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.
Oh, definitely, I agree. I just saw Bret that one time with Heather Heying and have barely paid attention to either of them since then (Bret and Eric, not Heather Heying). I think the reason people like me get them mixed up is that they’re both in that IDW network and all of those people kind of run into each other because they appear on one another’s shows and reference one another so often. That’s a minor explanation, not an excuse. I also just never found anything either of the Weinsteins said very memorable.
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 first listened to his brother, Bret Weinstein, on the Rogan podcast several years ago and he struck me as smart, humble, and self-aware. Then I heard Eric on Rogan and thought this guy sounded ponderous and pretentious, definitely a blowhard. And knowing nothing about them beforehand, I really had nothing to base my opinions on except how they came off on those podcasts.
I can't speak to the validity of either man's actual grips on reality, but social intuitions obviously are there for a reason. Having grown up in a cult, I'm more suspicious of conspiratorial claims made with certainty than most, but it is interesting how supremely confident, say, Trump is in everything he says and how much that confidence wins people over.
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 listened to the Bret Weinstein podcast w/ Steve and Robert Malone. Malone sounded fairly sober, but Steve didn't. If I recall correctly he put a lot of emphasis on the difference between flu and covid vaccines when it comes to VAERS numbers. I gather the numbers are indeed dramatically different but I assume (1) because covid vaccines are under emergency use authorization, the VAERS reporting guidelines are broader; and (2) people are just very conscious of the novelty of the covid vaccine and so more attentive to post-vaccine events that could conceivably be attributed to it. Is that the basic explanation?
Don't think #1 is right (I think VAERS works the same regardless), but #2 is spot on. Plus, I'd add three other factors:
1. With the exception of the flu vaccine, most vaccines are given to young people whose immune systems are more robust, less likely to have bad side effects, and less likely to report them when they do.
2. People are used to getting flu vaccines which makes our bodies more accustomed to them and less likely to have novel reactions.
3. The politicization of everything creates incentives for increased reporting (whether it is people reporting marginal cases or flat our fake reports).
So it's not at all surprising to me that VAERS reports have spiked.
That said, I certainly think it's concerning and should be investigated. Steve and Robert could be right that there are real issues with the vaccines. I don't think that possibility should be ruled out. However, the fact that the controlled trials didn't have major issues makes me skeptical And the falling death rates among the vaccinated certainly has me convinced at this point that the dangers of not vaccinating are more severe than the risk of possible side effects (at least for most folks). So I strongly recommend that people continue to get vaccinated. But I do hope the CDC or FDA or whoever is responsible is putting a lot of resources into investigating the VAERS reports. If they're not (and I don't know that they are) that IS a story that journalists should be chasing and writing about.
Until that happens, however, there isn't yet enough evidence to justify the sweeping anti-vaccine arguments that Steve has been spewing, which run the spectrum from alarmist to flat out wrong. Unfortunately, I think he is so frustrated that the medical community has not embraced the research he funded on fluvoxamine and is instead telling people to get vaccinated that his frustration has clouded his judgement about the vaccines. To play armchair psychologist, I think his self-image of himself as a heroic entrepreneur who has helped save the world through fluvoxamine is now tied up in his mind with the vaccines failing and people turning to fluvoxamine and ivermectin as treatments. So he now latches on to any anti-vaccine argument regardless of how flimsy.
It's what I mean when I say he has become a crackpot on this issue, and my sense is from your description is that Eric Weinstein is going through something similar. His self-image is so tied up with being the smartest person in the room who sees the grand theory that no one else can see that anything that any setback that threatens that image he credits to a conspiracy theory against him. Unfortunately, that way lies crackpottery.
It's too bad because he and Steve are both smart guys who have made some real contributions to the world (at least I know Steve has). Wish they could be satisfied with that.
Yet that makes sense as a VAERS explanation. (I did read in a USA Today piece that the reporting guidelines are broader as well, but it wasn't a well written piece and I'm not sure they got that right.)
To put a line under one point above Robert, I do wish some journalist (maybe you?) would do the legwork to contact the CDC/FDA and write a piece about how they typically handle reports into VAERS. Do they generally investigate these reports? Do they try to evaluate how many are credible? How are they handling the spike in reports into VAERS with the COVID vaccines?
I think these are important questions, but while I have seen debunkings of the idea that a spike in VAERS reports is proof of a problem, I haven't seen anything that answers the questions above. And until there are answers to those questions, I think vaccine skeptics have legitimate reasons for some doubts.
