in the UK seems to be unable to stop criticising the government even when they are following policies driven by a professional medical consensus, and broadly supported by the population. I think this is backfiring on them quite badly.
You know that during this strike, all that was hit was an empty airfield, right? It was deliberately a pointless attack that minimized harm. He only "had to do it" in the sense that he has to kowtow to powerful neoconservative influences.
Even if you lose, you're still in the group and get certain privileges.
Keeping the wealth in the group is key.
I'm not a Bernie Bro, but he's not a bad example in this case - he represents interests outside the monied/corporate group, which although it competes across Democrat/Republican political lines, shows class solidarity when people want to, say, regulate Wall Street more, or enact universal healthcare which would hurt the bottom line of healthcare companies.
I'm sure my explanation above has its flaws but I hope it shares the gist of what I was trying to express.
I have a great example, called the ‘mating call of the banks’ (in Australia, don’t know if there’s something similar elsewhere).
We only have four major banks here, and sometimes one or more of them wants to raise interest rates out of cycle (ie without the Australian Reserve bank changing official rates).
Of course, if only one of them raises rates, they’ll lose business.
And ultimately, they all want higher rates.
So one of them will book some media spots (easy if you’re a big advertiser) and start talking about the state of the economy and how it’s out of step with fiscal policy, etc etc.
That’s a mating call.
If some other bank’s talking head turns up saying the same thing, then that’s another one. That’s a signal that at least two banks will raise rates together.
Once they’ve done that, the other two will surely follow.
Publicly executed conspiracy to fix prices.
All this is possible of course due to the consolidation allowed over the past 15 years, but separate topic for a separate thread.
When the audience turning on you is a stronger threat than that of losing to a rival, kayfabe situations are likelier to develop. But vice versa. In a lot of modern arenas, such as business between banks or competition between democracies where war is nigh impossible, kayfabe is highly likely to be present. There's not much room for major victories over your nominal rivals so you stop trying and instead focus on looking good rather than actually moving forward.
No. Neither side wants the world to crumble tomorrow (I hope). Therefore it is not zero sum
Similarly, energy from the sun isn't going to happen or not, so there's plenty of wealth being left on the table so that entropy isn't a good argument for zero sum
"zero sum" is a hateful philosophy. It means I'd kill your children because if that's terrible for you it must be oppositely great for me
aside: realized that "competing for survival where only one can get out" isn't even enough to be zero-sum if both can die. Here's a "Gladiator's Dilemma": if both choose to fight, both die. If neither chooses to fight, both die. If only one chooses to fight, the other dies. This game is not zero-sum, as neither side necessarily gains anything by the other's death
If you managed to simplify the equation down to "kill their children or die yourself" through some desert-island scenario, then yeah, sure. Normally problems involve more variables than this.
This might be a better description than the linked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wr...
>Pro wrestling, unexpectedly, gave me a real insight into how the public is "worked" by celebrities, politicians, and so on. I often find myself being the first to see through these facades and explaining them to others, pointing out how individuals benefit from portraying a "character" of sorts. For instance, MMA fans that were never involved in pro wrestling are baffled by individuals like Chael Sonnen and Connor McGregor, when to us it is very clear what these individuals are doing months and years in advance of them simply being labeled as "liars and exaggerators" by the community at large.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/4laat6/is_ev...
>Politics and Public Relations certainly correlate with booking in wrestling. Anything does when you have to "work a crowd". During the 2012 election, the group of people I was with was amused when I was able to correctly "book" the Democratic Convention, predicting some "spots and promos" from the speakers, who was coming out when and why.
>After President Obama gave his speech, I said, "Obama is struggling to get over with the liberals this cycle and his convention speech had to play to the center, so they're going to send Bill out there to give him the rub." Right on cue, out walks Bill and the crowd pops.
