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What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

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Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#91
post #89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. 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 instal…

> I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. Please do.

In case you don't get a response, this seems topical. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/...

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#92
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I just don't see 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 d…

The subtlety is that kayfabe has elements of gradient to it. 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 stat…

Political dysfunction seems to be when politicians manufacture divisions between them and their opponents over issues that ought not to be divisive.

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#93
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD student in theoretical physics here. I will confirm: Weinstein is a charlatan, and all of us know it. As far as I can tell, the only people who believe in him are non-physicists who consume exclusively pop science. In other words, he's acting as the literal definition of a dishonest public intellectual. It's just sad, and it really shows the yawning chasm between verbal fluency and real expertise.

Whenever you feel saying "all of us" your credibility goes down to zero.

I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it's true.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I just don't see 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 d…

> politicians, corporations, etc have real conflicts over zero sum games. Of course, there are situations where there's are incentives to cooperate. 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 Re…

This is an interesting concept -- I would assume "mating call of the airlines" is a similar phenomenon that exists in the US airline industry (pre-corona of course) -- all want to raise fees / stuff planes, so there's this pantomime of whatever ails the industry covered in the media, before one (and then all) change policies that are pro-airline-profit but net-negative-passenger.

All this is possible of course due to the consolidation allowed over the past 15 years, but separate topic for a separate thread.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#95
post #80

Eric Weinstein is a delight to listen to: a polymath, a contrarian, a great interviewer, really gifted verbally. I'm a Portal subscriber and I've listened to his Rogan interviews all the way through. That said... 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 wor…

To me the entire portion of that interview with Joe Rogan was just someone talking about absolutely everything but the elephant in the room. Then he eventually talked himself out of all other topics and detailed why he was really there - to discuss his GUT.

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#96
post #89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. 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 instal…

> I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. Please do.

The secret that is rarely revealed in pop science discussions is that theories of everything are cheap. To count as a theory of everything, you just need to come up with any mathematical structure big enough to cram the Standard Model plus a graviton in. And adding mathematical structure, especially when you're playing around, is easy, like snapping legos together. In this way, you can crank out ten theories of everything a week if you want to.

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#97
post #52
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are often "symbolic votes" on issues, especially taken by the opposition party in a situation they know the bill could never become law. To take just one example, many Republicans ran for years on opposition to Obamacare and a promise to repeal it, even voting for repeal in the House and passing with wide margins. When finally Trump won the White House and the GOP controlled all 3 branches of gov't, they ultima…

> When finally Trump won the White House and the GOP controlled all 3 branches of gov't, they ultimately balked at voting to repeal. Well, it is basically a Republican national healthcare program, which preserved the hugely profitable health insurance industry. Modeled on RomneyCare.

Which itself was modeled on the HEART act, the collaboration between literally Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation in the mid nineties created when they thought Hillarycare might gain steam.

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you mean this as a joke but it absolutely was. At one point Joe mentions he and Carole made a lot of money off each other. He ran a whole internet show on the premise of vilifying her, and her whole "Cat Rescue" zoo couldn't exist without the likes of him. 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…

Sort of like Batman and the Joker?

"you won't kill me out of some misguided sense of self righteousness and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun"

I had the same thought

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#99
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, or just in physics? If the former, what is the evidence for that?

I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. 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 instal…

Regardless if he’s wrong, what he’s saying sounds interesting even to a physics PhD I’d imagine.

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.

Re: What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)

#100
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. 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 instal…

Regardless if he’s wrong, what he’s saying sounds interesting even to a physics PhD I’d imagine. 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…

Well, let me assume you're a software engineer. Suppose that one day you heard of some smooth talker who was going around pushing their vision of an AI-powered cloud blockchain as a service, or whatever. And everything they were saying just seemed empty: they would deliver the same polished, mindblowing speech about how this would revolutionize the world and topple all other software companies, but they hadn't written a single line of code, or even a whitepaper. And yet they were eloquent enough to end up with an audience of millions and billions in funding, exceeding the sum total of everybody doing real work in the area. And every time you tried to tell anybody about the real work you were actually doing, they would ask "but what do you think about the block cloudchain thing?"

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.)

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