My impression of the Dark Horse Podcast after listening to it for hours:
- Bret and Heather are both totally sincere about what they say and are not grifters. They're both very smart but that doesn't make them geniuses or right about everything.
- It appears both of them previously agreed with some variety of heterodox far-left politics, as in believing that we can use scientific innovation and computers to transition from capitalism to something like anarcho-syndicalism. Embracing a non-mainstream position that the far left considers fringe (or unusual) can feed into insularity and "conspiracy-theory-like" thinking. It seems like they still agree with similar ideas, but recently they've drifted into right-leaning politics on some issues without becoming pro-Trump.
- They've gone a little over the deep end in assuming there must be some type of evil plot behind pushing to get more people vaccinated. I think social media shouldn't censor posts by people expressing concern about the vaccines or side effects or talking about drugs like ivermectin that could possibly work but don't seem to have strong evidence supporting their use. They've moved past heterodox skepticism of vaccines over to participating in the mass panic about mandatory vaccination, vaccine passports, restrictions on freedom of movement, etc.
- There were occasionally interesting guests other than the conservative/centrist/libertarian "usual suspects" like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Andy Ngo, etc.
- Sometimes they make good arguments or do a type of interesting "hippie science" discussion of some issue, but that's overshadowed by an overreliance on hot takes, a tendency to believe people simply because they're contrarian, and unfairly demonizing mainstream academics without considering that mainstream opinion might be right or the issue might be even more nuanced.
I follow their podcast too and I haven't heard any panic over the vaccine-related issues you listed. Raising concern, maybe, which I don't believe equates to participating in panic.
I'm realizing I should add one additional point. I think it's important to distinguish between crackpots and people with whom one disagrees with politically.
While I lean left and disagree with most things Mitch McConnell says and does, I don't think Mitch is a crackpot. I think he's a fairly, ruthless politician who is going to present the best arguments and evidence that support his cause and ignore the ones that don't as a way to achieve his political goals. While it's fair to call Mitch a hypocrite, I actually don't think he is more of a hypocrite than some folks on the left who also ignore evidence they disagree with in favor of facts that fit their narrative. I tend to be sympathetic to those folks on the left more than Mitch because I think their preferred policies are generally (though not always) better for society, but I think they exhibit similar hypocrisy.
All that being said, I never doubt that Mitch has a firm grasp on reality, even when I think he is very, very wrong. Marjorie Green, on the other other hand, is clearly a crackpot and a loon. Trump is an interesting case that falls somewhere in between. I think Trump actually has a fairly firm grasp on reality, which is one of the things that makes him an effective politician. But I also think he has a sociopath's ability to convince himself that inconvenient facts for him are untrue, which adds to his effectiveness and is a big part of what makes him so dangerous.
As for Eric Weinstein, from your description (I've never listened to him or read anything by him), I think it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a firm grip on reality when it comes to anything that threaten his view of himself. In short, it's pretty clear he's a crackpot.
"I never doubt that Mitch has a firm grasp on reality."
I actually do think that McConnell is a very good example for someone who has no firm grip on reality but probably is more sure than others that he does. As most everyone else, he's delusional in thinking that his acts and deeds are in accordance with some deeper "truth," be it, in his case, the belief in the eternity of the political/economical system he's trying to sustain or of his own political power and legacy (the latter seem especially important to him).
As such, McConnell is fumbling like almost everyone else (including crackpots who fumble more than usual) by trying to grasp for solidity, security, and respect/admiration that aren't to be found by anyone, anywhere. He's just very good at giving off the impression of having an iron grip on reality, not least in part because of wealthy donors who like this particular version of "reality" (which feeds their own delusion) and how he's portrayed in the media (whose job, at least in part, is/was to convey a sense of solid and safe ground).
I don't think so Martin. When McConnell opposes Merrick Garland on the grounds that there is an election in less than a year but supports Amy Coney Barrett's with an election only a month away, it's not that he doesn't understand the hypocrisy there. He just doesn't think it's important as achieving his goal of having a conservative court.
But McConnell doesn't believe that there is some secret cabal of powerful figures out there who are secretly trying to undermine him. He understands and is realistic about who his political enemies are. He's a normal politician. One I strongly oppose, but he's not a crackpot in the way that a Marjorie Green is.
"he's not a crackpot in the way that a Marjorie Green is"
He's not a crackpot by any means--sorry if I gave the impression that I was suggesting that.