>I couldn't help it. The convention felt booked like a WWE PPV. I spoke like I would gathered around the sofa watching WWE with some friends. That wasn't a reassuring feeling, realizing the world is a work, booked to pop a crowd. Since then, the correlation is only more apparent, just like this article describes. The next time someone criticizes wrestling for being fake, I want them to show me something that isn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/4laat6/is_ev...
I like this article because I think Kayfabe is a much better explanation of certain societal tribes' mock battles, than a lack of intellect. I think propaganda is a poor theory for widespread misinformation, because if it were simply a lack of information, then giving correct information to the uninformed (e.g. wikipedia) would immediately rectify the problem.
Wikipedia happened, and then Conservapedia happened as a reaction.
His view on physics is equally as baffling. He claims he knows the secret that will revolutionise the field, at the same time, people in the field discredit his theory because they're arrogant and academically institutionalized. It's a bold claim to make, and I'll have to eat my hat if he's right, but I'll trust the people who are experts in the field.
In short, Eric Weinstein is a crackpot. A very intelligent crackpot, but he really should stick to mathematics and investment.
I can't myself evaluate his theory with my understandig of physics (basically at one point I knew the math for quantum mechanic, but that was long ago and at no point I did understood it).
But the way Eric sells his theory screams SCAM to me. He portraits himself as lone truthseeker against the established elites, uses every bit of confirmation he can get (talking at length about his speech in Oxford), but doesn't get that much into the falsifable predictions of the theory or how it differs from String theory mathemathically.
And he spends much more time on parables and "what would it mean for economy" and everything surrounding the theory than on the theory itself.
If your theory is good simply try to explain it as best you can, don't try to upsell it with all the marketing bullshit and conspiracy theories.
I understand the (one) example presented apart from wrestling, but it is not quite obvious that the actual framework of Kayfabe immediately maps to it. It feels like there are easier constructions that would explain this exactly as well, if not better (perhaps most notably, the Prisoner's dilemma and the fact that coordination games are hard[0]).
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As a stand-alone essay, this is very bad. As a contribution to a conversation, as you might see in an online forum, this probably makes more sense.
Why would anyone do this?
For one, suspended reality allows us to be creative and simulate outcomes that otherwise would not occur in real life.
But also, it can occur under information asymmetry. If something seems fake to me, but I am not sure if _you_ believe it is fake or not (and vice versa), we both might pretend something is real for the sake of not offending one another.
This segues into another of Weinstein's terms (originally from Timur Kuran) called "preference falsification": if no one has to falsify their beliefs, we might just _state_ things we don't actually believe in, since we don't know what other people actually believe, and we don't want to run the risk of being ostracized.
Overall, these two concepts explain how otherwise tenuous theories can be believed (or at least stated to be believed) by large groups of people.
> If something seems fake to me, but I am not sure if _you_ believe it is fake or not (and vice versa), we both might pretend something is real for the sake of not offending one another.
Yeah, I guess this is why I was referring to slightly cleaner game-theoretic formulations, but perhaps missed the main point because I didn't quite find it clear. In some sense, though, the piece calls for "active collusion" with rehearsed point and counterpoints (as in, e.g., wrestling) which seems distinct than preference falsification, which is the part I'm having a hard time squaring with the article?
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Likewise, paper money: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Paper_Money
This has always stuck with me. I’m not well enough read to know if he borrowed it from somewhere, but I’m not sure Terry Pratchett ever wrote finer words than those. Beautifully concise and apt summary of the human condition.
Also, stick with it through one book. I found quite a few books childish in the beginning. It is often a journey from "this is silly" over "ok, it has its own logic" to the realization "our reality is just as weird".
That's very naively materialist. Once you notice that, it becomes clear that the concepts mentioned are not "lies".
The passage may be trying to say something serious about those concepts not being universal, objective ones, but if it's intending to make a serious point it misses the mark.
But then again, it may not be intended to be taken seriously at all. Perhaps Pratchett assumed the weaknesses in this position would be obvious.
> Likewise, paper money
If someone writes an IOU to you, is that a lie? How about a check?
