Ericisms

Eric often uses terms or turns-of-phrase that some people may not immediately understand. This page is a reference source for those only. This should not be confused with more general topic areas that may at first cause confusion such as the DISC, EGOs, Load-Bearing Fictions, etc.

A/B Testing

Adaptive Landscape

Sewall Wright's theory of adaptive landscapes of fitness

Adaptive Valley

Sewall Wright's theory of adaptive landscapes of fitness

Adjective, Occupation, Name

Agency

Agentic Leadership

Anthropic Capitalism

Anthropic Capitalism & the New Gimmick Economy

Anti-Expert

Anti-Fragility

Anti-Interesting

Artificial Outelligence

Audience Capture

Audio Samizdat

The Big 5 Personality Traits

Eric has referred to the Big 5 Personality Traits as a person's hedonic composition.

The Big Nap

Checksum Theory of Politics

Church and Pike Commissions

Consensus

The Cosmic Spelling Bee

Bret Weinstein's term for the existential position humanity faces.

Critical Feeling

Deaths of Accountability

De-Potemkin

Dining a la Carte

Don't screw yourself out of magic

Don't wait for the bread to rise

"We Jews have a tradition that I wish everybody had, which is that we read one stupid story every God damn year, just to drill it into your head to make sure it's always fresh. And this is: when it's time to leave, when it's time to change, don't wait for the bread to rise. This is what I say to every Jewish person, like, you're sitting around waiting for the bread to rise, because they all know the story, which is you eat the goddamn matzah because the people who waited for the bread to rise are no longer with us; their descendants are no longer with us. And it is time to revolt. ~ Eric on JRE #1453 @ 36 min

Double Island Rules

The Educational Complex

A system of selective political, economic, and memetic pressures resulting in a cult of the teaching profession which prioritizes the careerist desires of the educators over the learning needs of the students.

Efficient Frontier

The efficient frontier is the blending of all possible components into portfolios with the highest possible return and the lowest possible volatility.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier

Electronic Tribalism & Electronic Feudalism

Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation

Environmental Insult

Escher's Hands Drawing Hands

Eric uses this drawing as a metaphor when beginning his discussion of our Source Code.

Wiki's article will hopefully be growing with this community's influence.

Evergreening

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)

Forced Citation

Fragility of Masculinity

Game B

Humankind has lived in Game A since we have escaped the Dunbar limit. Humankind has never seen or fully imagined Game B. People like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, and Jordan Hall speak about this process of dialogue and its risks on Rebel Wisdom. A fundamental shift from adversarial processing to opponent processing.

Gating Function

Gene Drive

A genetic engineering technology that propagates a particular suite of genes throughout a population by altering that a specific allele will be transmitted to offspring from the natural 50% probability.

Genius vs Excellence

Gini Coefficient

High Agency

When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So how am I gonna get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience? You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyverish sort of a way. And that’s your approach to the world.

- (https://tim.blog/2016/01/13/eric-weinstein/)

Iago Media

Irrationality

Irrationality is a feature, not a bug. It gives us the ability to Camp and decamp.

It's a beautiful thing

This originates from New York City.

Meaning: You can extract money from people who have no say in the matter.

Injustice Budget

Institutional Betrayal

Kayfabe

Knarc

Knark is Swedish for very hard recreational drugs, but it's also "crank" spelled backwards with a slightly different spelling.

[1]

Long-Form Podcasting

Led by Joe Rogan, long form podcasting is where thoughts are exchanged at length among individuals in conversation. A threat to mainstream, legacy media, those who work in and around this space are often smeared.

Source

Litella

The Looting Party

Episode 27, 1:46:00:

when Bill Clinton decided that he couldn't take yet another loss to the Republican party, he was going to start experimenting with republicanism inside of the democratic party. By that point, we had two parties that more or less were two flavors of the same thing. I refer to that collective as the looting party.

Long Term vs Short Term Optimization

Long/short positions (nuanced positions)

Maladaptive strategies

Meaning

"The meaning of my life is the progressing struggle to impart meaning to meaning." [2]

Message Violence

Middle Finger

Minus Epsilon

The N^2 Revolution

New Gimmick Economy

Anthropic Capitalism & the New Gimmick Economy

New Orchards

Often people discuss the availability of "low-hanging fruit" when discussing growth and innovation. Instead of arguing over the existence of low-hanging fruit in the current paradigm, consider finding New Orchards.

No Living Heroes

Operation COINTELPRO

Oral Torah

The Oral Torah is the set of traditional laws which are associated written texts... but not written.

Overton Window

Perfectly Legal

Physics Dollars

Potemkin Village

Preference Falsification

Timur Kuran's theory brought forth in his book Private Truths, Public Lies.

Eric contests that the theory of Preference Falsification is Intellectual Kryptonite. "Because your theory can be accommodated within the standard theory... the problem is that it is a ready made upgrade to the existing theory in which nothing is lost but new degrees of freedom are gained; and that could have an absolutely unpredictable effect on the entire field because it is at the level of the substrate." #4 Prof. Timur Kuran @ 1:07:03

Rent-seeking Elites

References:

Reputational Violence

Resource Capture

Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing

Mentioned in ep25

Riding on a technical substrate

Rough Space

"Rough Space, n: A place to think, joke & observe that is neither safe nor tolerant of abuse."

