This guy has been discussed somewhat by economists recently.
Background: His claim is that all of our CPI calculations are wrong bc we should be using gauge theory rather than differential calculus to understand consumer utility.
He got invited to the University of Chicago to give a talk about this theory. (This is one of the world’s top three or four economics departments.)
While I was not personally there, I have read reports about what happened. He was repeatedly asked by people in the room to provide a simple example of a case where his theory would do better than current methods for calculating CPI: suppose there are two goods and two periods of time, e.g. Show us how we get it wrong and you get it right (and why)
He did not do this. It seemed (according to reports from the room) that he was unable to do so.
It seems (being charitable) like the guy has a habit of making dramatic claims like “I have solved X and everyone currently working on it has it wrong!” and then not being able (not remotely able!) to back it up.
I'd be more charitable toward him - he's got a list of things to deliver upon if he wants his theories taken more seriously. It's a philosophy of science level thing to want a new theory that replaces other theories to improve on their understanding in some area by explaining phenomena the previous theory(ies) does not explain or providing the same understanding with fewer data needed.
He's not trying to replace theories, he believes he's created the underlying theory that allows other theories like relativity and string theory be able to be connected, which currently aren't.
> It seems (being charitable) like the guy has a habit of making dramatic claims like “I have solved X and everyone currently working on it has it wrong!” and then not being able (not remotely able!) to back it up.
He’s a libertarian so it kinda comes with the territory
Weinstein is either going senile or running a very advanced grifting operation to increase his clout on social media. He presumably did some advanced work in the past but that is no indicator of sanity. Sir Michael Atiyah towards the end of his life developed obvious cognitive deficiencies. [1]
I've watched several hours of conversation with Eric Weinstein. He talked at length about the academic cabal to keep him out of the "in group". I imagine Weinstein will repay Nguyen's efforts by attacking him as a monster from the old cabal.
I think I know what you mean about the "grift"; I've wondered if Eric wasn't hurt by his little brother having more notoriety. Given Nguyen's remarks on Eric's reluctance to actually produce a paper (despite talking up the idea in popular venues) and his indecision about whether Eric is an academic or an entertainer probably belies a similar suspicion. Of course, if the paper were solid, we probably wouldn't be wondering about this at all (assuming, of course, that Nguyen isn't a nasty monster from the cabal).
I don't know much about his work but I know he sometimes makes remarks that are paranoid, contradictory, and nonsensical when properly analyzed. This indicates to me that he either knows that such remarks drive a lot of engagement on social media or he doesn't. Either way, I think people should stop paying attention to whatever he's saying since it is often neither insightful nor productive in any meaningful way.
Do you have a link/timestamp to a video with such a reaction? I've seen him get frustrated or bored and then challenge people to try to think harder or differently, more deeply.
"Either way, I think people should stop paying attention to whatever he's saying since it is often neither insightful nor productive in any meaningful way."
You can peruse his Twitter feed. It's full of nonsensical statements. I like to think what I write makes some modicum of sense and when I do make claims that don't make sense then someone would be willing to say so and explain why.
Weinstein put out a mathematical paper with disclaimers that it is for purely entertainment purposes. If that's not nonsensical and contradictory then I don't know what is. This is why I don't pay attention to him. He's not a serious and sincere person because a serious person wouldn't publish a mathematical paper with disclaimers about it being nothing more than entertainment. So his actions make him look like either a troll or someone going senile. In both cases it doesn't make sense to pay attention to someone like that.
He also likes to encourage conspiratorial thinking among his followers which is again a sign of someone that is not operating in good faith and trying to achieve any positive outcomes. It makes him seem like someone that enjoys stoking fear and paranoia in order to grow his clout on social media.
If you have references for any worthwhile work that he has produced then I'm actually curious to see it because whatever I've seen from him indicates what I already wrote.
Or he's gauging, no pun intended, the audience and moving forward at a pace that's safe with the crowd/mob - the crowd who overall on average is less competent than the top minds who'd be able to understand what he's suggesting.
If someone reads this without knowing the author, what opinion do you think they would form of him or her?
> The Law of The Gated Institutional Narrative: Every story that starts out to be about some particular topic, once reported, instantly comes to be about perseveration, framing, coordination, gaslighting & narrative.
> In my own opinion, this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
What if someone picks up any long book and picks a random page to read then a few sentences in it, without bothering to try to understand the context - and if not understanding it they don't bother exploring further and just assume the person they're reading must not be useful or insightful - and instead try to paint them in possibly the worst light possible as "going senile or running a very advanced grifting operation to increase his clout on social media" - as you said earlier about Eric?
He has more than a few hundred thousand followers. If those accounts aren't just bots and are real people then presumably they're paying attention to nonsense and thinking it is sensible and so he's deserving of criticism. If he's doing this on purpose then he's acting in bad faith. If he's not doing this on purpose then that's even worse and someone should help him log off because it seems to me like he's going senile.
He's also actually contributing to the problem he's criticizing. He's creating destabilizing narratives and reducing trust in democratic institutions by spreading fear and paranoia to a few hundred thousand people. [1] That might actually be his goal in which case he should be rightfully criticized.
You missed my point, which upon reflection, isn't surprising.