I was just trying to make a counterpoint to your assertion that "Mitch has a firm grasp on reality." I really don't believe he has that grasp--he's more deluded than most of us (e.g., being insatiably hungry for power and influence--as by all accounts he was/is--is based in a major delusion about the world), though I agree that he certainly is not as deluded as Marjorie Green, but probably on par with Eric Weinstein.
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.
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 have sometimes tried to cook up a thought experiment for my fellow non-Trump supporters to help them understand why someone might vote for a wacked-out problematic candidate, given the choices, and Al Sharpton was always the example that would come to mind. Jonathan Kaye does a much better job at this than I could, though. Great piece.
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.
But the nature of discovery should motivate those others not towards jealousy but towards "Eric's on to something but let ME be the one to actually demonstrate it." Even if Weinstein is the first to get the broad outlines, I assume being the one to nail the details and proofs and get on the right side of things early is a stronger motivating force than jealousy if they think there's something to the theory.
The simpler explanation is just that Weinstein is wrong, and he's wrong enough that it's not worth spilling ink over.
Hi Paul, the jealousy would stem from all the attention (and maybe money) Eric is getting. Bob tried to tease that out of Tim, a couple times. Why IS Nguyen wasting time and ink on a theory without merit?
Good question. I think it’s plausible that, as Nguyen said, he started as a fan of Weinstein, and when he heard him pontificate on an issue Nguyen knows about his bullshit detector went off and he did a little digging. Weinstein may not be on as many people’s radar within the physics community, but that’s just a guess.
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.
Which Weinstein? Bret and Heather were on together but as far as I know Pia was never on Rogan with Eric.
Ah, shoot, I mixed them up. Thank you for the correction! I was wondering whyI’d so poorly misremembered her name.
To be honest I find it interesting that they get mixed up. Bret was was talking about evolutionary biology on Rogan's show, not math or physics.
Oh, definitely, I agree. I just saw Bret that one time with Heather Heying and have barely paid attention to either of them since then (Bret and Eric, not Heather Heying). I think the reason people like me get them mixed up is that they’re both in that IDW network and all of those people kind of run into each other because they appear on one another’s shows and reference one another so often. That’s a minor explanation, not an excuse. I also just never found anything either of the Weinsteins said very memorable.
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 first listened to his brother, Bret Weinstein, on the Rogan podcast several years ago and he struck me as smart, humble, and self-aware. Then I heard Eric on Rogan and thought this guy sounded ponderous and pretentious, definitely a blowhard. And knowing nothing about them beforehand, I really had nothing to base my opinions on except how they came off on those podcasts.
I can't speak to the validity of either man's actual grips on reality, but social intuitions obviously are there for a reason. Having grown up in a cult, I'm more suspicious of conspiratorial claims made with certainty than most, but it is interesting how supremely confident, say, Trump is in everything he says and how much that confidence wins people over.
I find Eric often very interesting and worthwhile in spite of the blowhard tendency. But I agree about Bret, they are temperamentally quite different.
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 listened to the Bret Weinstein podcast w/ Steve and Robert Malone. Malone sounded fairly sober, but Steve didn't. If I recall correctly he put a lot of emphasis on the difference between flu and covid vaccines when it comes to VAERS numbers. I gather the numbers are indeed dramatically different but I assume (1) because covid vaccines are under emergency use authorization, the VAERS reporting guidelines are broader; and (2) people are just very conscious of the novelty of the covid vaccine and so more attentive to post-vaccine events that could conceivably be attributed to it. Is that the basic explanation?
Don't think #1 is right (I think VAERS works the same regardless), but #2 is spot on. Plus, I'd add three other factors:
1. With the exception of the flu vaccine, most vaccines are given to young people whose immune systems are more robust, less likely to have bad side effects, and less likely to report them when they do.
2. People are used to getting flu vaccines which makes our bodies more accustomed to them and less likely to have novel reactions.
3. The politicization of everything creates incentives for increased reporting (whether it is people reporting marginal cases or flat our fake reports).
So it's not at all surprising to me that VAERS reports have spiked.
