Excellent, thoughtful, analysis. The other natural human tendency that I am aware of (especially as a scientist) is the search for patterns and then explaining those patterns with a model. Models are necessarily wrong in that they are simplifications, that is they only explain X percent (less than 100 and often far less than 100) of the observed variation. But we LOVE explanations that simplify reality because they make us feel smart AND they give us confidence (which is very sexy and therefore has its own evolutionary benefits). Going into battle, who are you more like to follow the guy that says, “I know we can win with my plan!” Or the guy who says, “I’m not sure we can win this way but we ought give it our best shot with the understanding that it might not work.”
I have had enough brilliant people in my life who have made similar claims—“I discovered this theory before that person did”; “My ideas undermined someone else’s power, so they suppressed them”—that this analysis rings very, very true. It doesn’t mean they aren’t truly brilliant, even genius, or that decision makers made choices they disagreed with. But there’s a constant sense that the world owes them something for their brilliance (recognition, money, a Nobel Prize). It’s an exhausting thing to live with.
I watched Weinstein with his wife on Rogan’s podcast the first time they were on I think. She was really interesting. I’d have been willing to hear more of her but had no need to listen to him ever again.
If the DISC has fixed the game why does he care about the Nobel prize so much? If it's rigged then the prize should be largely meaningless, right? But his fixation gives him away- he's just a sore loser.
Bob. I have a definition of crackpottery that I'll share below. But first some caveats::
- In general, I like the idea of being slow to declare someone a crackpot. For all the reasons you outline, it's generally a better approach to take.
- I've actually interacted via email a good bit with Steve Kirsch, one of the guests on Bret Weinstein's "How to save the world" video. One of my roles at Nextdoor (where I work) is to help set our policy on misinformation, and I restored some of Steve's posts about fluvoxamine (the other repurposed drug, along with the now more well known ivermectin, that has shown some promise as a COVID treatment). I believe that putting that information in the public sphere is the right thing to do, and I appreciate all the work that Steve has done in that area. In addition, the reaction to Steve's work in the medical community has convinced me that they are probably too deferential to cautious authorities in not recommending that patients consider experimental treatments. My sense is the the medical community probably overvalues the risks of "doing no harm" and undervalues the risks of doing nothing. I credit Steve for making me think about these issues.
- I also think that there is value in raising concerns about the potential risks of the COVID vaccines. These drugs are still young, there are still unknowns, and I certainly hope the CDC and/or other authorities are following up on all the reports in VAERS to better understand potential risks. Social media (including Nextdoor) should not be suppressing people's stories of their experiences with the vaccines.
Having said all that, there is little doubt in no doubt in my mind that Steve has descended into "crackpottery" in his current campaign against the vaccines. After they were removed from Nextdoor, he contacted me to request that we reinstate links to the anti-vaccine paper he had written, but when I looked at the paper it combined.a complete misunderstanding of VAERS and links to completely uncredible claims. And when I asked him to point me to his best argument, he share an analysis of British data which after ten minutes of reviewing I realized was a complete misunderstanding of the data because it compared vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths in total without cohorting by age (and as soon as one did that the data pointed in the opposite way of his argument).
Anyway, I say all that because Steve is obviously a smart guy but he has somehow has reached a point in his anti-vaccine fulminations where he is simply citing any statistic or argument that he thinks backs his point without any critical examination.
In short, he has reached a point where it's best to assume that any claim he makes is wrong, unless you have done enough research to decide that he is right. That is my definition of a crackpot: someone you're best off assuming is wrong until proven otherwise.
And that's why I think we can safely assume that Eric Weinstein is a crackpot as well. While I'm certainly in no position to assess his scientific arguments, his DISC theory is so obviously absurd and wrong (for all the reasons you point out and more) that it's clear that one should never take Eric's arguments on good faith, they clearly need to be accepted only when clearly proven right. To be clear, that doesn't mean Eric is always wrong. But it's clear that a wise person should assume so until proven otherwise. In short, he's a crackpot.
I enjoyed your conversation with Timothy, although I confess that I dropped off somewhere in the first half. Not because it wasn't interesting to hear you do skilled forensics on Weinstein's grand theory but because I felt I had heard enough that unambiguously dealt this beautiful theory an early death by several ugly facts.
And I use "beautiful" only because the aesthetics of a grand unifying theory has always had a big appeal--undeserved imo because there's no such thing as a grand unifying theory, only a desire to have one and no shortage of aspirants who purport to fulfil that desire.
The real, and rapidly unfolding, story is that physics not only has a problem stemming from it being grounded in a faulty metaphysics of a subject (that acts and manipulates) over "here" and an object (that's acted upon and manipulated by the subject) over "there," but has also become a tool for the very wealthy and powerful to look for escape hatches out of the misery and suffering they've helped create.