Do you even know what Eric's referencing in his tweet re: Gated Institutional Narrative or GIN for short? It's a concept he's spoken out about in detail before. I'm guessing you don't or his tweet would make more sense to you. But there is a community of people around him who value and understand what he says, learning from him as well, even so much so as creating a wiki for his concepts - theportal.wiki - and specifically here's GIN for you: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Gated_Institutional_Narrative_(G...
He's also coined DISC for Distributed Idea Suppression Complex - look it up.
Are you able to understand either of these concepts for what he's pointing to? If no then perhaps it's just not an inherent capability you have with how your intelligence is structured - that's a possibility outside of Eric being a kook - but requires one to be humble in their limitations.
It doesn't seem like you do understand him. He's not fear mongering or spreading paranoia, he's shining a light on corruption and its inner workings, highlighting oddities. It's actually the opposite of what you say, it's empowering to know - knowledge is power - in fact it may be you who's fearful, paranoid, and worrying and projecting that.
Thanks for the links but I already told you I'm not interested in joining a cult with a senile fool at the top. I recommend you expand your intellectual horizon and avoid hucksters like Weinstein because "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex" is a nonsensical phrase and the fact that you're convinced it means something is what's actually worrying. It's surprising no one else has criticized him for what he's actually doing. Has he ever engaged with any actual critic about his ideas? Or is he always talking to people that just agree with him all the time?
I did not expect his followers to have such strong feelings. I'll keep this in mind next time I engage with Weinstein cult members. I might even need to create phrases of my own like "Algorithmically enhanced cult induction, memetic capture, and gating" and "Social media is an algorithmic substrate for mutagenic enhancement of viral ideological vectors" to be taken seriously by people like you because it seems like you folks enjoy unnecessary and convoluted abstractions that are basically meaningless.
Here's my abstract assessment of Weinstein. I don't have a wiki page to explain what any of it means but I assure you it's all very meaningful:
Eric Weinstein is using basic cult induction techniques and leveraging social media as an algorithmic mutagen to enhance viral ideological vectors of destabilizing and paranoid narratives that paint him in a favorable light in order to place himself in a position of leadership among the people that believe existing democratic institutions are no longer acting in their favor. It's either that or he's going senile. Either way, the man should not be taken seriously because he's only interested in his own crusade against the establishment that he feels spurned him and his unfathomable genius.
Then you're much better at Weinsteinese than I am because I don't know what "perseveration" even means and how it applies to "gated institutions" and their narratives. Does he have examples of institutions without gates, i.e. "ungated" institutions? Is he talking about any specific institution in particular or just abstractly and he's divided them all in some taxonomy that only he and his followers understand? Is he in favor of "ungated institutions" and their narratives?
You can see how any sane person when they decide to analyze the statement would think the man is going senile. There is no real substance in the statement other than whatever the reader is willing to imbue into it, i.e. it is nonsensical. This is all before we even get to the part where he is claiming to have created a grand unified theory of everything which solves economic problems better than existing economics but is also just purely for entertainment purposes. The man is practically asking to not be taken seriously.
Weinstein did good to not only formulate but to publish.
At some point you got to throw caution into the bin and publish what you have to say.
This person mentioned Einstein, but Einstein was just the byproduct of a time when people had the balls to publish what could be perceived as extravagant theories.
Einstein was the one who got it right, but you don't get to hear from him if you don't create an environment in which people like him also felt the confidence to publish stuff that could be considered controversial.
People say necessity is the mother of invention, well right after that there's the feeling of being the only one who gets it and that all the others are wrong/clueless.
> This person mentioned Einstein, but Einstein was just the byproduct of a time when people had the balls to publish what could be perceived as extravagant theories.
As an outsider, while I can see many problems in academia today, I'm not sure that an exceptional fear to publish extravagant theories is one of them.
It seems to me that the opposite is true. The replication crisis is a symptom of a general unfriendliness towards uninteresting publications.
It's tough to gauge if someone's competent or not when they're speaking at a very high level in a domain you know nothing much about, and where very high level is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than high level. For this I've found myself leaking in corollaries such as Eric being able to have old time theoretical physicists on his podcast and having in-depth and flowing conversations with them.
Einstein had a few important but easy to state ideas about the speed of light and gravity, that he analyzed at length with non-controverial comprehensible (to experts) math, and made a bunch of predictions that many scientists verified.
The quantum menchics theory was much more controversial, and Einstein opposed it.
As the One Source of Truth puts it: This guy is "an American podcast host and a managing director of Thiel Capital" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein). For one thing this matches more or less one of the author's own disclaimers under one of his papers (quoted by https://www.cantorsparadise.com, link of OP), for another his affiliation is highly problematic to put it mildly.
Background: His claim is that all of our CPI calculations are wrong bc we should be using gauge theory rather than differential calculus to understand consumer utility.
He got invited to the University of Chicago to give a talk about this theory. (This is one of the world’s top three or four economics departments.)
While I was not personally there, I have read reports about what happened. He was repeatedly asked by people in the room to provide a simple example of a case where his theory would do better than current methods for calculating CPI: suppose there are two goods and two periods of time, e.g. Show us how we get it wrong and you get it right (and why)
He did not do this. It seemed (according to reports from the room) that he was unable to do so.
It seems (being charitable) like the guy has a habit of making dramatic claims like “I have solved X and everyone currently working on it has it wrong!” and then not being able (not remotely able!) to back it up.