On Eric Weinstein

If you aren't familiar with Eric Weinstein, this isn't the post for you. May I recommend the rest of the internet?

I would also flag this is most definitely a 'Narcissism of Small differences' post, which isn't to assert the narcissistic claim that I am close to the subject in terms of knowledge, horsepower or mental agility. Just to say that while I am venting my frustrations with someone whose content on balance I enjoy, it would be a mistake to think I am in any way sympathetic to ideologies most motivated to be critical of Eric.

In fact I highly recommend his podcast series 'The Portal' and anywhere else he appears as a guest. Eric interviews subjects that push back, and have the horsepower to push back occasionally to the extent of making him look foolish, which is an achievement because I wouldn't describe Eric as a fool. His guests are also eclectic, so he's one of those interesting people that has curated an interview series with interesting people that are rarely if ever on a promotional tour for the book they've just released.

It's just when the pandemic hit, and I got this visceral feeling that I was witnessing Eric have a kind of public meltdown. Simultaneously, I possibly project onto him that he is getting dangerously close to a lethal level of confidence and self belief, a state of mind where I myself am at my worst. I may simply be witnessing someone go through the liberating experience of unburdening oneself of long held fears, or I may be witnessing someone who has built up an audience of yes-men and now has a diminished capacity to sense their own performance, as dare I say it, they slip into the grips of their own organic DISC or GIN, see below. At any rate, I want to shit it out in my little corner of the internet.

Dunning-Kruger Appeal

I've promoted this to my most resonant gripe. I was fortunate to have an older brother walk in to our living room sometime in the late 90's early 00's and watch about 40 seconds of Pacey talking onscreen in the drama 'Dawson's Creek' to which he replied 'what's worrying about this is that people will watch it and think they are getting smarter.'

This is my synthesis of an argument Eric has presented, and shouldn't be confused for a necessarily accurate representation of Eric's actual argument. But it's something like he hypothesizes that people are tired of, or suffer from having science communicators dumb concepts down for them. Some kind of resistance training where the onus is put on the audience to go and research anything they don't understand. Much as Michael Shermer and Michael Iain-Black's podcast 'Topics' has the guideline of covering '80%' of any topic and the audience is to fill in the remaining 20%, whilst simultaneously instructed to 'take it easy.'

A potential jump-the-shark moment for me in the Portal, was when Eric said to a guest in response to the guest trying to explain some concept they had mentioned 'don't worry about the audience, they'll go look it up, I may not have the biggest audience in the world but I have the best audience.' or something to this effect. I'm paraphrasing, and unfortunately can't recall which specific episode he made this remark or event he guest he said it to... maybe Roger Penrose but I'm not going to sit through that again.

So if you care about Eric Weinstein, or have been a member of his audience you may want to go look up the Dunning-Kruger effect if you haven't heard of it. Eric's statement made me cringe, and project my shit onto him and his platform with a 'why would you do that?'

Case in point, on April 1st... uh... America time, 2020. Eric posted on his youtube channel his presentation to theoretical physicists his theory of Geometric Unity, including a preamble by Eric, then the actual lecture and then roughly 35 minutes of ppt slides in explanatory notes, as Eric I think introduces the footage with an apology for his handwriting quality.

It was solely because of the aforementioned statement about having the 'best audience' that I did something I never do and that is go 'below the line' and read video comments. I have to be in a state of morbid fascination to ever read youtube comments, but here I was rather testing the assertion of 'best audience' by looking for evidence that a largely lay audience presented with this material where interpreting, understanding and dissecting the contents.

A single piece of positive evidence would suffice to substantiate claims made by Eric whereas the null hypothesis can't really be concluded - an absence of evidence is not sufficient to conclude evidence of absence. Maybe that discussion takes place elsewhere, on another forum like a reddit thread or some kind of wiki.

Whereas I feel the comments on the video provide many data points to build circumstantial evidence that we are seeing more of a Dawson's Creek type fanbase. People perhaps prone to interpreting the experience of watching something impenetrable to them, as proof positive that they are the kind of 'smart' person that watches stuff they don't even understand because they are that kind of curious intellectual.

The lecture is entirely impenetrable to me. This is why I pick it out to substantiate my gripe, if Eric's hypothesis about dumbing down language to the detriment of the audience is true - I would guess his show would diminish rather than exacerbate the Dunning-Kruger effect. People would watch it and feel dumber for watching it, rather than smarter. So someone like me that stopped any instruction in Physics at the end of high-school if in the grips of Dunning-Kruger would possibly assume there wasn't much to know about theoretical physics; you know, I'm someone that if you asked me 'what's Newton's 3rd Law?' would respond 'I know I've been taught that, and I have access to Google.'

I should at this level of comprehension of the subject of physics feel pretty confident that I can duke it out with the best. Like some kind of Simon Cowell 'So you think you can break the Einsteinian Speed Limit' audition show. I don't. I don't think I could pass the exam I passed in my final year of highschool. It's possible I've forgotten more than I ever knew of physics. Then I listen to Eric talk about Geometric Unity and am humbled by it, realizing there's so much more I didn't even realize I didn't know - my overconfidence should diminish.

For one thing, I didn't have that confidence to begin with. Another thing is, that I don't know what I'm looking at with Eric's lecture. I am simply not in a position to do even a J Peterman evaluation:



I don't have the competence, to tell whether Eric even presents anything coherent or incoherent. I have to defer to an appeal to authority, and the authority I would disallow myself an appeal to is Eric Weinstein. There's a number of reasons I'd proffer for this.

That Eric sat on this theory for as long as he claims means I can't exclude the narrative that he has done so because he suspects it may be rejected on its merits - like a guy that procrastinates about asking a girl to the prom because he suspects she might reject him, the moment he asks the fantasy collapses - what Dan Gilbert in his book 'Stumbling on Happiness' explores as anticipatory pleasure - the more one looks forward to an uncertain event, the less likely one is to act on it, or thereabouts.

I can't exclude the possibility, that there just isn't a there there. To exclude it, I would have evidence that Weinstein's outsider idea had some traction in displacing the status quo. I don't really know what his theory even is, my closest attempt to understand it by analogy is something like:

We've assumed that a human cannot break the 8 second mark for the 100m sprint because they have to apply force to the ground to propel them forward with equal and opposite force, but what if we assumed the ground could also propel itself forward?

Some kind of re-framing theory like that, where you re-examine an assumption that something is constant, and then changing that as a variable can demonstrate mathematically a reconciliation with everything else working. Some kind of De Bono lateral thinking approach, that the academic establishment hasn't been doing. If someone were to pose such a theory to me on a subject I do actually understand I could probably make one of two evaluations: 'woah that opens up a lot more interesting possibilities.' or in the possibly apocryphal words of Abraham Lincoln 'calling a tail a leg don't make it so.'

The other thing I can't exclude is, that even if Eric's unified theory is correct - its lack of traction may owe to his own inability to communicate and sell it to that critical mass level where the right people look at it. Write ups in the Guardian dating back to 2013 when he first presented this talk report complaints that Eric gave people no paper, or pre-print draft to review, some of the sighted sources mention that he provides no testable hypothesis in his theory just elegant coherent mathematics.

