Problems with Eric Weinstein's “Geometric Unity”
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
As an analogy, I have an aural thermometer and an infrared thermometer. From what I've read (and discussed with my doctor) the aural thermometer is the more accurate one. If my aural thermometer and my infrared disagree on someone's temperature, I believe the aural thermometer. Is this because I am bereft of logic and using only my personal feelings about the two thermometers, or because I reasonably trust one device more than another?
In areas that I don't have lots of familiarity with, like the kinds of math and physics discussed in the article, I think I can use the feedback of experts as sensing tools. Just like I can't directly infer someone's temperature by looking at them or feeling them, I can't directly infer the truth about competing claims related to Geometric Unity. What I can do though is rely on the sensing tools or experts with established credibility and see what they say.
Not being an expert in thermometers, but having a vested interest in normal human body temperature, at first I thought aural was a homophone for oral, another common type of thermometer, and a strange speech recognition error.
Having googled the term "aural thermometer", I see it is a popular product, and the descriptions show that it measures the temperature inside one's ear by infrared, as in an aural thermometer is, logically, also an infrared thermometer.
If this simplest of everyday health monitors can have that much confusion in clear writing, I wonder how it is possible to believe that laypeople listening to a podcast on groundbreaking theory could expect to usefully interpret any part of it.
If someone claims to have a theory of everything, they're probably full of shit. If they claim to have it, but says they can't show you for some reason, they're 100% full of shit.
Because Weinstein doesn't explain graduate level maths to laypeople well doesn't make his theory valid.
But the refusal to be transparent in communication has made the mathematics community severely unwilling to continue to expend efforts into saving / communicating with Mochizuki's work.
I must say, it is a little weird to get the public involved in an intellectual debate about theoretical physics which is so far hosted on a podcast and a blog, rather than in peer-reviewed journal articles.
Laypeople should probably wait a couple years for this idea to be hashed out more formally.
That said whenever I listen to him I feel my BS detector lighting up in head. He's a smart guy, but he always comes across as a little too confident in his own intellect to know when he's out of his depth. I suspect this is a good example of that.
I see myself in him a bit. I think a slight over-confidence in your own abilities can often be a useful trait to have – especially if you're an entrepreneurial person. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think he's trying to deceitful and I think he's an interesting guy, but you really have to take everything he says with a pitch of salt if you want to get any value from him.
Lex Friedman did a wonderful podcast with him last year. It's probably one of my favourite podcasts of 2020. They talk about all kinds of things from music to the nature of love and for me I think this is Eric at his best. Also, the way he's cynicism contrasts with Lex's child-like nativity is really fun to listen to.
The density of self-promotion also affects the likeability of an author, and is part of signal to noise ratio.
Weinstein has been far less forthcoming than Mochizuki, but he has already gotten far better treatment, and Mochizuki is an actual career mathematician. [1]
One can view intellectualism as an activity of moving things around your head, and being correct in your own little world. Or one can view intellectualism as an activity of contributing to the cultural tapestry of knowledge. Regardless of merit, perhaps one of these positions is more likeable than the other.
He's basically a anti-authority (/anti-expert/?) a la Alex Jones in [0]. Weinstein has been full of shit enough in the past that him claiming something is, absent any other evidence, evidence that the claim is false.
0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/
Has this happened before? Is this the mark of a new era in scientific research?
Not sure if should be asking this seriously or not.
If the author of this post had some compelling research from Weinstein that Weinstein had tossed up on his blog and was complaining about it not being peer-reviewed, I'd say sure-- there's a bit of ivory-tower-ism. But it seems a pretty valid complaint against a scientist when the primary material for their grand theory is a YouTube video. In fact after 8 years without much more than that, I'm surprised anyone paid enough attention to bother addressing the theory at all.
Pretty much anyone in any job can't propose a single thing without giving specific reasons justifying it. If Weinstein isn't willing to pass that bar, it's not some kind of insider's-club to dismiss what he's done as insufficient.
From what I gather, Weinstein regards quantum theory as an intellectual distraction, and not a useful theory in a practical sense. So if you disagree with that, then that's his whole theory out the window.
That seems a bit harsh. There is a certain beauty in the geometry equations Weinstein presented. I find it interesting that EFE, Yang-Mills and Dirac emerge from that. He certainly hasn't shown a complete theory of everything but I wouldn't say that it doesn't have any merit.
If I had one criticism of Weinstein it would be that he's never put anything down on paper for anyone to deeply review.
And Don’t forget Brandolini’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
(In this particular case I don’t know the requisite theory myself but having experienced crank theories in areas of physics that I understand, it’s obvious this is the same.)
My favorite quote:
“To take an extreme example, if Mochizuki had carved his argument on slate in Linear A and then dropped it into the Mariana Trench, then there would be little doubt that asking about the veracity of the argument would be beside the point.“
Maybe in the new media landscape it is important to debunk pseudoscientific theories more publicly? Is this going to be an integral part of interacting with the public? As opposed to normal outreach activities, such debunking would would be boring and annoying work for an academic -- but maybe it should be viewed as having become part of the job.
>> I also became increasingly skeptical of Weinstein’s claims when I pressed him about his alleged discovery of the Seiberg-Witten equations before Seiberg and Witten (see here, here, here, and here), a set of equations which was the central focus of my PhD thesis and several resultant papers. When I asked Weinstein for certain mathematical details about how he had arrived at the Seiberg-Witten equations, his vague responses led me to doubt his claims. Though Weinstein proposed to host a more in-depth discussion about GU and the requisite math and physics, no such discussion ever materialized.
What does Eric Weinstein's theory enable that can't be done with what we've already got? That's what I'm interested in and I haven't heard anyone say anything on the matter, which strikes me as rather strange, given that uh, that's why people presumably do science?
That said, I'd give him the benefit of a doubt. Many people seriously believe in counterfactual stuff as we now, sadly, know so much better than a mere twelve months ago.
There's a certain ivory tower je ne sais quoi to it. Got me thinking about that superpermutations solution posted on 4chan leading to a paper with "Anonymous 4chan User" as the lead author.
Obviously some of these conventions might be pedantic, and criticizing an argument's form doesn't invalidate its essence, but I don't think it's a bad idea to insist on standards, even somewhat arbitrary ones. It seems like you're wishing for a world in which every citation is equivalent to "Anonymous 4chan User". I don't think that would improve things.
And even if publishing conventions are part of the problem, doing away with all convention is likely to make things worse, not better. It would amount to throwing the baby away with the bathwater.
Trading citations and authorship is such a common practice nowadays that I don’t trust that metric for pretty much anything.
Assuming that's actually true (and it's not, in my experience), that alone is a valuable thing. Do you prefer doing research in a place where political connections cannot be traced? I don't. It's bad enough as it is.
Here's the other -- really obvious -- thing it achieves: it helps you find more information about a given subject. It helps you understand precisely what a given publication is referring to.
Just because a system is abused doesn't make it a bad system. And if you want to dismantle a system, you must at least replace it with something that isn't worse.
I'm fine with skepticism of the traditional research publication path, but "take my word for it" is a significantly worse alternative.
Not to mention the embarrassing and cringe-inducing attempts to coin the term “The Intellectual Dark Web” as a way for him to leverage Joe Rogan’s and Sam Harris’s popularity. Dark indeed, alas not for the adolescently edgy reasons he has in mind.
Here’s to him rebounding from this foolishness and doing some actual scientific work worth of merit.