I'm hopeful that at least some of them will soon learn through expanding knowledge and insight that there are no escape hatches but that the most habitable world is the one we currently tread (even the Gobi desert is more habitable than Mars, and good luck dealing with the manifold vagaries posed by the gravitational and magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn).
Then one could bring smarts and energy to bear on, say, devising agricultural systems in the American Midwest, Europe, and Asia and forestry systems across the world that help stave off further carbon release and provide important and meaningful jobs and communities for millions.
My 2 cents. What you're really asking, Bob, in a way is: does Eric Weinstein have a personality disorder? I can't speak to the physics part (his theory, etc.); but can to the "psychological" aspect. The threshold for a disorder is: does one's personality impair one's success, i.e. goal attainment? Or does it (the personality) harm others' potential?
I think you're right on when you say "people are doing what people do", w/r/t functioning within a system. In other words, people lie (deceive) to themselves and others in pursuit of their own goals. SOP. In that regard (DISC) Weinstein is correct.
From afar, we can't say what his overall health & well-being is. Or whether or not he's done harm to others. So ... ?
I think his brother, Bret, has the right approach - write a book and present your argument there - where you're free of "peer review" and all the bs that comes with that. But then there's the problem of getting read and understood w/o prejudice. So we're sort of back to the beginning.
The individual needs others, within a system, to function well.
Btw, the GUT is evolution and its laws. Space, the Universe (multi)? Beyond my pay grade.
I would agree with the conclusion but I still wonder what the dividing line would be. It has to be somewhere between this and Alex Jones screaming the craziest things he can think of in between 'dietary supplement' advertisements.
Eric seems to have a penchant for granting imaginative terms to concepts. It does feel like as a matter of principle his mind tends to land in the "Just asking questions" camp which occasionally veers into self serving or bad faith territory.
I would challenge anyone to listen to the recent Rogan podcast and not to walk away with that conclusion. He makes Trump look humble. Listening to him reminded me of Forrest Gump, where Forrest happens to be part of major historical events over the years. That is how Eric portrays himself. I would say you have a very solid beginning to your grand unified theory.
Thanks all for your comments and to bob for the analysis. Maybe we could refine crackpottery 😁 to extreme narcissism in these cases. That seems to be the key for me to understanding what skews them from possible brilliance to paranoid conspiracist. RFK Jr seems to be another example of a very smart human whose relative views are extremely tainted by an abject ignorance of ultimate truth.
Hi Bob, A brief comment after watching the latest Parrot Room chat with Mickey. I, too, (I'm retired) watched the podcast of Lex Fridman with Jocko Willink & switched it off after Jocko's comments about dehumanization not applying to him and his soldiers in Iraq. There you have it - a great example of just how strong and powerful cognitive biases are. In some ways, that's why we (humans) are here. They work.
And why you face, maybe insurmountable, challenges with your AAP. Because of your reliance on the belief that "cognitive empathy" can override them.
I think that in practice, cognitive empathy as you define it, will invoke cognitive dissonance. And that (also an evolved psychological mechanism) makes (most) people feel bad. People (most) are also wired to avoid pain (feeling bad about themselves.)
In a nutshel: People want to feel good about themselves, no matter what they have to do to pull that off. Thus all the self-deception (aka ego defense mechanisms), etc. and so on.
Hey Bob, I actually watched all 2+hrs of your convo with Timothy Nguyen, and again, I have to agree with Martin S - boring. You're not going to get many clicks with that. However, The sub-plot thickens, i.e. motivation and personality.
What was/is Nguyen's? Apparently, there are only a few dozen scientists capable of understanding the gist of Weinstein's theory. And almost all hardly gave it any consideration at all. Maybe the motivation was that age old one, jealousy.
Jealousy's root is fear that an object will be lost/stolen from you. ... Y'all can take the plot from there.
On the other hand, maybe it's that, almost as old, hero complex? Would Tim know? I doubt it.
How to know? Psychoanalysis? Takes a long time and has many variables. Meditation? Say a week-long silent retreat? In essence with meditation you're talking with yourself, or is it 'god'?
Joe Rogan's (and others') solution is 'shrooms. Again, an interface with 'god'.
A very thought provoking post, Bob. Thank you. Keep it up.
Excellent, thoughtful, analysis. The other natural human tendency that I am aware of (especially as a scientist) is the search for patterns and then explaining those patterns with a model. Models are necessarily wrong in that they are simplifications, that is they only explain X percent (less than 100 and often far less than 100) of the observed variation. But we LOVE explanations that simplify reality because they make us feel smart AND they give us confidence (which is very sexy and therefore has its own evolutionary benefits). Going into battle, who are you more like to follow the guy that says, “I know we can win with my plan!” Or the guy who says, “I’m not sure we can win this way but we ought give it our best shot with the understanding that it might not work.”