That said, I certainly think it's concerning and should be investigated. Steve and Robert could be right that there are real issues with the vaccines. I don't think that possibility should be ruled out. However, the fact that the controlled trials didn't have major issues makes me skeptical And the falling death rates among the vaccinated certainly has me convinced at this point that the dangers of not vaccinating are more severe than the risk of possible side effects (at least for most folks). So I strongly recommend that people continue to get vaccinated. But I do hope the CDC or FDA or whoever is responsible is putting a lot of resources into investigating the VAERS reports. If they're not (and I don't know that they are) that IS a story that journalists should be chasing and writing about.
Until that happens, however, there isn't yet enough evidence to justify the sweeping anti-vaccine arguments that Steve has been spewing, which run the spectrum from alarmist to flat out wrong. Unfortunately, I think he is so frustrated that the medical community has not embraced the research he funded on fluvoxamine and is instead telling people to get vaccinated that his frustration has clouded his judgement about the vaccines. To play armchair psychologist, I think his self-image of himself as a heroic entrepreneur who has helped save the world through fluvoxamine is now tied up in his mind with the vaccines failing and people turning to fluvoxamine and ivermectin as treatments. So he now latches on to any anti-vaccine argument regardless of how flimsy.
It's what I mean when I say he has become a crackpot on this issue, and my sense is from your description is that Eric Weinstein is going through something similar. His self-image is so tied up with being the smartest person in the room who sees the grand theory that no one else can see that anything that any setback that threatens that image he credits to a conspiracy theory against him. Unfortunately, that way lies crackpottery.
It's too bad because he and Steve are both smart guys who have made some real contributions to the world (at least I know Steve has). Wish they could be satisfied with that.
Yet that makes sense as a VAERS explanation. (I did read in a USA Today piece that the reporting guidelines are broader as well, but it wasn't a well written piece and I'm not sure they got that right.)
To put a line under one point above Robert, I do wish some journalist (maybe you?) would do the legwork to contact the CDC/FDA and write a piece about how they typically handle reports into VAERS. Do they generally investigate these reports? Do they try to evaluate how many are credible? How are they handling the spike in reports into VAERS with the COVID vaccines?
I think these are important questions, but while I have seen debunkings of the idea that a spike in VAERS reports is proof of a problem, I haven't seen anything that answers the questions above. And until there are answers to those questions, I think vaccine skeptics have legitimate reasons for some doubts.
My impression of the Dark Horse Podcast after listening to it for hours:
- Bret and Heather are both totally sincere about what they say and are not grifters. They're both very smart but that doesn't make them geniuses or right about everything.
- It appears both of them previously agreed with some variety of heterodox far-left politics, as in believing that we can use scientific innovation and computers to transition from capitalism to something like anarcho-syndicalism. Embracing a non-mainstream position that the far left considers fringe (or unusual) can feed into insularity and "conspiracy-theory-like" thinking. It seems like they still agree with similar ideas, but recently they've drifted into right-leaning politics on some issues without becoming pro-Trump.
- They've gone a little over the deep end in assuming there must be some type of evil plot behind pushing to get more people vaccinated. I think social media shouldn't censor posts by people expressing concern about the vaccines or side effects or talking about drugs like ivermectin that could possibly work but don't seem to have strong evidence supporting their use. They've moved past heterodox skepticism of vaccines over to participating in the mass panic about mandatory vaccination, vaccine passports, restrictions on freedom of movement, etc.
- There were occasionally interesting guests other than the conservative/centrist/libertarian "usual suspects" like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Andy Ngo, etc.
- Sometimes they make good arguments or do a type of interesting "hippie science" discussion of some issue, but that's overshadowed by an overreliance on hot takes, a tendency to believe people simply because they're contrarian, and unfairly demonizing mainstream academics without considering that mainstream opinion might be right or the issue might be even more nuanced.
I follow their podcast too and I haven't heard any panic over the vaccine-related issues you listed. Raising concern, maybe, which I don't believe equates to participating in panic.
To the extent that there is any panic among the public it doesn't reach the mass-level.
I'm realizing I should add one additional point. I think it's important to distinguish between crackpots and people with whom one disagrees with politically.
While I lean left and disagree with most things Mitch McConnell says and does, I don't think Mitch is a crackpot. I think he's a fairly, ruthless politician who is going to present the best arguments and evidence that support his cause and ignore the ones that don't as a way to achieve his political goals. While it's fair to call Mitch a hypocrite, I actually don't think he is more of a hypocrite than some folks on the left who also ignore evidence they disagree with in favor of facts that fit their narrative. I tend to be sympathetic to those folks on the left more than Mitch because I think their preferred policies are generally (though not always) better for society, but I think they exhibit similar hypocrisy.
