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Comment by Randor | Hacker News Reader

>There is zero chance his theory has any merit.

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.

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Well, that latter one kind of seals the deal for me. Falsifiability is essential to me.

Weinstein is a grifter, he doesn’t want to or can’t actually do hard work so he does podcasts and tweets and whines about how badly he has been treated. People find this compelling I guess.

Calling someone a 'grifter' is an intellectually lazy derogatory epithet. How is he grifting?

He appears to have been trying for many years to convince people that he's discovered a unified theory of physics, without producing a single technical paper on the topic. I think that suffices.

grifting implies he's doing it for financial gain. I think there's more lucrative ways for him to make money than publishing physics papers.

I'd say benefit generally instead of gain that must be precisely in monetary terms. Grifting is lying plus purpose, and that purpose may be any kind of advantage obtained by smoke-and-mirror tactics. It may be reputation, or satisfaction from being talked about, appearing in talk radio, that kind of stuff.

It seems like a certain percentage of people are susceptible to Weinstein type claims. Like people with anti vaccine stuff or natural remedies.

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