I have had enough brilliant people in my life who have made similar claims—“I discovered this theory before that person did”; “My ideas undermined someone else’s power, so they suppressed them”—that this analysis rings very, very true. It doesn’t mean they aren’t truly brilliant, even genius, or that decision makers made choices they disagreed with. But there’s a constant sense that the world owes them something for their brilliance (recognition, money, a Nobel Prize). It’s an exhausting thing to live with.
I watched Weinstein with his wife on Rogan’s podcast the first time they were on I think. She was really interesting. I’d have been willing to hear more of her but had no need to listen to him ever again.
If the DISC has fixed the game why does he care about the Nobel prize so much? If it's rigged then the prize should be largely meaningless, right? But his fixation gives him away- he's just a sore loser.
Bob. I have a definition of crackpottery that I'll share below. But first some caveats::
- In general, I like the idea of being slow to declare someone a crackpot. For all the reasons you outline, it's generally a better approach to take.
- I've actually interacted via email a good bit with Steve Kirsch, one of the guests on Bret Weinstein's "How to save the world" video. One of my roles at Nextdoor (where I work) is to help set our policy on misinformation, and I restored some of Steve's posts about fluvoxamine (the other repurposed drug, along with the now more well known ivermectin, that has shown some promise as a COVID treatment). I believe that putting that information in the public sphere is the right thing to do, and I appreciate all the work that Steve has done in that area. In addition, the reaction to Steve's work in the medical community has convinced me that they are probably too deferential to cautious authorities in not recommending that patients consider experimental treatments. My sense is the the medical community probably overvalues the risks of "doing no harm" and undervalues the risks of doing nothing. I credit Steve for making me think about these issues.
- I also think that there is value in raising concerns about the potential risks of the COVID vaccines. These drugs are still young, there are still unknowns, and I certainly hope the CDC and/or other authorities are following up on all the reports in VAERS to better understand potential risks. Social media (including Nextdoor) should not be suppressing people's stories of their experiences with the vaccines.
Having said all that, there is little doubt in no doubt in my mind that Steve has descended into "crackpottery" in his current campaign against the vaccines. After they were removed from Nextdoor, he contacted me to request that we reinstate links to the anti-vaccine paper he had written, but when I looked at the paper it combined.a complete misunderstanding of VAERS and links to completely uncredible claims. And when I asked him to point me to his best argument, he share an analysis of British data which after ten minutes of reviewing I realized was a complete misunderstanding of the data because it compared vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths in total without cohorting by age (and as soon as one did that the data pointed in the opposite way of his argument).
Anyway, I say all that because Steve is obviously a smart guy but he has somehow has reached a point in his anti-vaccine fulminations where he is simply citing any statistic or argument that he thinks backs his point without any critical examination.
In short, he has reached a point where it's best to assume that any claim he makes is wrong, unless you have done enough research to decide that he is right. That is my definition of a crackpot: someone you're best off assuming is wrong until proven otherwise.
And that's why I think we can safely assume that Eric Weinstein is a crackpot as well. While I'm certainly in no position to assess his scientific arguments, his DISC theory is so obviously absurd and wrong (for all the reasons you point out and more) that it's clear that one should never take Eric's arguments on good faith, they clearly need to be accepted only when clearly proven right. To be clear, that doesn't mean Eric is always wrong. But it's clear that a wise person should assume so until proven otherwise. In short, he's a crackpot.
I enjoyed your conversation with Timothy, although I confess that I dropped off somewhere in the first half. Not because it wasn't interesting to hear you do skilled forensics on Weinstein's grand theory but because I felt I had heard enough that unambiguously dealt this beautiful theory an early death by several ugly facts.
And I use "beautiful" only because the aesthetics of a grand unifying theory has always had a big appeal--undeserved imo because there's no such thing as a grand unifying theory, only a desire to have one and no shortage of aspirants who purport to fulfil that desire.
The real, and rapidly unfolding, story is that physics not only has a problem stemming from it being grounded in a faulty metaphysics of a subject (that acts and manipulates) over "here" and an object (that's acted upon and manipulated by the subject) over "there," but has also become a tool for the very wealthy and powerful to look for escape hatches out of the misery and suffering they've helped create.
I'm hopeful that at least some of them will soon learn through expanding knowledge and insight that there are no escape hatches but that the most habitable world is the one we currently tread (even the Gobi desert is more habitable than Mars, and good luck dealing with the manifold vagaries posed by the gravitational and magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn).