We now need rough spaces to replace safe ones.

Seberging

"When [the] sport of personal reputational destruction is coordinated by members of the complex formed by institutional media, the intelligence community, the political parties, political consultants, finance, tech and the academy"

Source

Section A of the Reserve Index

Yes, our government developed a plan for rounding up people who could contradict the GIN. There‘s a plan for a coming total collapse of confidence in our system.

[Source]

Selective Pressures

Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making

There has been a breakdown in the Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making. Traditionally we used institutions to guide our collective sense-making, but this is no longer the case in the media landscape – so sense-making is no longer close to fully communal. Walter Cronkite was not always telling the truth, but what he said was a close approximation of the national consciousness and shared belief structure as a complex for the country to function upon, but this does not exist in the current media landscape – so it is no longer semi-reliable.

References:

https://youtu.be/URS81okN0Mc?t=927

Skadoosh

Sharp Minds vs. Sharp Elbows

References:

2:16:21 in Podcast Episode 41

Speaking Fee

"Speaking Fee, n: 1) Asynchronous Baksheesh received once a politician has left office. 2) (Archaic) A modest honorarium for giving a speech."

Split Level Argument

Related to the "Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine".

Steady Hands

This originates from Washington D.C.

"He has steady hands." You can count on him to do the wrong thing during an emergency to keep everyone on the inside okay Everyone on the inside is super dependent to burn all of their credibility in public

Steel-manning

The steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the exact opposite of the straw man argument. The idea is to find the best form of the opponent's argument to test opposing opinions.

Steelmanning

Teaching Disabilities

Not Learning Disabilities Differential diagnosis

Terms of Service

References:

Totalizing Ideologies

Arendt defines ideologies as concepts of describing the world and people in it, as ‘isms which at least as far as their adherents are concerned, can explain virtually every event and norm in social life by deduction from a single premise. They are worldviews that collapse nuance and contradiction, and simultaneously promise a means of refining and perfecting the world in a fashion that is promised to significantly improve it for its adherents and their progeny. Ideological systems like this are obviously not rare, rather it is the elevating of one such school of thought into a totalitarian movement where the mischief occurs. Seized by such a movement as a templates of a future perfected, an ideological system of belief becomes transformed into a deductive principle of action.

http://necessaryadvocate.com/totalizing-ideologies-on-campus-and-off/

Referenced in https://theportal.wiki/wiki/41:_Douglas_Murray_%E2%80%93_Heroism_2020:_Defense_of_Our_Own_Civilization

The Twin Nuclei Problem

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1117085693883273218

The Observerse

There is no secret ingredient

This is a line from Eric's favorite movie, Kung Fu Panda.

Thinkquisition

"In the Inquisition, the Jews of Spain were chased by the Spanish Inquisition into, say, Turkey in the Ottoman Empire. My claim is that a lot of analytic lefties have been chased into the center right by the madness of these progressive lunatics, and that thing I'm calling "The Thinkquisition" is that people who are worried about, you know, homophobia or xenophobia, and all these things, but don't for a second sign up for the progressive, revolutionary sort of pseudo-Maoist agenda, those people are now hanging out as if they were in Turkey, even though their home, you know, was originally in the analog of Spain. The center right has become the Ottoman Empire to receive people chased out of the madness of Spain." ~Eric on The James Altucher show #472

Technology Intelligence Media (TIM)

Eisenhower said: “beware of the military-industrial complex” in his final farewell address. Eric believes that this needs to be updated to be aware of what he calls TIM: technology, Intelligence, and Media.

All of our personal information is housed on the servers of a few large tech companies. The intelligence community has not been vigorously investigated for a very long time. The media is in some sort of relationship to both of those that we don't understand. The real concern is that the people who threatened the dominant “Gated Institutional Narrative”, have to beware of TIM: technology, intelligence, and media working behind the scenes in ways that we don't understand, which is the expectation post Church/Pike commissions.

I've tried to document the ways in which people have been brought down before. The last time we really cleaned house and the intelligence community was in the mid-seventies with the Church & Pike commissions. And we learned a ton about these untraceable ways that a Goliath -- which sometimes is emergent and sometimes conscious -- can take somebody down and you don't realize that the story that got written about you was planted by the government. And if that sounds crazy to you, you actually have a problem because this is fully documented. There's no conspiracy theory. It's a “conspiracy fact”. What we don't know is what happened since Church/Pike.

And this is why, for example, with the Nunes memo. (While I think it's a completely partisan stunt, it's a partisan stunt that may actually have an underlying reality as well.)

The default should be that this is the way the world normally works: that wasn't an anomaly. And if you believe that that doesn't happen anymore--absolutely--then the burden of proof is on you.

We have to imagine that fundamentally we're all vulnerable to having all of our email in a Gmail account, all of our personal interactions in our Facebook account, what we are doing with direct messages, being read by Twitter engineers. You know, I don't love James O'Keefe, but he seems to have unearthed some stuff at Twitter. We should be very, very worried.