Thread by @eriktorenberg

Favorite ideas & quotes from Eric Weinstein's interviews:

"The middle finger is the secret of how America will continue to outcompete

& the ppl good w/ middle fingers need to be in touch w/ the ppl who've yet to use them so that we can have cross pollination & gains from trade"

Marketplace of ideas:

We're in this mutual fund area where there's long only—are you for immigration or against?

The interesting positions right now are hedge fund like positions (relative value trades), but you can't be long, short immigration. You can only be for or against.

Bad ideas are worse than bad people.

Not that many bad people walking around, but lots of people get infected w/ bad ideas

They think they're doing good, or it might even be locally good, but globally bad, or it doesn't survive scaling.

Why Pinker's optimism is premature:

We have a system in which more & more of the kinetic energy (war) has been turned into potential energy (unused nuclear weapons). So if we don't take into account potential energy for destruction, then everything's getting better & better.

You talk about your taxpayer dollars supporting my physics habit, but what about my physics dollars supporting your lavish lifestyles?

Physics dollars led to development of semiconductor that won WWII, created the internet out of CERN. Do we get a licensing fee?

Critique of Ayn Rand:

She was not sufficiently aware of the problems of multi level selection. Sometimes we act an individual level, but we can also act family level, group, level, national level.

But also her heroes were excellent, and I'm for genius instead of excellence.

Excellence is consensus, quality control, 10,000 hrs

Excellence is hill climbing, Genius is valley crossing

We want excellence in surgeons, Genius in inventors

Genius is doing things that make almost no sense to others, & can only be shown to have been sensible after the fact

Society is run by power laws.

The thick tales of these distributions suggest that life isn't normally distributed, but distributed by power laws.

And we need a special special class of people to play those tales to get us the returns to power us forward and advanced society.

And so what I'm really interested in is not being blinded by excellence, to the prospects for other modalities in particular genius.

So you need the place for high agency people to go to high agency things with other high agency people in a very lightly regulated environment.

"To misbehave even. Like we're really going to regulate the hell out of Elon Musk, the one person who's working on the atomic layer. It's like, fine, maybe he's having too much fun w/ dating & drugs, let him have fun w/ dating & drugs. We need the cars & batteries & space travel"

We need some such a situation in which the the radical individual can say no to 10s of thousands or millions of ppl & produce something of great value and beauty and grace for all of us or for themselves

And any system that doesn't have that is not a system I want to be part of

On overcoming imposter syndrome:

"I learned this from Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. And he's he had this brilliant insight, which was, if you're going to do anything big, you are by definition unqualified to do it."

Bad faith diversity:

"What do you do when you have a dinner party & somebody says, Well, we didn't invite anyone from the suicide bombing community? Well, if you invite em, what you get is pink mist. Everyone's blown up, & you didn't get a chance to hear the diversity of ideas"

"I think I think of all the values out there of all the political issues out there, there's none more important free speech.

Because if if you believe in something, the only way I think that's legitimate to change other people's opinion, is by speaking to them"

And so as long as we accept reason as a standard, it's not 'Oh, you offended me' emotions are not part of the debate, or at least not as obstacles

And if we eliminate free speech, if you can't have conversation, then truth is out the window. & It's whatever the snowflakes decide

Extreme identity politics tosses out reason & conversation altogether:

Acknowledge bias, but if it's a conversation stopper, then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation?

That's why identity politics is toxic: if identity is paramount, communication is impossible

Comedy is an art form that includes, among other things, offending surgically exactly who needs to be offended & with minimal collateral damage.

A great comedian is like a sniper: They take out the hostage taker and they leave the hostage intact.

We talk about critical thinking a lot, but critical feeling is really what we have to be cultivating as well

Critical feeling: ensuring that your emotions are actually your own,& that you're not simply reflecting what the emotions are of those around you to keep in good standing

It's keeping empathy in line with our analytics. It's knowing when we're being manipulated

Be mindful of Russell Conjugation: I am steadfast, you are stubborn, he is a pig headed fool

The meaning is the same but the emotive shadings to the listener are different. Watch for that

On education:

The sooner you get to the point where you're not being spoon fed something where the subject has been rearranged to make it maximally time expensive so that the teachers have jobs

Almost every subject can be rearranged so that it can be learned incredibly rapidly.

Consider piano versus guitar: "Piano, you learn all these scales, two styles, blah, blah, blah, nearly everybody learns to hate on the other hand guitar, like, very quickly, somebody shows you 3-4 chords, and you can play 95% of all the songs that ever meant something to you."

"I'm terrified that what's happened is that we've all fallen under a spell of magical thinking that it doesn't matter how bad things get it somehow the world is bizarrely stable & safe and it absolutely isn't and I think maybe we need to actually activate the amygdala (continued)

and remind everybody with what is hanging in the balance and how unstable this is so we can get on to the to the business of making a really beautiful planet for generations to come....

There's there's a sense that people are in a video game mode."

"Russian tradition on your wedding day, where you visit a memorial of those who gave their lives. Can you imagine? on the happiest day of your life, you pay homage to the people who died in Stalingrad?"

"I'm not a fan of communism, but they have a better model of seriousness.

I call it the no name revolution—The n squared revolution which doesn't look like any revolution we've had before. It's much less physically violent. It's digitally extremely violent. & it has to do w the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at a semi reliable level

Embedded growth obligations:

As long as we had economic growth, you could promise people a future while having them contribute their youth into a system (e.g. academia).

When that stopped, we had to make fake growth (financial engineering, printing money, etc)

In order to keep running an institution that relies on growth, you start stealing from the future & from groups too weak to defend their own interests.

That’s why these institutions started lying—to hide the fact that the growth is slowing, can't keep the ponzi going anymore.

Perhaps this is also why our conversation has crumbled

If I can't find fulfillment in the outer world, I will look inside at what makes me special. & we've all been taught that we're special by Barney. & thus you saying anything that disagrees w/ me is taking away my specialness

And I worry that what we've done is created immunologically naive people who imagine that they are being assaulted and harmed by just about everything. And what I would love to do is to figure out how to get these indoor cats to grow some claws and get back the assault weapons

Social media and polarization are overstated:

if you look at the most polarized populations in the country, it's actually older people who are more polarized politically and are having fewer conversations with people on the other side of the aisle than younger people.

You're the news that's fit to print, yet you avoid reporting a story that's counter narrative—

Your newspaper shouldn't have a strong narrative bc facts haven't come in yet—

Why do you have a pre-planned narrative arc lasting 6 months, if you don't know what the truth is yet?