The entire history of Q&A sessions at the end of a keynote speech, at events at the 92Y in New York or Google Talks, IQsquared debates, Convention Panels and book tours all provide evidence of a particular manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect, which is people consuming some material and equating that with an estimation of their ability to produce such material. You can virtually rely on someone getting up and being completely unable to articulate their question, trying to pack their life story and/or their thesis into the background of their question. You can rely on some anonymous person in the audience trying to speak to the keynote speaker as though they are equals. One doesn't even have to rise to the level of a Ta Nahesi Coates or Steven Pinker. You can see it with Clerks director Kevin Smith in his 'Evening with Kevin Smith' releases. People confuse their ability to consume content with their ability to produce content.

Recently on an Episode of the Portal, Eric Weinstein interviewed the founder of Project Veritas, James O'Keefe where I feel it is not hyperbolic to say that Eric keeps hounding James that he doesn't demonstrate enough agonizing over the destruction of people's reputations/lives. In the same way, I would be greatly reassured if Eric publicly demonstrated more agonizing over exacerbating the Dunning-Kruger effect in his audience, that as my brother put it so long ago 'the worrying thing is that people will watch this and think they are getting smarter.' My life experience predicts that a majority of people would agree with the statement 'Reading books makes me smarter.'

Worrying enough is that he coined the term 'Intellectual Dark Web' which is if nothing else, labeling yourself an 'intellectual' a red flag. The 'IDW' furthermore has now had some time since its minting to gain or lose traction, and in my opinion has lost traction. Perhaps analogous to Dawkins' suggestion that Athiests refer to themselves as 'brights'. I'm guessing that it moreso is owing to informality of membership and that many of its associated personalities like Murray, Harris and Peterson are larger personal brands where both the IDW and Eric stand to gain more than they receive by adopting it.

Again though, I can't exclude that nobody has really rallied to the IDW banner because like 'Brights' or 'iSnack 2.0', it is simply a branding disaster. My current go-to Youtuber Dr Todd Grande who despite his name is refreshingly lacking in any grandiosity, production values or pageantry does a good summary of Mensa & Narcissism that I suspect might have a lot to do with why IDW hasn't crystalized into something more cohesive. It's not very intelligent to advertise yourself as intelligent, as most people find this off putting.

Eric's behavior, specifically his affection for 'the greatest audience in the world' or whatever makes me worry that the Portal as a product, and perhaps Eric Weinstein as a public intellectual is more in line with Lumosity - a product that actually targets dumb people with the promise of feeling smarter, while failing to demonstrate the claims. This is a confronting thought to entertain as I would be one of these dumb people consuming the illusion that I have special insight or am smarter than the average Bear. One might also recall the athlete hologram power balance bracelets, that were eventually outdone by my barely noteworthy Alma Mata: RMIT University, who were the first that  bothered to investigate whether these placebos did improve performance as they claimed.

Eric's content he has released over the course of this pandemic though, has had the result of me actually looking to his wikipedia page, and its attached talk page and it is sobering to be reminded that despite the impression Eric makes through his polymathic articulate intellectualism and the circles he moves in - he actually is and remains barely noteworthy, by Wikipedia standards. This could be a bias built into wikipedia that I disagree with. For example, when some speaker starts tickling my bullshit detector I like to check their wikipedia page, because of the tranparancy of the talk page, like if you believe it biased one way or another you can go to the talk page and often see that bias fought out.

(historically, I had a friend that at one point sent me videos to check out Nassim Haramein and rather than picking apart yet another video and debunking it, I just looked him up on wikipedia a page now deleted, apparantly for notability, but recently I used it for Chris Martinson, and for Randall Carlson and he doesn't have a page. Whether pseudoscientists and hacks are noteworthy or not, it's actually good to have a page where this is briefly explored and maybe even fans can learn skepticism by having their edits deleted.)

Eric could be an intellectual's intellectual, or he could be just remarkably successful at infiltrating scenes and coasting. I raise this because Eric may in part be in the grips of Dunning-Kruger himself, I recall him commenting on his brother Brett's speaking event with Richard Dawkins, and how Dawkins had experienced a decline from ground breaking maverick in the 70s to somewhat of a curmudgeon in the present day. I wonder whether Eric (and Brett) can extrapolate out that if it proves to be the case that they are the new generation of public intellectuals of the moment, they too are on a trajectory that will have them like Dawkins and maybe Chomsky in a position where they are the ones closed to criticisms and revisions of their pet theories by the next generation.

I also notice that Eric does not yet have an achievement to his name anywhere near that of Dawkins' Selfish-Gene, coining the concept of 'meme' or even a pedestrian best seller like the God Delusion that in my opinion did the service of repackaging and expanding Bertrand Russell's arguments from 'Why I Am Not a Christian' for a new generation.

And oh god... every time I go to look something up to check myself, it just gets worse. Now I can picture Nassim Haramein or Randall Carlson sitting on their own podcasts presenting mathematical art pieces they find compelling like Eric's klein bottles and other math knick knacks, before talking about the black hole at the center of every atom/the catastrophic event that explains the loss of Atlantis... This isn't where I set out to go with Dunning Kruger appeal, but I just fear I'm looking at the teeth now of my own Dunning-Kruger trap.

Conspiracy Bating

It was really his podcast episode 'The Construct' I forget which number; where I reached peak irk. But it makes me reflect on his first appearance on Sam Harris' podcast, where Eric steel-mans conspiracy theories at some point. Then in that context it felt like an interesting point, but more for the steel-manning than the legitimizing of the psychological phenomena of conspiracy-theories.

By his publication of the podcast about the death and possible life of Jeffrey Epstein, the point that a conspiracy theory was theoretically possible had been repeated enough to stop being interesting and start being annoying.

What is a 'conspiracy theory'? I suspect part of the problem is that it's an undefined term. The etymology of conspiracy is evidently, something banal such that the words are not descriptive of the behavior we refer to when taken literally.

What I'm saying is, in the legal sense 'conspiracy' can be thrown into a bunch of charges. Such that 'conspiracy to commit murder' describes what happens when an exotic dancer and her pimp conspire to murder a 'John' after having him take out life insurance, naming the dancer as beneficiary. But the cops solve the murder in a few hours, because they made their conspiracy in a quiet dive bar where the staff could all hear them conspiring.

If this were the accepted definition of 'conspiracy theory' whenever 2 or more people discuss something that they then do, then legal tomes would prove that conspiracy theories are proved true all the time in criminal trials.

But if you are at a party and someone says 'I'm really into conspiracy theories!' I feel most people will guess in the league of moon-landing-faked/royals-killed-diana/9-11-inside-job/earth-is-flat territory of conversation.

Wikipedia gives a pretty thorough definition on its page:

A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[2][3] when other explanations are more probable.[4] The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.[5] Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth,[5][6] whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved.[7][8]

The bold type is my emphasis, because I'd probably if pressed to define or characterize a 'conspiracy theory' I would say something in line with 'explanations that add unnecessary complexity, like them breakfast machines.' this is reflected in the 'more probable' wording in the wikipedia definition, by my interpretation. A straight mathematical calculation, did somebody flick the light switch with their finger leaving a fingerprint, or did the person use a koala to flick the light switch leaving a human-like fingerprint? One probability has to factor in the extra detail of having a koala on hand, the other doesn't.

Conspiracy theories are often worse than this, because the theory has to include explanations as to why there is no evidence of a koala being present at the scene also.

But keep in mind, there's this banal, legal definition of 'conspiracy' that means two or more persons premeditating an act that we generally aren't referring to when discussing 'conspiracy theories' and the more grandiose sense of 'conspiracy theory' that can go right off the deep end of credulity, which we are more often discussing.