It creates false equivalences, blurs important distinctions, and doesn't help people understand the nature of these concepts - rather, it obscures that nature.
It upgrades one's cognitive toolkit by allowing someone reason in the second order (Assuming Kayfabe) vs. the first order (Taking things at face value).
If you can spot Kayfabe and realize that certain rivalries exist for the sole purpose of propping each other up, you realize that the degrees of freedom are far greater than it seems.
This applies to the Democratic and Republican parties in the US.
Setting the conversation agenda is specially useful to hide inconvenient topics from public scrutiny. Sex regulation, religion and other "social" controversial discussions are very effective to create noise and put in the background the economic problems, that have often more direct and severe consequences for most people.
The whole thing is just a contest for who can get the most pithy soundbite for the day. It's horrible and ineffective and stupid but there's no "Republicans and democrats are working together to.... do exactly what?" conspiracy.
On its face, this could be hundreds of thousands of people. All manner of legislative staffing, bureaucracy, public relations, media content production, etc. could be considered "in politics", when viewed through a hazy enough lens. As you say, none of these people admit knowledge of the kayfabe. OTOH, the lobbyists who actually write the bills and pull the strings? That's a much smaller group and yeah, they know it's largely kayfabe.
As a relatively recent example, much has been made of the current president's suitability as "commander-in-chief" (or lack thereof). One might have had the impression that there was a disagreement over how much military power he should command. Yet, somehow both parties in both houses of Congress agreed that he should get $740B in military spending rather than the $600B he requested.
In the reverse situation, it's understood that leadership in Congress often head counts up to the number of votes needed and then give a pass to members to symbolically vote against as long as it doesn't affect the outcome - e.g. the GOP impeachment votes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_repeal_the_Patient_...
Well, it is basically a Republican national healthcare program, which preserved the hugely profitable health insurance industry. Modeled on RomneyCare.
All of the major pieces, including individual mandate and exchanges makes it's way back to that proposed plan.
It's some real wag the dog shit. Both that Obama's "compromise" plan was the far right position on the mid nineties, and that Republicans still characterized it as just left of Trotsky taking the major provisions that they championed all the way to the supreme court.
My admittedly limited experience suggests otherwise.
Many years ago, I worked for a state-level legislator, as an environmental aide. Although Republican, he supported (and contributed to) many good environmental bills. And worked closely with Democratic colleagues.
So one night over beer, I asked why he was Republican. And while he did make some cogent points about social and economic issues, his primary reason was that he lived in a Republican area, and that he'd never be elected as a Democrat.
The OP article was written in 2011. Not long before, maybe as recent as 2000, there was a lot more so called "civility" in government, where most of the debate was pork barrel negotiations, not major party line votes on major legal upheavals.
R and D worked together on things like handing ever more power to corporations and the military industrial complex, and diverting national wealth to the weathiest people.
This is exactly it. The Rock isn't really going to dust anything off, turn it sideways, and ram it into anyone's candy ass. He's cutting a promo. It's kayfabe.
Similarly, the American process is entirely promotion. Are you a good fundraiser? Can you win popularity? Will you appoint the right cronies to the right positions? Can you cut a good soundclip? Then you've got a shot at the heavyweight title. Notice that at no point was anyone actually assessed on leadership capabilities. Professional Government. Politics Entertainment.
I feel as though this concept specifically isn't novel. Some would argue this situation could be applicable to the cold war--perhaps the soviet union didn't prop the United States up, but it certainly allowed us to foster and strengthen our sense of nationalism, which typically leads to a more robust state.
I have the sinking feeling that you're right about the breadth-first thing, and it's about to become a bigger issue. Back in the 80s Weinstein was working on an alternative Grand Unified Theory. When his work was marginalized, he never really got over it, and he's now using his platform (an important platform for many other reasons!) to try and right that wrong. To that end, he just published a 2013 talk he gave at Oxford on this theory. [0]
What he has not published in all these years, afaik, is an actual math paper describing his theory. This is the mark of a charlatan. I fear for Eric, and for all the other positive things springing up around The Portal, if it's discovered he lacks the depth and rigor we've all been assuming he has.