All that being said, I never doubt that Mitch has a firm grasp on reality, even when I think he is very, very wrong. Marjorie Green, on the other other hand, is clearly a crackpot and a loon. Trump is an interesting case that falls somewhere in between. I think Trump actually has a fairly firm grasp on reality, which is one of the things that makes him an effective politician. But I also think he has a sociopath's ability to convince himself that inconvenient facts for him are untrue, which adds to his effectiveness and is a big part of what makes him so dangerous.
As for Eric Weinstein, from your description (I've never listened to him or read anything by him), I think it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a firm grip on reality when it comes to anything that threaten his view of himself. In short, it's pretty clear he's a crackpot.
"I never doubt that Mitch has a firm grasp on reality."
I actually do think that McConnell is a very good example for someone who has no firm grip on reality but probably is more sure than others that he does. As most everyone else, he's delusional in thinking that his acts and deeds are in accordance with some deeper "truth," be it, in his case, the belief in the eternity of the political/economical system he's trying to sustain or of his own political power and legacy (the latter seem especially important to him).
As such, McConnell is fumbling like almost everyone else (including crackpots who fumble more than usual) by trying to grasp for solidity, security, and respect/admiration that aren't to be found by anyone, anywhere. He's just very good at giving off the impression of having an iron grip on reality, not least in part because of wealthy donors who like this particular version of "reality" (which feeds their own delusion) and how he's portrayed in the media (whose job, at least in part, is/was to convey a sense of solid and safe ground).
I don't think so Martin. When McConnell opposes Merrick Garland on the grounds that there is an election in less than a year but supports Amy Coney Barrett's with an election only a month away, it's not that he doesn't understand the hypocrisy there. He just doesn't think it's important as achieving his goal of having a conservative court.
But McConnell doesn't believe that there is some secret cabal of powerful figures out there who are secretly trying to undermine him. He understands and is realistic about who his political enemies are. He's a normal politician. One I strongly oppose, but he's not a crackpot in the way that a Marjorie Green is.
"he's not a crackpot in the way that a Marjorie Green is"
He's not a crackpot by any means--sorry if I gave the impression that I was suggesting that.
I was just trying to make a counterpoint to your assertion that "Mitch has a firm grasp on reality." I really don't believe he has that grasp--he's more deluded than most of us (e.g., being insatiably hungry for power and influence--as by all accounts he was/is--is based in a major delusion about the world), though I agree that he certainly is not as deluded as Marjorie Green, but probably on par with Eric Weinstein.
These are good points. McConnell seems to have a solid grasp of the paradigm he's currently operating in might be better.
Astute analyses here.
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.
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.
"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/
A really exemplary analysis of the ongoing human tendencies that produce idea suppression. Thanks
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.
I think alex jones is just dishonest: he knows he's spewing nonsense. crackpots, in contrast, believe what they're saying.
check this out: https://quillette.com/2017/09/28/trump-voters-irrational/
I have sometimes tried to cook up a thought experiment for my fellow non-Trump supporters to help them understand why someone might vote for a wacked-out problematic candidate, given the choices, and Al Sharpton was always the example that would come to mind. Jonathan Kaye does a much better job at this than I could, though. Great piece.
Thank you for the link. Excellent piece.
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.
yeah that's what i say in the piece. otoh, eric does see specific conspiracies subsumed by the disc as, well, conspiracies, complete w/ coordination.
Hmm …
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.
yeah I wondered if eric would be considered narcissistic under clinical criteria. he does seem to lean in that direction.
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?
But the nature of discovery should motivate those others not towards jealousy but towards "Eric's on to something but let ME be the one to actually demonstrate it." Even if Weinstein is the first to get the broad outlines, I assume being the one to nail the details and proofs and get on the right side of things early is a stronger motivating force than jealousy if they think there's something to the theory.
The simpler explanation is just that Weinstein is wrong, and he's wrong enough that it's not worth spilling ink over.
Hi Paul, the jealousy would stem from all the attention (and maybe money) Eric is getting. Bob tried to tease that out of Tim, a couple times. Why IS Nguyen wasting time and ink on a theory without merit?
Good question. I think it’s plausible that, as Nguyen said, he started as a fan of Weinstein, and when he heard him pontificate on an issue Nguyen knows about his bullshit detector went off and he did a little digging. Weinstein may not be on as many people’s radar within the physics community, but that’s just a guess.