Theme: Reform

Notes on Eric Weinstein interview:

1) Continuing my criticism: You notice that Erice is GSRRM’ing all day long, but he’s not proposing an alternative model. Not how to create the research economy. Now how to reform the academy. He hasn’t provided enough a solution that’s strong enough to falsify the existing body of work. All he’s doing is GSRRM. And he pulls entertaining pseudo-intellectual analogy that makes a good story out of his hat rather than produce solutions open to criticism.

2) He goes after Lisi who took a different strategy and at least provided one output: candidates. I don’t see an output here. I see someone hinting at an avenue he wants other men to investigate?

3) Eric’s Attempt at description

Two Models GR=General Relativity, . SM=Standard Model

Four forces. One Gravitational, three not: 1) photons, 2) gluons and 3) intermediate vector Bosons. Then Matter.

GR = Pride of place to gravity.

SM = The other three of the four forces shine. photons, gluons and intermediate vector Bosons

Take a manifold … (explains a manifold as a workspace in some geometry or other)… then goes off the rails again.

Tired. Either you can construct an operational argument or you can’t. Mathematics is a trivial logic that because it is one dimensional (positional) is so simple that we can use it to describe any set of constant referents in constant relation independent of scale. All this childish digression into cartoons is self congratulatory nonsense. Either make the argument or don’t. And yes, it can be made in ordinary language because there is nothing that can be said in mathematics that cannot be said in ordinary, operational language, albeit with effort.

4) Well done on Gauge Theory: that is the best most accurate most parsimonious definition of gauge theory. To construct an operational argument, next describe Arithmetic > Accounting > Geometry > Calculus > Gauge Theory > Schrodinger > Weyl > Dirac > Yang-Mills-Maxwell > Lagrangian etc, using the same technique and it’s an obvious progression. I wish he’d do the same for symmetries and lie groups and explain why they’re important (evidence of equilibria).

Correct on how the world hasn’t even caught up to the standard model, but then again, it’s not clear the community has either … because without it farther along, it’s still spoken in platonic language like a neo-mysticism just as dozen’s of great mathematicians warned.

Regarding Dimensions: always confuses people when we confuse people with the four dimensional world and the forces (dimensions) that influence the points of reference (Positions) in that four dimensional space. As far as we know only three+one dimensions are required to describe a point in space time, but to to describe changes to it can require absurd numbers of dimensions. It’s one of those problems of the grammar of mathematical platonism. We describe space time with four dimensions, and we describe the forces on points in those four dimensions with additional dimensions when we say ‘it has’ vs ‘ we use’. Space and time do not have anything. We describe them with three plus one dimensions. No point that I know of requires more than three. This platonic (supernatural) vocabulary always loses the audience.

5) There is very little difference between strictly constructed law and the mathematics of euclidian geometry other than the far larger number of referents and operations in human behavior, and the far larger number of causal dimensions in mathematics that needn’t be described in human action.. If I can do it in my field Eric can do it in his. I had similar difficulty when I didn’t fully understand the problem. Once you fully understand the problem you should be able to reduce it to operational language (meaning scientific testimony). He doesn’t. He can’t.

I have a lifetime of experience with people across the spectrum whether dyslexia or aspergers or anything in between. The fact that these people (myself included) identify patterns of promise does not mean that they are capable of doing anything about it. And so far the sour grapes thing, which I have also for the exact same reason, is.. well… not helping. Public therapy by verbal exegesis tiresome.

Listening to his presentation of his theory, I understood his deduction. Until I understand his construction, assuming there is one, then I can’t tell if obsessions with critiques, virtue signaling, and trauma pandering combined with lack of ability to articulate solutions, is cover for lacking solutions.

So, I understand administrative skepticism.

Conversation ends.