In other words, he could turn out to be not just a "breadth-first associative thinker," but someone who lacks the self-awareness to know when he's out of his depth; a dangerous know-it-all. Eric if you're reading this: publish the paper the damn paper -- with the help of a mathematician or physicist if needed -- or drop it.
It's just sad, and it really shows the yawning chasm between verbal fluency and real expertise.
The fundamental problem with talking about highly technical things (like theories of everything) to a popular audience is that it's totally one-sided: he could spout nonsense and none of his listeners would have the slightest chance of noticing, as long as it sounded complicated enough. It's just like how you could talk somebody tech illiterate into installing malware.
I don't know about his other opinions, but for nontechnical topics, the audience can check for themselves whether the conclusions make sense. So if you think they do, it's probably fine.
Please do.
It seems that there has (a) been no paper, so his theories remain too vague to even properly criticize, but (b) as far as people can tell from the vagueness, his theory predicts the existence of particles that the LHC should have detected but has not.
So has another pop science disaster, string theory.
So how do we decide what is worth actually taking seriously? First, you need to establish that your theory actually reproduces the Standard Model plus gravity at low energies, i.e. that it doesn't blatantly fail to match the something we already know. (Most ideas fail here.) Then, you need to show that your proposal is actually mathematically self-consistent. (Most remaining ideas fail here.) Then, you need to work on the finer details, i.e. making sure you don't accidentally predict large deviations from the Standard Model that contradict observation, and match what we know about quantum gravity already at the semiclassical level. (Everything except for string theory fails by this point.) And then finally, you need to be able to extract sharp predictions from your theory -- and this is quite hard, because a complicated theory tends to have a lot of knobs to twiddle, making the predictions ambiguous. (Nobody has gotten this far.) And even if you pass all of these checks, there's a high chance the predictions will be wrong anyway, because nature's not our slave.
Weinstein's theory has not even gotten past step zero. He hasn't provided enough technical detail to calculate anything, there's just nothing there at all. Yet he made a huge media push to get recognized as "the next Einstein". It's like saying your startup is the next Google before writing a single line of code, and having the public believe you.
(You could criticize the little there is on aesthetic or philosophical grounds. I tried to avoid this because that's subjective, but it is true that there is a great deal more arbitrariness in his construction than in alternatives. For example, string theory also has a lot of extra dimensions, but the number of them is fixed by internal consistency. It wasn't just made up.)
The scientific community doesn’t know why there’s 3 generations of particles, heck I’ve barely heard anyone in my life even mention the fact. It’s a curious thing and his theory was at least infinitely better than 99% of the content on the Internet.
I don’t really understand what he said (and a paper won’t help me) but it made me think in different ways.
He conceded he may be wrong, that he may be crazy, but he also has a PhD in mathematical physics. A charlatan typically declares he is right, often by divine right or unreasonable skill level. Eric’s just exploring ideas from his perspective.
I think hyper-criticizing him is more dangerous for intellectual thought than him inspiring millions of potential minds with fantastical descriptions that may be wrong. Some of what he’s saying is undoubtedly true.
That's what the situation is like for actual physicists. There's people who do the actual work, there's people who are famous for claiming to have done great things, and there's very little overlap between these two sets.
(Also, there's an "imprinting" effect here. For example, in the scientific community, we talk all the time about why there are only 3 generations. It's one of many, many mysteries that everybody is always aware of. You might have heard it from Weinstein first, but people really have spent enormous effort investigating the question. And a flashy self-promoter tends to erase those people.)
And I heard about the 3 generations when I was a freshman in HS in AP physics and I wrote a sci-fi story on it. Obviously it’s a widely known problem, I assumed people would understand me.