Then one could bring smarts and energy to bear on, say, devising agricultural systems in the American Midwest, Europe, and Asia and forestry systems across the world that help stave off further carbon release and provide important and meaningful jobs and communities for millions.
A really exemplary analysis of the ongoing human tendencies that produce idea suppression. Thanks
"Seyberg-Witten" is misspelled. Should be "Seiberg-Witten." See for instance https://www.quantamagazine.org/nathan-seiberg-on-how-math-might-reveal-quantum-gravity-20210624/
ok so in a way I respect your open-minded reticence, but the guy's a crackpot. Is it irresponsibility or mental illness? I have no idea.
My 2 cents. What you're really asking, Bob, in a way is: does Eric Weinstein have a personality disorder? I can't speak to the physics part (his theory, etc.); but can to the "psychological" aspect. The threshold for a disorder is: does one's personality impair one's success, i.e. goal attainment? Or does it (the personality) harm others' potential?
I think you're right on when you say "people are doing what people do", w/r/t functioning within a system. In other words, people lie (deceive) to themselves and others in pursuit of their own goals. SOP. In that regard (DISC) Weinstein is correct.
From afar, we can't say what his overall health & well-being is. Or whether or not he's done harm to others. So ... ?
I think his brother, Bret, has the right approach - write a book and present your argument there - where you're free of "peer review" and all the bs that comes with that. But then there's the problem of getting read and understood w/o prejudice. So we're sort of back to the beginning.
The individual needs others, within a system, to function well.
Btw, the GUT is evolution and its laws. Space, the Universe (multi)? Beyond my pay grade.
I would agree with the conclusion but I still wonder what the dividing line would be. It has to be somewhere between this and Alex Jones screaming the craziest things he can think of in between 'dietary supplement' advertisements.
Eric seems to have a penchant for granting imaginative terms to concepts. It does feel like as a matter of principle his mind tends to land in the "Just asking questions" camp which occasionally veers into self serving or bad faith territory.
check this out: https://quillette.com/2017/09/28/trump-voters-irrational/
I would challenge anyone to listen to the recent Rogan podcast and not to walk away with that conclusion. He makes Trump look humble. Listening to him reminded me of Forrest Gump, where Forrest happens to be part of major historical events over the years. That is how Eric portrays himself. I would say you have a very solid beginning to your grand unified theory.
Maybe I'm dim but I never thought 'DISC' implied coordination among those involved. The coinage seemed more nerdy than conspiracy-minded.
Thanks all for your comments and to bob for the analysis. Maybe we could refine crackpottery 😁 to extreme narcissism in these cases. That seems to be the key for me to understanding what skews them from possible brilliance to paranoid conspiracist. RFK Jr seems to be another example of a very smart human whose relative views are extremely tainted by an abject ignorance of ultimate truth.
Hi Bob, A brief comment after watching the latest Parrot Room chat with Mickey. I, too, (I'm retired) watched the podcast of Lex Fridman with Jocko Willink & switched it off after Jocko's comments about dehumanization not applying to him and his soldiers in Iraq. There you have it - a great example of just how strong and powerful cognitive biases are. In some ways, that's why we (humans) are here. They work.
And why you face, maybe insurmountable, challenges with your AAP. Because of your reliance on the belief that "cognitive empathy" can override them.
I think that in practice, cognitive empathy as you define it, will invoke cognitive dissonance. And that (also an evolved psychological mechanism) makes (most) people feel bad. People (most) are also wired to avoid pain (feeling bad about themselves.)
In a nutshel: People want to feel good about themselves, no matter what they have to do to pull that off. Thus all the self-deception (aka ego defense mechanisms), etc. and so on.
Hey Bob, I actually watched all 2+hrs of your convo with Timothy Nguyen, and again, I have to agree with Martin S - boring. You're not going to get many clicks with that. However, The sub-plot thickens, i.e. motivation and personality.
What was/is Nguyen's? Apparently, there are only a few dozen scientists capable of understanding the gist of Weinstein's theory. And almost all hardly gave it any consideration at all. Maybe the motivation was that age old one, jealousy.
Jealousy's root is fear that an object will be lost/stolen from you. ... Y'all can take the plot from there.
On the other hand, maybe it's that, almost as old, hero complex? Would Tim know? I doubt it.
How to know? Psychoanalysis? Takes a long time and has many variables. Meditation? Say a week-long silent retreat? In essence with meditation you're talking with yourself, or is it 'god'?
Joe Rogan's (and others') solution is 'shrooms. Again, an interface with 'god'.
A very thought provoking post, Bob. Thank you. Keep it up.
Now, about that cat video?