Keeping those two poles in mind, Eric's podcast 'the Construct' begins with him building a category of 'responsible conspiracy theories' so 'conspiracy theory' with the qualifier of 'responsible' and then reading through a long list of known 'conspiracies'. Also referred to by Eric as 'dirty tricks' that were a product of some review sometime in the 60's or 70's of tactics and strategies US intelligent services had employed against US citizens.

I do not wish to come across as dismissive of the data set Eric provides, I simply cannot recall the details, and found the episode too irksome to revisit. It's up there on youtube to investigate yourself.

My synthesis though, is that the list of 'dirty tricks' that Eric cites as in the realm of "proven conspiracies", are fully plausible, because they are tactics proven to work by any group of mean girls in any high school, in any culture, in any time period, in known history of teenage high school girls. Reputation destruction, spreading false rumors, gaslighting, deplatforming, peer pressure etc.

I can't recall but it possibly includes precedents for the US government creating or employing spies to infiltrate organizations like Unions or Communist Parties. Much as the police create fake prostitutes to infiltrate illegal prostitution rings. British comedian and director Chris Morris' second movie 'The Day Shall Come' was based on more contemporary phenomena of American Intelligence agencies recruiting terrorists in order to arrest them in some form of legal entrapment.

If there were such a thing as a 'responsible conspiracy theory' or 'responsible conspiracy theorizing' it would I suspect probably involve assuming the burden of proof, specifying conditions under which the theory can be falsified and a presumption of innocence. This isn't where Eric goes though, he really alludes to but doesn't specify some qualifier of plausibility...

This is all preamble to the main content of the episode, that Eric believes Epstein was 'a construct' which is a fancy, sexy way to say an actor hired to pretend to be a real person, whose employers had made the fatal mistake of miscasting a pedophile actor into that role bringing the whole operation undone, and was then murdered to conceal the truth of his existence, his murder being made to look like a suicide.

To Eric's credit there are a lot of disclaimers. But the preamble diminishes the disclaimers somewhat. It just happened to remind me of an athiest youtuber's video I had seen perhaps that same day, where a similar preamble was offered by an apologist.

The synthesis of that video, is trying to confuse claim + evidence, with just a claim. By introducing categories of 'reasonable claims' vs 'unreasonable claims'. The apologist even gives examples of an 'unreasonable claim' accompanied with testimony that the claim is made up, and the 'reasonable claim' example with testimony that the claimant witnessed the event first hand.

All in the service of equivocating 'hey we've all heard claims that kids trip over and hurt their knee, and we've witnessed this happening too.' with 'we've all heard Jesus died and was resurrected, the one time this happened in history and what makes him so uniquely special...'

Something rhymed - in the attempt to bolster speculation with a preamble - between the two videos. 'reasonable claims' vs 'responsible conspiracy theorizing'. An attempt to predispose me to consider a story as closer to known documented historical events than a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory.

Which is where Eric's ability to articulate arguments very well becomes a 'with great power comes great responsibility' conundrum; specifically the responsibility to not use that ability to bolster not only a spurious personal interpretation of events (disclaimed to have no special insight) but the legitimacy of positing conspiracy theories in the first place.

Somewhere in his interview with Tyler Cowen, the guest pushes back on this conspiracy theory indulgence of Eric. Imploring him to look at the abysmal historical track record of conspiracy theories proving true. Often, (and this is my impression not Tyler's), conspiracy theories become religious claims in so far as they are unfalsifiable, (going back to that wikipedia definition), all evidence that refutes the conspiracy theory becomes proof of the cover up.

Eric in his 'the construct' episode, offers his testimony of his one meeting with Jeffrey Epstein. When I imagine Eric sitting in a court room, offering his testimony, I can imagine the defense attorney yelling 'objection: speculation' 'objection: speculation' and having it sustained again and again. Eric appears to be trying to build a case for Epstein being a construct which I believe based on Eric's testimony is Eric's impression of Epstein. But drawing from the Youtube Athiest communities playbook again it's a 0 + 0 doesn't equal 1, but maybe 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 does equal 1, style fallacy, which is a hefty accusation to hurl at a mathematician like Eric.

The episode could have been much shorter if it stuck to a reasonable complaint that the media abandoned this story much too fast. If it was a call for dispassionate, investigative journalism to resolve the uncertainty to public satisfaction and nothing more (notably the media can't do investigative journalism to the satisfaction of conspiracy theorists, as they are unsatisfiable).

I would actually really like to see a Dr. Todd Grande summary of the Epstein case, as he would responsibly speculate. But also because Todd often speculates on numerous highly publicized criminal trials and is subsequently to more accurately see law enforcement breaking from procedure in compromising ways as the norm it seems to be, rather than suspiciously exceptional.

But the episode ends weirdly with Eric imploring someone that we not be too hasty to seek retribution if Epstein turns out to be an intelligence asset of the state of Israel or something. Watch it for yourself, there are certainly, big unknowns surrounding Epstein's life and death. Is this speculation responsible though?

Responsible conspiracy theories I would reiterate, are actually just investigations, with appropriate burdens of proof and presumptions of innocence/incompetence. What makes conspiracy theories fundamentally irresponsible is that they can never find anyone innocent. Conspiracy theories shift a burden of proof upon skeptics to prove a negative, that some nefarious plot didn't take place. 'Prove a black-ops assassin wasn't there!'

I understand and hold to the principle in the more ordinary legal world of a presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt/balance of probabilities (depending on severity of charge). This answers the question of 'what do we want to get wrong more frequently? jailing innocent people, or letting guilty people walk?' Our legal system (humbly realizing that perfect justice is beyond our grasp) opts to try and jail less innocent people. If there's one mistake it makes, it is heavy handed in finding people not guilty, because the social cost of the opposite has been decided to be too damn high. This obliges me as a citizen to have a point where I have to hand it to some people that they got away with murder or other crimes because the forensic tech lags behind.

The cost of conspiracy theories is the time and attention spent spinning wheels in the mud of a case you can't prove is even a case to begin with. That due to the compelling nature of the narratives will have people talk about convoluted assassination plots instead of how change in GNP is a provably terrible scorecard for human well being and government performance. That climate change is a massive existential threat to humanity, and ordinary human psychology ignores it, simply because we'd rather chase shadows than deal with a real problem right in front of us.

Having read all that, I should disclose in closing, why it may just be my personal prejudice that finds Eric's championing of conspiracy theories so irksome.

I have had the personal experience of being involved in a Non Government Organization (ngo) where they weren't doing well. Membership and revenue was stagnating, they only had one full time staff member who actually implemented outreach projects, and awareness of their brand and mission was close to zero. I got a very quick impression that the organization was unsuccessful owing to it being incompetent and antiquated in communicating their message. They alienated every person who walked through their doors. The internal diagnosis? - a vast conspiracy so scared of their message that they were invisibly thwarting their every attempt from behind the scenes. Their evidence? their lack of success.

It was in the worst cases, worse than the picture I've painted here. But I was painting this picture for a friend of mine that consults with a lot of different ngos and apparently my experience is not that uncommon. Many organizations fall back to this ego defense where it is simply easier to imagine you are so important that terminators are sent back from the future to thwart your success than to contemplate that you are simply not very good at what you are doing.