I’m defending the public sphere, promoting thoughtful ideas and intellectual adventures. Most people still don’t know who Elon Musk is yet it seems like they would. I want the average person to know the great open questions in physics.
Other professionals, hackers and those with PhDs in mathematical physics can contribute something novel and true to the future of understanding physics. No one owns mystery or the right to explore it.
Even if it’s just an artist or mathematician inspiring a physicist to understand an idea that could lead to something unrelated but true. Or public support to increase scientific funding.
I also work with a physicist who probably would criticize my perspective here. He has analyzed and critiqued pseudoscientific claims for national security reasons. So my experience here isn’t non-existent.
And I’m not a software engineer. I was a hacker. I like to reverse engineer things and understand the world through first principles...
Why would you imagine that?
> The scientific community doesn’t know why there’s 3 generations of particles, heck I’ve barely heard anyone in my life even mention the fact.
Your random encounters with information are not a good guide here. The generatation issue is often described as one of the main open problems in particle physics.
Here are some links about particle generations:
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/august-2015/the-mys...
https://particleadventure.org/three_gen.html https://particleadventure.org/beyond_start.html
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/generation+of+fundamental+part...
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-why-are-ther...
I could go on.
The reason Weinstein focuses on it is because he's a crank, and cranks are attracted to notorious problems.
> Some of what he’s saying is undoubtedly true.
Such as? I'm reminded of the quote, "What is new is not true; and what is true is not new."
And of course it’s one of the main open problems. Obviously people in the community discuss it and it’s widely known. I meant in general, all the people talking sports, politics, business, finance, technology and reality TV, you know 99% of human communication, never ever discuss any ideas interesting in physics. Maybe because the authoritarians motivate normal people to avoid it thus only charlatans and a few science popularizers drive public awareness.
And I meant some of the math and physics he’s describing are true. I’m not saying his theories are true but not all his perspectives on them are unfounded. He’s had highly intellectual conversations with physicists on his podcast. Including Penrose. And Lisi, whom he strongly criticized.
My point is, he doesn’t need a license to talk and the criticism towards new ideas is wrong. Plus we need more cool ideas in the public sphere, right or wrong.
I agree, if by "verbal fluency" you mean stringing together heavyweight jargon and concepts like Eddy Van Halen doing a guitar riff.
Even in a colloquium filled with subject matter experts that kind of pace is off-putting and raises red-flags instantly-- but this guy does it when communicating with the general public, fully knowing that people are going to be lost in a matter of seconds.
... so yeah, that and NO FREAKING PAPERS. It's a bit disconcerting for a theory that purports to unify relativity with quantum mechanics.
Humans pay more attention to tone than to content. More than we care to admit.
On the other hand, he kind of uses his Portal community and podcast - where there are interesting important discussions on many social issues - to promote his theory. This theory sounds smart for non-physicists, they cannot see flaws in it, and he preaches passionately about it - thus he can ignite enthusiasm in his community about the theory and grow the cult of the unrecognised genius, misunderstood and rejected by official science community.
Dr.Weinstein, please, write a book, a paper, elaborate on some response before pushing your theory on masses. This can discredit your other important activities.
It's great to master something, but depth first thinkers also tend to be content with the external peer recognition of their narrow niche, without challenging it or moving it forward. It's a lot like fox/hedgehog and other tropes. So to use breadth as a euphemism for charlatanism is a bit tendentious. From what I can tell, the main indicator of being a charlatan is losing political battles.
I saw the guy on Rogan and I sympathize with the challenge of having both the breadth and depth to wade into that band of status anxiety where mediocre talents feel threatened by cross disciplinary thinkers focused on a bigger picture. They can behave like an immune response and pile on, so it's a hard spot to be in.
Couldn't say whether he was or wasn't, but to be sure, depth-first thinking has equivalent limits.
Yes, it’s weird for someone outside of a field to try and introduce a whole new concept to it. But it’s been done. Einstein was a parent clerk, I think one of the Bernoulli’s was a lawyer for an entire career before contributing anything, and Galois made a huge contribution to math immediately before being killed and from absolute obscurity.
