Eric Weinstein: How Not to Formulate a Theory of Everything
cantorsparadise.com
cantorsparadise.com
Background: His claim is that all of our CPI calculations are wrong bc we should be using gauge theory rather than differential calculus to understand consumer utility.
He got invited to the University of Chicago to give a talk about this theory. (This is one of the world’s top three or four economics departments.)
While I was not personally there, I have read reports about what happened. He was repeatedly asked by people in the room to provide a simple example of a case where his theory would do better than current methods for calculating CPI: suppose there are two goods and two periods of time, e.g. Show us how we get it wrong and you get it right (and why)
He did not do this. It seemed (according to reports from the room) that he was unable to do so.
It seems (being charitable) like the guy has a habit of making dramatic claims like “I have solved X and everyone currently working on it has it wrong!” and then not being able (not remotely able!) to back it up.
He’s a libertarian so it kinda comes with the territory
1: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2009/07/15/michael-atiyah/
I think I know what you mean about the "grift"; I've wondered if Eric wasn't hurt by his little brother having more notoriety. Given Nguyen's remarks on Eric's reluctance to actually produce a paper (despite talking up the idea in popular venues) and his indecision about whether Eric is an academic or an entertainer probably belies a similar suspicion. Of course, if the paper were solid, we probably wouldn't be wondering about this at all (assuming, of course, that Nguyen isn't a nasty monster from the cabal).
"Either way, I think people should stop paying attention to whatever he's saying since it is often neither insightful nor productive in any meaningful way."
Should we do the same with you? How ridiculous.
Weinstein put out a mathematical paper with disclaimers that it is for purely entertainment purposes. If that's not nonsensical and contradictory then I don't know what is. This is why I don't pay attention to him. He's not a serious and sincere person because a serious person wouldn't publish a mathematical paper with disclaimers about it being nothing more than entertainment. So his actions make him look like either a troll or someone going senile. In both cases it doesn't make sense to pay attention to someone like that.
He also likes to encourage conspiratorial thinking among his followers which is again a sign of someone that is not operating in good faith and trying to achieve any positive outcomes. It makes him seem like someone that enjoys stoking fear and paranoia in order to grow his clout on social media.
If you have references for any worthwhile work that he has produced then I'm actually curious to see it because whatever I've seen from him indicates what I already wrote.
Reciprocal same level of effort into citing my claims as you, re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29281850
> The Law of The Gated Institutional Narrative: Every story that starts out to be about some particular topic, once reported, instantly comes to be about perseveration, framing, coordination, gaslighting & narrative.
> In my own opinion, this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
He's also actually contributing to the problem he's criticizing. He's creating destabilizing narratives and reducing trust in democratic institutions by spreading fear and paranoia to a few hundred thousand people. [1] That might actually be his goal in which case he should be rightfully criticized.
Do you even know what Eric's referencing in his tweet re: Gated Institutional Narrative or GIN for short? It's a concept he's spoken out about in detail before. I'm guessing you don't or his tweet would make more sense to you. But there is a community of people around him who value and understand what he says, learning from him as well, even so much so as creating a wiki for his concepts - theportal.wiki - and specifically here's GIN for you: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Gated_Institutional_Narrative_(G...
He's also coined DISC for Distributed Idea Suppression Complex - look it up.
Are you able to understand either of these concepts for what he's pointing to? If no then perhaps it's just not an inherent capability you have with how your intelligence is structured - that's a possibility outside of Eric being a kook - but requires one to be humble in their limitations.
It doesn't seem like you do understand him. He's not fear mongering or spreading paranoia, he's shining a light on corruption and its inner workings, highlighting oddities. It's actually the opposite of what you say, it's empowering to know - knowledge is power - in fact it may be you who's fearful, paranoid, and worrying and projecting that.
I did not expect his followers to have such strong feelings. I'll keep this in mind next time I engage with Weinstein cult members. I might even need to create phrases of my own like "Algorithmically enhanced cult induction, memetic capture, and gating" and "Social media is an algorithmic substrate for mutagenic enhancement of viral ideological vectors" to be taken seriously by people like you because it seems like you folks enjoy unnecessary and convoluted abstractions that are basically meaningless.
Here's my abstract assessment of Weinstein. I don't have a wiki page to explain what any of it means but I assure you it's all very meaningful:
Eric Weinstein is using basic cult induction techniques and leveraging social media as an algorithmic mutagen to enhance viral ideological vectors of destabilizing and paranoid narratives that paint him in a favorable light in order to place himself in a position of leadership among the people that believe existing democratic institutions are no longer acting in their favor. It's either that or he's going senile. Either way, the man should not be taken seriously because he's only interested in his own crusade against the establishment that he feels spurned him and his unfathomable genius.
You can see how any sane person when they decide to analyze the statement would think the man is going senile. There is no real substance in the statement other than whatever the reader is willing to imbue into it, i.e. it is nonsensical. This is all before we even get to the part where he is claiming to have created a grand unified theory of everything which solves economic problems better than existing economics but is also just purely for entertainment purposes. The man is practically asking to not be taken seriously.
I think he exists in a superposition of both.
At some point you got to throw caution into the bin and publish what you have to say.
This person mentioned Einstein, but Einstein was just the byproduct of a time when people had the balls to publish what could be perceived as extravagant theories.
Einstein was the one who got it right, but you don't get to hear from him if you don't create an environment in which people like him also felt the confidence to publish stuff that could be considered controversial.
People say necessity is the mother of invention, well right after that there's the feeling of being the only one who gets it and that all the others are wrong/clueless.
Competitive arrogance is right there at no.2
As an outsider, while I can see many problems in academia today, I'm not sure that an exceptional fear to publish extravagant theories is one of them.
It seems to me that the opposite is true. The replication crisis is a symptom of a general unfriendliness towards uninteresting publications.
The quantum menchics theory was much more controversial, and Einstein opposed it.