Eric's increasingly building a case for me that he is somebody that posits the extraordinary lacking even ordinary evidence, in favor of entertaining the ordinary for which evidence abounds. He is veering more towards a Slavoj Zizeck - a generator of interesting ideas and provoker of interesting thoughts, but ultimately of little substance.

Combine these apologia for the practice of conspiracy theorizing, and the appeals to the audience's Dunning-Kruger effect and for me it dangerously doubles down on being a product designed to feed the audience's illusions of superiority, or possibly delusions of superiority.

Neologisms

A neologism is a 'newly coined word or expression' semi-recent examples might include 'selfie' 'unfriend' 'iso-hair'.

What about what I'm calling the Social Traffic Obstruction Protocol or 'the STOP'? a concerted effort to impose a cost upon me as an employee whereby coordinated efforts create inefficiencies in the transport grid, greatly expanding the time taken for me to cover the distance between my home and place of work. Where I can only avoid the reputation cost of arriving late to work through a sacrifice of my personal time to negotiate with the STOP.

Yeah, well I guess someone could call it 'congestion'. A very boring and un-sexy pre-existing word that more accurately describes what happens when everyone tends to commute during the same peak time periods because businesses operate the same standard opening hours of 9~5 as a hangover from a bygone era when if the bank closed its doors and the post office closed their doors there was little point to keeping your office open.

I'm not really enamored of my neologism 'The STOP' it is posited to compare it with Eric's neologism he calls 'The DISC' or the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. For me, the 'D' in that acronym is what sticks in my craw, because I suspect the justification for 'distributed' is so you wind up with a word, which you don't with 'the ISC' and it's possible that there's a technical justification for 'Complex' instead of 'Paradigm' or 'Instinct' but I suspect 'Complex' is chosen for the same reason I chose 'Protocol' for 'the STOP'.

'Clever' acronyms do certainly make me suspicious, they make me groan in fact, with real disdain, as puns do. So it might just be I'm projecting my shit onto Eric who has a fondness for them. My more sober objection is just as a choice to use 'congestion' instead of 'The Stop' might rob me a lot of sexiness in thinking I'm describing a complicated, personal and esoteric phenomena. I would offer as an alternative to coining a new term like 'the DISC' as 'inertia'. Which robs the sexy sounding 'the DISC' of an ability to distance itself from describing a very ordinary, very mundane aspect of human psychology, and robs Eric of a pretense of special insight.

The new term Eric appears enamored of (he has incorporated 'the DISC' into two podcast episode titles, and appears to have his guests accepting it as having unique descriptive value) is but one of many - he also increasingly throws out 'GIN' or 'Gated Institutional Narrative' instead of off the shelf terms like 'sunk cost' or 'reputation' or 'self interest' again, all very ordinary human psychology, not the diabolical agenda of powerful institutions, and not a special insight on Eric's part.

Similarly, Eric has started to abbreviate a discrediting process as 'Fear Uncertainty Doubt' as 'FUD' which I regard as a bit of a dick move. It's similar to the meme of if you start to doubt the existence of God, that means the devil is infiltrating your mind. FUD appears to pre-emptively strike at feelings that Eric may not actually have figured out what he claims to have figured out, not that his enemies are nefariously trying to bring him down through reputation destruction.

It poisons the well. If Eric was to release a podcast tomorrow saying 'The Earth is Flat' (just to pick something I'm reasonably confident he won't do) and I say:

okay I know the Earth isn't flat because I live in fucking Australia, I have seen the top of a ship appear on the horizon before its hull does and literally nobody benefits from suppressing the truth about the shape of the Earth. I'm fairly confident he's wrong about the Earth being flat... does that mean his other theories are... OH NO this is FUD just like he warned me! I couldn't be experiencing fear, uncertainty or doubt as the natural result of his own conduct, it must be 'them' turning me against him. This proves 'the DISC' and 'the GIN'.

You could save a lot of neologisms, and a lot of time by promoting the more generally applicable principles of skepticism. If I read criticisms, like this one I'm writing about Eric Weinstein, I can just evaluate the criticisms on their own merits, engage with the material. I don't need FUD as a framework to evaluate whether something is a hit-piece or legitimate criticism.

By the report of Steven Pinker, fellow linguist Noam Chomsky isn't just dismissive but actively hostile toward some alternative theory of linguistics or neuroscience he isn't on board with. It's probably some very common, very ordinary piece of human psychology even Chomsky falls prey to like confirmation bias. I suspect whatever Eric calls the GIN and the DISC is an emergent property of this same psychology in institutions, just like rush hour congestion is an emergent property of enough people sharing the same work hours and infrastructure. Rush hour congestion doesn't require a nefarious puppet master, or coalition of any kind, it simply requires a lack of imagination on behalf of the participants.

People not from the United States are well positioned to observe one Gated Institutional Narrative in the form of trying to convince US citizens they are not objectively from the greatest country in the world, and probably have first hand experience that this endeavor is a lost cause. Creating this narrative is a very simple and efficient process, assert the claim with no substantiation and safely count on almost nobody bothering to verify the claim for themselves.

When immigration at LAX repeatedly forced me to explain the concept of Mexico to them as I transited through, I didn't believe that this was the product of a vast conspiracy to enforce the narrative that nobody could possibly want to live in Mexico and must be trying to enter the US for some devious subterfuge. I just put it down to ignorance.

If 'the DISC' exists, it is an incredibly efficient machine that requires no fuel, no maintenance, no user manual. It just works. I would posit that if some environmentalist patented a sustainable greenhouse-emission free jet fuel and took on a billion dollar loan to supply the aviation industry, only to discover that another environmentalist later that week invented solar powered stable wormhole technology rendering all fuel based transport obsolete, that first environmentalist would get all Thomas Edison on the latter's arse, running PR campaigns to scare the public away from their superior solution and preserve their investment.

There's probably not much Hannah Gadsby and I agree on, but when she does profess not to think women are better than men in her special Nanette (or could be a later appearance it's been a while), I hope she's veering towards the Michelle Wolfe camp who argues (perhaps facetiously) that women should be celebrating Elizabeth Holmes' contribution to gender equality, and that female heads of state aren't just the Jacinda Arderns but also the Margaret Thatchers.

I hope Eric can see the opportunity he has to observe the ordinary way in which his own podcast is subject to generating its own GIN, its own DISC, its own FUD. The portals' GIN is 'the DISC' and others. He's not doing pirate radio, he's a Youtuber. Possibly anti-fragile in that his own bad press only serves to raise his profile and give him a voice, much like Jordan Peterson's adversaries made him a star and a best selling author.

Excellent case in point that I just learned while writing this point, Andrew Yang credits his appearance with Sam Harris and his appearance on Joe Rogan with his viability as a candidate. Yang appeared on the Portal as well, but Eric claims that Andrew Yang was left off CNN and MSNBC graphics as a function of 'the DISC' while disregarding the ability of his personal friends to essentially create a Presidential Candidate. Eric claims to be an outsider, doing 'pirate radio' such that his descriptions of the world seem to be more of an attempt to reconcile his impotence in reshaping the world to fit his conclusions with his actually quite significant influence. If you can call Joe Rogan and Sam Harris on the phone, you are a fledgling kingmaker.

Like JP though, Eric is much better at bringing himself down than his detractors. The neologisms mainly bother me because I believe them to be redundant, his insistence on using them rubs me as a conceit, or oversight. They also fold neatly into the conspiratorial thinking, and with increasing fear, uncertainty and doubt, I begin to think Eric gravitates toward intelligent design positions, which in turn makes me notice that he doesn't criticize the progressive/SJWs/Post-modernists whatever because they essentially advocate an intelligent design position, but as an intelligent design position.