Look, academia is sick and has been sick for as long as anyone can remember. I left math because all it takes is one grudge from one professor to tank your entire academic career. For as long as that’s going to continue people will be contributing to human knowledge through out of band channels.
However, the only way forward from this point is for Eric to publish his ideas in definite form — in the language of mathematics — for the rest of us to evaluate for ourselves. Paper or GTFO.
It makes me think of Nassim Taleb who has really added some valuable mental models that are extremely intuitive to the layman, but now his twitter existence is spent posting boring paper after paper of math to prove his ideas are correct.
I am unqualified to speak to Weinstein’s theory and what it lacks, but I like underscoring the trend I mentioned above when it surfaces in some form. On another note, I highly recommend listening to the Jeffrey Epstein podcast on the Portal. It’s not a typical podcast, but rather something Weinstein felt obligated to release into the ether.
Also, in the referenced video he says he wants to work on further developing the theory now. It's not complete and doesn't claim that it'll work. He says repeatedly that it may be wrong, even pointing out it could be fools gold. He also notes he's not a physicist and doesn't have all the necessary skills.
He's openly questioning, starting to present an idea and working on it.
At this point it doesn't strike me charlatan-like and I don't see how it's dangerous given all of his disclaimers... just seems like an outsider taking an unorthodox approach.
Similar things come up in the theory of musical composition where you create and resolve "tension," and you can drive the listeners perceptions by loading them up with mental anchors to notes and then resolving them all at once. If you learn to play any Bach, you can begin to see and articulate how he discovered it. Eric Weinsteins example of pro wrestling is identifying where it appears in narrative, but there are analogous concepts in areas like so-called, "neuro linguistic programming," where ideas are "stacked," and then collapsed into a conclusion. I only know about that part of it because I have some very diverse and interesting friends.
As a writer, I use a similar technique all the time, but in smaller more digestible loops, and only rarely with enough to take the reader into that kind of "hall of mirrors," effect great fiction writers use, where each new sentence introduces plot elements that cascade back through the story and closes loops on ideas you have already set up. Mystery novels are a the most simple example of it, where at the end _it all falls into place_.
Great auteur films like 13 Conversations About One Thing, and any Cohen Brother's pic uses a similar device.
Anyway it's fun and addictive, and while I'm sure smarter people than me have a more coherent theory of it, I can see why this fellow thinks it's important.
When you think about it, how our mind works is fundamentally the only actual problem. Everything else is just an artifact of it.
"breadth-first associative intelligence"
"open cognitive loops"
* "Breadth" as opposed to depth; in the sense of someone who knows a lot of relatively surface-level things across many areas, and can synthesize them. "Associative" in the way you're quickly associating concepts. In the same sense as "free association".
* The loops are analogous to the notes mentioned in the OP that are resolved all at once. Imagine a chain of associated concepts revealed over a conversation, sometimes with gaps between, that all lead towards a larger synthetic point.
"breadth-first" is an order of graph traversal. In this case, it refers to covering all of the topics before drilling down into more detail in each topic, and later drilling down even further into topics.
The chief alternative order to discuss topics would be depth-first: to cover a major topic, and drill down as deep as you're going to go into the details, before moving onto the next major topic.
The open cognitive loops are the incompletely-covered topics that must be kept in the listener's head because they haven't been completely covered ("closed") yet, and will be re-visited in greater detail later.
> He has a particular kind of breadth-first associative intelligence that can cause listeners to become almost hypnotized by all the open cognitive loops his conversation creates
Well said. Eric is also gaining a reputation for coining labels, the best known being the "Intellectual Dark Web", alongside lesser-known acronyms like EGO (Embedded Growth Obligation), GIN (Gated Institutional Narrative), and DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex).