I don't have the brainpower or inclination to substantiate this suspicion.

Instead I compare Eric, and even his more self-moderated brother Brett's podcast output to similar but adjacent bodies like BloggingheadsTV with its excellent channels 'The Glenn Show' and 'Feminine Chaos' and how they manage to often tackle the same subjects I do care about with none of the baggage the Weinsteins bring.  Or compare the IDW to Heterodox Academy. Or detractors of the status quo that operate within gated institutions, like professor Mark Blyth of Brown University, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Richard Thaler of Chicago University (and Nobel Laureate), Politician Yanis Varoufakis of Sydney University, Cambridge etc.

There are plenty of people that seemingly falsify 'the DISC' or 'GIN' and I find Mark Blyth's explanations as to why we suddenly all know the name of Central Bankers both simpler and more compelling than Eric's neologisms.

Again, I find myself finding Eric's the Portal being a confusing mix of great guests and an imploding host. I find myself drawn to drawing the distasteful comparison of Eric to Australia's worst export - Ken Hamm, where his neologisms are coined in characterization with the sense of superior insight conspiracy theorists claim, and also the persecution narrative so beloved by Ken Hamm.

Eric is quick to jump on evidence that seemingly corroborates his status as a persecuted outsider, and appears to ignore evidence that he is actually a privileged insider. Tyler Cowen again offered Eric push back on this point as well by suggesting that he is now one of the mainstream voices.

Where Eric thankfully does not resemble national disgrace Ken Hamm, is that the portal doesn't have the same two recurring guests employed to agree with him and block anyone who questions him. Perhaps a better analogy is that Eric likes to think of himself as NOFX, when in practice he's probably The Offspring and could even be Blink182.

Chauvinism

I don't mean chauvinism in the more common usage of 'male chauvinist pig' but I probably can thank that usage for watering down the word, because its strict definition is apparently "exaggerated or aggressive patriotism" a charge for which I'm fairly confident there's not enough evidence to convict or even bring charges. But I'm talking about something more in this vein, than the gendered sense of chauvinism.

Eric has one trick for generating interesting ideas that he possibly learned or adapted from his friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, coiner of the term 'anti-fragile' that unlike the previously examined neologism/forced clever acronyms is not a loaded redundant term.

Eric looks at a concept and imagines the opposite: virtue signalling generates vice signalling (useful concept) leadership generates followership (useful concept) inclusion officers generate exclusion officers (possibly useful if you can find a non zero-sum context for inclusion officers).

And so the 'chauvinism' I'm talking about is a very personal pet-peeve I'm almost certainly projecting psychologically and yet, it's a behavior I find off putting.

If we are familiar with the concept of 'othering'... actually that's a big assumption. Wikipedia has this: "The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native" and more, to describe othering.
My experience of it being employed is: essentially foisting some burdensome out-group identity on a person. Eg. here's Mike, Mike think's of himself as a skater and when he shows up to his natural habitat - the skate park - the other skaters in various ways keep pointing out that Mike is aboriginal overshadowing his identity as a skater, Mike has been 'othered'.

So take 'othering' and generate 'samening' where this shows up as: essentially foisting some burdensome in-group identity on a person. Where both 'othering' and 'samening' are both aggressive acts - the aggression being respectively 'you're not one of us' and 'you are one of us.'

Somewhat in some pseudo mathematical sense, othering and samening are the same act. Discrimination 101 you can't create an in-group without de facto creating an out-group and vice versa. The one implies the other. There may be an emotional difference for Mike on the one hand to turn up to the skate ramp and be told by white kids that he's aboriginal; and on the other to turn up to the skate ramp and be told by aboriginal kids that he's aboriginal so maybe that amounts to a functional difference. But if we substitute Mike for me, that difference is illusory, I turn up to the skate park and the white boys say 'hey you're alright you're one of us' we can immediately see the problem because we are probably imagining Mike standing next to me.

I say discrimination 101 because if Mike and I did turn up to the park as friends, discrimination against Mike is discrimination against me also. It might be harder for Mike, but there's the not to be neglected imposition on my freedom to associate and befriend whoever I choose.

I'll just disclaim two personal experiences that might prejudice me against the behavior of Eric's that irk me, before describing that behavior. The first was that in my teens and twenties when people still watched Television on a television, I used to get angry in the lead-up to Australia day as the ethnic majority tried once again to force a positive national identity upon itself. One year following the usual attempts to define ourselves as about 'mateship' and 'a fair go' I got to ask a panelist at some event of a refugee background how she felt about this insistence that Australians were somehow especially representative of fairness, justice, friendship, hospitality etc. I really enjoyed her assertion that there is nothing Australian about basic human decency, hospitality etc. that all people's of the world do this.

Obviously, culture exists. It can be demonstrated, but as the joke goes 'what's the difference between Australia and Yogurt?'

Second prejudicial experience was when I had a crush on this girl, that for anonymity's sake we'll say had a Finnish ancestor. In our social circle, there was another girl who had Finnish parents, and she would interject in my attempts to converse with the girl and do my Garry Groundwork with these 'oh my god, I have to tell you about what my Finnish parents did last night, so Finnish you are going to die!'

Because I was having precious attention diverted, I couldn't help but notice this 'samening' behavior that completely overlooked all the components of my crush's non-Finnish makeup in order to assert her Finnish identity. The other thing I notice is that this samening was not a two-way street, the motivation was coming from the Finnish girl to claim my friend as her compatriot. I cannot read minds, it just struck me as insecure behavior, something like the spotlight effect where she was incredibly self-conscious of being from Finland, and failing to notice that nobody cared. Now maybe I'm more agitated because she was competing with me for attention from a third party, but I feel I recognize a real phenomena there of steamrolling someone's broader identity to assert some trivial aspect of it as common ground.

And so, I find myself particularly sensitive to noticing every time Eric points out to a guest 'but come on you're an Armenian-Jew...' or 'you Russian-Jews are...' and it may be these instances I recall are the only two-instances of samening that I can assert. And again being charitable that Eric means these to be positive affirmations of character. But they are what serve to stimulate the visceral response that I find off-putting. It may be a subtext I put in that just isn't there, but it's invoking an appeal to mutual Soviet-bloc-Jewishness to explain some positive character attribute. Two instances might be insufficient data sample to extrapolate a pattern, but the other data points would be that Eric is yet to assert that not being some variety of former soviet bloc Jew might contribute to a particular genius or positive character trait.

...It's possible that my own confirmation bias is at play, Eric has introduced Garry Kasparov in Russian, doesn't assert a Jewish identity on Sam Harris, and doesn't to my recollection hit Rabbi David Wolpe with any assertions that his being a (?) Polish-Jew contributed to anything in particular. It may simply be too obvious that Kai Lenny's Hawaiin identity contributes to his surfing genius. I may be overlooking when Eric asserts his Gen-X identity with a guest like Brett Easton Ellis.

I may simply be making a case for my own latent anti-semitism, where people can get out their tiny violins as I cry over being left out of the Jewish-genius club because now a white straight man know how it feels. I do love however this mind bending quote from Chomsky "“Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's really an easy way: Stop participating in it.” which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly that 'our' predictable reactions (and knowing Chomsky probably pre-actions too) perpetuate the phenomena.

I suspect there's a principle in their that has broader applications - the inclusion/exclusion, othering/samening continuum where a predictable response of oppression is solidarity, solidarity creates in-groups that can then be targeted or used to justify further oppression. Possibly the best course of action is to assert one's identity as an individual, like John Hurt's depiction of John 'The Elephant Man' Merrick "I am not an animal." much as when complaining it is best to own the complaint rather than de-individuate.

Again, I might be seeing things that aren't there, but the very engrossing episode of the Portal with Prof. Agnes Callard opens with a kind of coded discussion of status and the need to acknowledge status in order to move on that I suspect has the covert subject of Eric at it's core - Agnes sensing his ego needs to be appeased. I suspect also that she identifies part of that as Eric's fragility regarding the Jewish axis of his identity to keep throwing Greek intellectual traditions at him, perhaps covertly deny his agitations for the Jewish intellectual tradition as pushback for his attempts to samening her. More likely this is my psychological projection, as this is what I tend to do when people attempt to samening me (and I tend to lean in hard when being othered). I would not rate my abilities to read Agnes' mind because Agnes is the kind of person I'd stand next to when trying to pass myself off as intellectually disabled.

Narcissism of Small Differences

The irony/hypocrisy of writing a narcissism of small differences post, is to say one of the things I'm finding increasingly off-putting is the narcissism of small differences that Eric exhibits. If you aren't familiar with this concept, a simple example might be that you sit down to dinner with two friends that have previously not met eachother. You are an omnivore, one friend is a vegetarian and your other friend is a vegan. As you order your meals, you notice that your vegan friend gives your vegetarian friend a much harder time for not being vegan than you do for not even being vegetarian.

So to keep it specific, Eric Weinstein in the banal Eric is heavily critical of the US Democratic Party. He is a fan of certain candidates as per the appearance of Andrew Yang on the Portal, but he like many is no fan of the Clinton dynasty, early in the pandemic he appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast and called for Nancy Pelosi to resign over some behavior like encouraging New Yorkers to go eat in China Town or something. The Narcissism of Small Differences I'm asserting here, is that he is disproportionately angry at democrats like Pelosi, compared to how angry he is at the Trump administration or Mitch McConnell etc. This in itself is a very understandable psychology of 'I expect better from you though!'

It's compounded by Eric's propensity to praise Trump, a pattern of behavior whether he is pushing back on Sam Harris' 'Evil Chauncey Gardiner' analysis or enamored by "Kayfabe" posits some 'genius' as explanation for Trump as president.

My prejudice/personal bias again, is that we've been through this with the George W Bush 'secret genius/it's all an act' hypothesis. I view this as an argument from incredulity, where much like a conspiracy theory people fail to imagine a world in which a moron could win highest office, thus they must be playing some kind of 'three dimensional chess.' History, and all behavioral evidence corroborates that George W Bush was exactly as dumb as he appeared. The hypothesis that Trump is a secret genius is even weaker.

The frustrating thing is that Eric himself has demonstrated a useful analogy, (in an interview I sadly couldn't find to link to) where he described how a mindless parasite can hack the intelligence of another organism. I would put it thus, an architect is intelligent and they use that intelligence to design a house with a timber frame. Then termites eat that timber frame and ultimately bring the house down. Is it right to conclude that the termites are therefore 'geniuses' or that eating timber and reproducing is a kind of 'genius' for their ability to confound the designs of an architect?

This is where the costs of narcissism of small differences become apparent, I compare Eric's calls to a vague unspecified 'mutiny' in his post pandemic appearance on the Joe Rogan show to Michael Lewis' thesis from 'The 5th Risk.' To attempt to steel-man Eric's calls to mutiny, I would say that there are indeed problems with a 'vote for the lesser evil' worldview. World leaders don't just have their finger on a nuclear button where we need to pick someone who won't push it, but they have another hand on a faucet of greenhouse gasses where we need them to be turning it off before the timer is up. Which is to say, leaders are needed that have positive proof of attributes being present, not just less defects than the other guy.

But Michael Lewis points out that the Trump administration hasn't filled many government positions, and the government actually does a bunch of important stuff. I don't think 'the 5th risk' is a great book title in so far as being self explanatory. Lewis' explained it on the Al Franken podcast appearance as 'there's always 3 or 4 things you're worried about, and it's the 5th thing you don't worry about that gets you.' We know that a party controlled Golden Retriever would do a better job than Trump because they will at the very least appoint a bunch of experts to look after the nuclear arsenal, predict cyclones, ensure food security etc.

Lewis' and Harris' seem to recognize the low hanging fruit of civilization being in peril with a buffoon like Trump having the keys to the oval office. Eric appears to admire trumps ability to put himself in a position to destroy civilization, while feeling that Pelosi's head should be on a stake for saying something that granted, may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers, but is comparible to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's advice to Australian's that they could enjoy a meal at a Chinese restaurant roughly a week before we started locking down.

In this manner, he strikes me as having a similar mindset to intersectional progressives, fixated on a civil war and inflating the threat of unpopular enemies while ignoring the encroaching obvious enemy.

Dumb Ideas

This is probably a good time to take stock of comedian George Carlin's observation that everybody on the road who drives faster than us is a maniac, and everyone who drives slower than us doesn't know what they are doing. Which is to say we all have some internal equilibrium where we look at people with a view held stronger than our own and think them some insane fundamentalist, and then look at anyone with a view held weaker than our own and think them some naive idiot.

So the question of whether an idea is dumb or not, can break down to one of personal preference and I want to acknowledge that up front. Here's a link to YANSS podcast on the psychological phenomena 'naive realism' from which I took wholesale the George Carlin bit. I don't know if this psychological phenomena has yet survived the replication crisis.

That out of the way, I want to look at just two 'dumb ideas' Eric has touted. The first is leaving the planet.

Again to allude to the spectrum of reasonableness, there are going to be scientists working on real logistical solutions to establishing a moon colony, a mars colony, a titan colony etc. theoretical physicists trying to find a way to exceed the Einsteinian speed limit, an ongoing arms race to militarize space, another one to capitalize space etc. Then there's all the way down to very unrealistic proposals by cult leaders that Jesus is a righteous alien dude.

Eric appears to be in the camp of theoretical physicist trying to break the Einsteinian speed limit. The science and mathematics there is impenetrable to me, so it could be dumber or wiser than I am capable of ever discerning. The dumb idea is the rational he's outlined on Joe Rogan the 'We have become as God's but for the Wisdom.' meme. Eric believes it's time to leave the planet and explore the cosmos because we are unfit custodians of Earth.

Here, my mind at least draws a parallel between a 'Humans can't live sustainably/responsibly, we need more planets' argument and a 'Humans can't live sustainably/responsibly, we need less humans' argument - which I refer to in my head as the 'population' argument of environmentalism, and may technically be known as the Malthusian Trap. This 'we need to reduce the population' argument appears to be the conclusion of the Earth Day premier, Michael Moore produced 'Planet of the Humans' but is popular in environmental crowds.

The significance of this parallel I will annoyingly try to explain with a third analogy - sprinkling salt on a bird's tail. I can't source this folklore with my Google-fu, and I don't know how widespread it is, but I find it useful. It's apparently an annoying thing the elderly said to credulous children 'how do you catch a robin/swallow/sparrow/pigeon/crow/hummingbird?' 'Simple you just sprinkle some salt on its tail feathers.' The point being however, that the solution requires a bigger problem to be solved than the original solution. If you can sprinkle salt on the tailfeathers of a bird, you have far exceeded the conditions required to catch it.