I think this nails it and is really the main thrust of the kayfabe analogy. It's also something I came to understand a few years ago, and have since had a lot of trouble getting others to understand the concept.
Can you elaborate some more about how Bach ties into this? I can see how sonata-allegro form goes back to the tonic key in the recapitulation, but I'm interested in hearing some more about Bach and these concepts.
The rhetorical analogue is creating tension in the listener by adding parenthetical ideas (open loops), and then making them agreeable by providing relief by "resolving," them to your theme. The link to "kayfabe," is that the stacked story lines in the wrestling narrative create the same tension and consequent audience and participant submission by overloading our ability to track the individual threads.
Eric Weinstein said on Rogan that he thinks this is what the current president did to win the last election, and that he picked it up literally from his time in the professional wrestling world. I tend to agree with him on that one, and am sympathetic to his idea because it reflects dynamics in other areas.
>Perhaps confusing battles between "quantum" and "classical" physicists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to develop a unified theory of gravity.
- Marketing depts want to sell AI solutions as it’s higher perceived value
- Execs/managers want to check an AI checkbox to show their using the latest tech
- Practioners want to grow AI skills to find interesting opportunities and stand out from regular devs
- Academia wants to talk up their AI solution to get more attention and funding (and find jobs!)
- The media wants to write about robots taking over the world
Whether or not there’s real value when any particular machine learning solution on any given domain problem is seen as less important than the signaling that we’re all using cutting edge tech. We all just participate in the mutual deception.
I guess it's a particular kind of conspiracy, so maybe it's useful to have a word for that? But I don't think it describes the political scene well. Politicians from opposite parties aren't rehearsing debates with their opponents and choosing who wins before the debate starts.
There's some level of "cover your ass" and "don't annoy too many people" that makes accountability almost impossible, but kayfabe isn't the right analogy IMHO. It's not intentional cooperative theatrical performances, it's just an effect of incentives being what they are.
But this is a deeper cut.
However, in looking for kayfabe, there's the risk of conspiracy thinking.
In string theory we quantize gravity by attaching voodoo parameters to particles, and manipulating those parameters so that they forbid the gravitational ultraviolet catastrophe. In LQG or NQFT we attach voodoo parameters to spacetime, forbidding tiny singularities. We can also attach voodoo parameters to gravity itself and get the theory of asymptotically safe gravity. I think that would be four theories. Anyone who finds better-justified voodoo parameters should be welcomed into the ring, but that is very difficult.
Personally I find the voodoo parameters in NQFT to be the least weird, but Connes (a leading proponent) earned some raspberries for his oh-wait-I-didn't-mean-that revision of his prediction of the Higgs mass ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.1030.pdf ).
They both denounce each-other but depend on each-other. Though I suppose Kayfabe would maybe imply some mutual understanding of this interdependence and some agreed-upon boundaries.
I had the same thought
A "shoot" is when the agreed-upon boundaries are broken and a "worked shoot" is one where they are "broken" but actually planned E.g. when Joe's barn burned down. Classic.
Society is based on shared concepts/stories, the effectiveness of that society is based on the value of these shared concepts, not their truth/untruth.
On a small scale: Washington and the cherry tree Daily conversation (How are you ? Good !) Santa Claus Public persona of hollywood stars, entertainers, politicians, etc. etc
On a large scale: Freedom/Democracy Capitalism/Socialism Religion
I strongly disagree with Weinstein and think he's spreading conspiracy theories
I'll grant this is getting into Ad hominem territory, but I point it out because an 'it's all just a performance' viewpoint seems kind of worrying when you wield signifiant influence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf0_nMaQ6tA&feature=youtu.be...
This is the part where he introduces the concept of kayfabe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf0_nMaQ6tA&feature=youtu.be...
I’m guessing anyone reading this knows what non-wrestling kayfabe scene I’m talking about—except maybe those who are already participating in it themselves—and even for those folks, well, it all depends on what “knows” means, doesn’t it?
Says the man behind Thiel capital.
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