With 'we need to reduce the world's population because humans can't live sustainably.' you are asking people who can't give up asparagus for 3 months of the year to give up their children. Furthermore, the best path to a declining birthrate appears to be increased consumption. This of course is not an argument Eric has to defend, he has another solution, crack the speed of light and spread out into the universe.

That in itself isn't so stupid. As per #27 of the Portal - Avoiding the Apocalypse Daniel Schmactenburger points out that for much of human history we've had recourse to migrating to a new area. Once you've covered the globe, you need more globes. However, it's that Eric uses this, I would argue, transparently stupid rationalization of 'We have become as Gods but for the wisdom' where it may be the influence of the online Athiest community rubbing off on me, but any examination of the 'wisdom' of the Gods indicates that humanity exceeded the wisdom of the Gods long before splitting the atom. There is little evidence in the scripture to substantiate the gods are wise at all.

But I am inclined to recall Gary Larson's bozone layer a layer of tightly packed clowns orbiting the Earth that protects the rest of the universe from our effects. I am also reminded of Carl Sagan's "If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes." all of which is to say, that anyone who believes humans are as yet unfit custodians of our own planet, shouldn't be arguing that we need more planets.

In the context of the current pandemic, it would be like arguing 'Wuhan's hospital system is on the brink of collapse, we need more international flights out of Wuhan, let's export this thing to the world.' It's kind of I guess, the reverse of sprinkling salt on a robin's tail though fixing our economic models may prove much easier than building a warp drive. It's that if we can't all get along on one planet, why expect us to learn to get along on two planets.

It isn't the dumbest thing of course. Maybe it is the case that with two planets we can at least buy human civilization some time to sort its shit out. But sooner or later learning to survive our own intelligence has to become the central project. I believe that project is what is referred to as 'Game B' and is one Eric has engaged in with his guest Daniel and possibly his own brother Brett and found uncompelling. However, again, with the influence of the Athiest community, there are plenty of smart people aware of the mechanism of evolution via natural selection that prove time and time again to be incapable of engaging with it. When Daniel pushes back 'your solution requires a Warp drive' there's no equal and opposite retort from Eric. I'd be inclined to suggest his solution is not a solution at all. At best it is a stop gap, at worst I imagine there could be some game theory where you are more likely to lose something if you believe you have a spare/or second chance. (I've always wondered this about the AFL's preliminary final vs Elimination final performances)

Eric's brother Brett has at least once expressed some frustration on his Darkhorse podcast that his own brother is in this camp of 'more planets' rather than 'figure out stewardship of the only one we know we have.'

The second dumb idea, is hopefully one that needs less explanation, that is 'Joe Rogan for President' it's just impenetrable to me. Joe Rogan has a big show in terms of viewership, and I suspect some aspect of Chauvinism might be rolled into that. The most defensible argument for Joe Rogan to make a run for the oval office, is not one of suitability but electability in the specific context of an incumbent Donald Trump and the unbelievably low bar he sets for improvement.

To even make this argument, you'd have to exclude how many of Joe Rogan's views and hits come from people with absolutely zero ability to vote in a US election. One might also want to compare the value of Joe Rogan's endorsement vs Barack Obama's endorsement. It might be hard to isolate the impact, but probably can be estimated. It's also hard to gauge how popular Joe Rogan would be given an actual alternative, like if people could choose to have Rogan interview his guests, or Howard Stern or Ricky Gervais, or Conan O'brian etc. We could conceivably conduct a poll on who you'd rather helm the Joe Rogan experience. It would be imperfect, I mean Conan for example would probably precipitate a sharp decline in guests that bow hunt and spear fish, and an increase in guests that have read every piece of correspondence of Grover Cleveland and a skew towards the incestuous SNL family tree of comedians.

We are going to get a test, which is whether Rogan proves risk averse with his Spotify exclusivity deal. Taking a certain $100M payday while tanking his podcasts' reach. I don't know enough about the economics. Presumably Rogan is concerned about losing a share of his audience when working out the deal, what will be tested there is his and his teams ability to forecast.

As for suitability on this idea, it's probably easier to even see Trump as a capable President when you have the proximate access of a Steve Bannon, assuming you'll have the Presidents ear and exert influence over policy which with the courage of your convictions, you shouldn't fear. It doesn't take long though for me to find plenty of reasons not to vote for Joe Rogan. Whatever secret sauce has driven the success of his podcast, you just need to watch how hard he questions and cross-examines his guest Adam Conover in #1282 whom I don't agree with, citing really bland versions of progressive assertions and then go to #1284 and watch how little push back he gives guest Graham Hancock, a man whose book 'Fingerprints of the Gods' were the inspiration for blockbuster movie 2012. If Eric bates conspiracy theorists, Joe pours gasoline on that fire for a living.

If Eric has acquitted himself poorly in the advent of the pandemic, Joe Rogan has proved a real time study as a documented fool in the pandemic, and this is who Eric feels needs to give up his charmed life to run for president for the good of the country. Rogan is someone credulous to characters like Hancock and remains incredulous to characters like Bill Gates in the middle of a pandemic. (I suspect also that Sam Harris in his early NY outbreak podcasts refers to his tendency to go through back-channels to try and correct his covid-19 skeptic friends, that he is likely referring to Joe Rogan as one of these friends given how much Rogan was downplaying the pandemic).

I just feel this is a dumb idea, akin to the Oprah 2020 idea. That the only thing that can kill a celebrity is a celebrity. Now I don't think the Democratic Party has proved great at devising a solution to the Trump problem. But that's like making a valid defense of the futility of breaking a siege through continued diplomacy, and then presenting as an alternative clicking the heels of ruby red slippers and repeating there is no place like home.

A Man Shall be Judged by the Company he Avoids

Which I take from Gordon Livingston's 'How to Love' chapter title. I originally wanted to comment on something purely visceral for me, which is the whole Rogan-Ferris-Willinck type podcast scene that seems to suck in intellectual men because they can't get past the dream of tight abs. A place where PhD's in mathematics and nueroscience intersect their love of UFC/MMA with the common man. The phenomena of more accomplished men to become George Costanza in the presence of a Mimbo.

Ostensibly there's nothing wrong with this. LA as near as I can discern is somewhat a culture of blowing smoke up others arses.

Something that I actually credit Gladwell and Lewis with for example is that they are far more interested in discussing sports with their guests than the subject of their books, and many many an intellectual proves themselves vapid and vacuous by parochially confessing they are a snob to sport.

It's just that writing out the section on Conspiracy bating, and where I have bothered to go and check my source or do even arbitrary research, keeps painting this picture that Eric Weinstein may just plain be a conspiracy theorist, albeit an atypically articulate and coherent one.

That's where I notice in the network constellation around Eric, there's a convenient absence of people whose existence appear to contradict the existence of the DISC, the GIN etc. People who could take him to task, like a Mark Blyth or a Robert Sapolsky, maybe even a Yanis Varoufakis, perhaps even a Dr Todd Grande. It may be that such figures have been approached and just wouldn't dignify the Portal, sadly reinforcing the notion of what Eric calls the DISC.

Eric knows by one degree of separation Mark Blyth (Via Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and by one degree of separation Matt Dillahunty (Via Sam Harris)

So I guess I'd just pick one example and look at Eric in relation to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Unquestionably, Harris and Peterson have a constructively adversarial relationship. They disagree, but do the good work of modelling a civilized and constructive conversation (eventually) in what is probably a zero-sum game.

Their sparring matches, particularly the first one where Harris and Peterson got bogged down in a point that Harris couldn't let go was where Eric scored a coup and got himself on Harris' podcast offering to constructively critique the exchange between Harris and Peterson.

Exchanges between Harris and Peterson did seem to improve subsequent to Eric's intervention. Eric's diagnosis was something like Harris has a paradigm of 'truth' and Peterson has the paradigm of 'meaning' and something Eric has expounded on more than one occassion is his five factor model of something like truth, meaning, grace, beauty... and something else.

It may be a good exercise in cognitive empathy to understand 'oh I really care about truth but this person doesn't they care about meaning...' but I would say on my intuitions that if you posit having 5 true norths, you should have to defend why they don't collapse into a single one - namely truth.

As in, what is more beautiful than truth? what is more graceful than truth? etc.

I basically feel, that Eric exhibits a preference for people that will permit him alternative epistemologies to believe what he wants. Jordan Peterson is guilty of everything the non-radical left accuse him of. The non-radical left tend to accuse him of being a sophist, a christian apologist etc. So Peterson and the Progressives lock horns because they disagree fundamentally on ideology, and to Peterson's credit he appears a competent and credible clinical psychologist, everything he has put out in this lane is generally sound, and yes! even Todd Grande has a good video on JP.

But I think the exchanges between Peterson and SJW's and why they appear characterised by simmering rage may in my opinion be a narcissism of small differences one, where their ideologies are directly opposed but they share a methodology.

Not in psychometrics, or clinical psychology, but in literary criticism. Watch any of Peterson's Bible lecture series and then watch Harris' take on sophistry/mystical interpretation. And I don't know how true this is, but have my suspicion that Peterson (and maybe Ben Shapiro, though I only catch him on the periphery of panels populated by people I actually find interesting) started the newish annoying trend of apologists claiming the achievements of the West as owing to Judeo-Christian values, completely ignoring the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians etc.

Without waxing on about Peterson endlessly, it's that on the subject of say Cancel culture or Identity politics Harris, Peterson, the Weinsteins etc. align ideologically in terms of thinking them in the majority share, a load of shite. But Harris and Peterson lock horns over differences in methodology. Hence Harris can share a stage with Peterson and it's largely adversarial, sometimes constructive and Harris has to push back against Jesus smuggling, by not permitting Peterson's non-epistemology. Harris can also share a stage with Matt Dillahunty, best known as host of 'The Athiest Experience' and this is not his first appearance in this post.

I think Eric can share a stage with JP, but I increasingly suspect he would avoid the company of somebody like Matt Dillahunty, because Matt Dillahunty if nothing else, keeps speakers honest. It's hard to assert this, given Eric's willingness to sit down with someone like Prof. Agnes, or Daniel Schmactenburger or Tyler Cowen. I just suspect as where those guests joust, Dillahunty (who reportedly has problems with some of Harris' positions) is likely to tear in and force Eric to justify his sympathy for the 'mytho-poetic' or the metaphor of moving through rooms in a house he used to illustrate to Sam Harris' his various modes of thought in that first podcast.

I guess my hypothesis, subject to testing is that Eric will avoid the company of anyone who might detect and diagnose cognitive dissonance on his part. Anyone that could competently prevent Eric from believing what he is comfortable believing, or motivated to believe. To a lesser extent I believe he might successfully avoid guests that are averse to using insider terms of art or jargon, and hence not tolerate what has become the jargon of the portal - DISCs and GINs and EGOs. I suspect he'll never talk to a Mark Blyth who might suggest you can just throw out guage theory as it's unnecessary to understanding economics, and who has demonstrated much more powerful predictive power than Eric as near as I am in a position to assess.

Tentative Conclusion

It has been good to think on these very visceral things I felt, and explore them through writing. What I suspect is happening is again a piece of ordinary human psychology. To borrow an analogy from Dan Ariely, as you increase the resolution on a photograph the subject becomes less attractive. You start to see the acne, the freckles, the blackheads, the veins. Details that are lost from a distance.

With someone like Jordan Peterson this process is relatively short*, you watch his lectures on the Big 5 personality traits and are like 'fascinating and informative' then switch over to maps of meaning or his bible series and start tugging at your collar nervously. Which is probably unfair, Peterson's sophistry is interesting and safe provided you allow the possibility that it's all irrational.

*(Not so short if you basically do the same thing as Peterson and draw from the never constructed panopticon prison that psychology is a Eurocentric construct)

Eric Weinstein is a bit more mysterious, because he speaks a lot of maths and theoretical physics seemingly coherently but it is much less penetrable than the assertions of Peterson. One has to defer, and often there's nobody else in the room to defer to. Eric doesn't speak much to Harris about Gauge theory, Geometric Unity and Klein Bottles. I have to go 'Roger Penrose seems to think he's okay.'

It's just these little alarm bells that go off, with the conspiracy theories, the neologisms, the chauvinism, the dumb/questionable ideas, and the admittedly availability-biased choice of company.

I cannot emphasize enough that nobody has fed my fear, uncertainty and doubt more than Eric's own conduct and behaviors, particularly post pandemic outbreak where the resolution improved like Eric had an embedded growth obligation to reveal more of himself.

In late January, the Australia day weekend I was visiting my friends in Geelong, one of which at least consumes the Portal like me. He shared his gripe that Eric 'thinks he's pretty good' or something, the self-congratulatory elitism he was picking up, which I hadn't noticed. Once it was pointed out though, I couldn't not notice, and the rest sort of unravelled.

I'm surprised, that after having done this, I'm inclined to feel more that Eric is someone that could be fairly described as a conspiracy theorist and would actually have a hard time debunking that as mud-slinging, albeit he's as close to borderline not one as you can probably get. He seems quite callous though in permitting his fans to think conspiracy theorizing is okay.

I've also noticed, how much of Eric's position just washes over me, without me realizing that he has just said a bunch of stuff unintelligible to me. He's presented that argument that people don't need and perhaps suffer by having everything dumbed down for them, but I tend not to compare and contrast this with thinkers like Chomsky, Blyth, Harris, De Botton and Varoufakis who seem to have arrived at the opposite conclusion and in many cases test for content via intelligibility to say, a child. My marketing degree would also disagree, this sink-or-swim philosophy just strikes me as a terrible approach to communication, but I'm agnostic as to whether an authority in marketing might point out circumstances in which alienating speech becomes a lure like hard-to-get tactics in courtship.

I have to imagine Eric listening to Judith Butler making the argument that there's no need to abandon rarefied academic speak for the benefit of an audience, and wonder if he'd agree that audiences stand to benefit by assuming the cost of deciphering speech in order to grow or, alternate hypothesis retreat into a safe bubble of self-selected sympathetic people who can dismiss criticism from outsiders. From memory Eric kind of out and out said he was willing to cull his own audience to the ones willing to do the homework, which sounds too much like a desire for 'true believers only' for my comfort.

I don't know myself, I'm agnostic. I'm just willing to start betting, based on confidence in a state of uncertainty.

I would love to see Dr. Grande's take, and I'm tempted to call the Athiest Experience and try and get Matt's take, but I imagine it would be 'Eric's not here, tell us what you believe and why' I suspect the big avenue to explore is ordinary human psychology, and the perils of dismissing its explanatory power.