18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

===The DISC in Academia===

This is, however, not my major focus. My major focus of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex or DISC has to do with what happened inside of our universities.

I'm in a somewhat unusual position, in that both myself and my wife have PhDs, as well as my brother and his wife, and we've all appeared in interviews within the last five years, so maybe you've seen all of us on camera, or have some idea of how Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Pia Melaney and I sound.

What some of you don't know is that I believe that inside of that group of four, one of us wrote a book immediately after getting a Ph.D., which is Heather Heying's book, Antipode, about her solo travels to the jungles of Madagascar. So if you have a young woman in your life was looking for a pretty impressive female role model, I would say Heather's toughness and intelligence and grit makes for pretty terrific reading. I'd recommend buying the book Antipode for that young lady.

In the case of the remaining three, none of us wrote a book immediately afterwards. However, I think that the quality of the discoveries that were being explored was incredibly high and in each case, what I thought happened to those was most unexpected. Now, what are these ideas that I'm claiming were suppressed? So I would say that in one case, we were talking about the reasons why we die. One of these theses contained what I think is one of the best models for the reasons that we have these finite life-spans, and of course, we're all subject to what might be called environmental insult. If a piano falls on your head while you're walking down the street, that's usually going to be your exit. But why we age, why we get cancer, and why we die, I think has not been very well understood at the molecular level. And I think perhaps one of the first mature attempts to do this took place in my brother's thesis at the University of Michigan. This is one of the major ideas that I wish to be exploring in 2020.

If biology is one of the greatest ideas man is ever had in the form of natural and sexual selection in the work of Darwin and Wallace, I would say that the other complex of great ideas, truly top ideas, would be what I would call Geometric Dynamics. Those are the ideas that take place underneath theoretical physics. Whether we're talking about the Standard Model, or General Relativity. We now believe the all fundamental physical phenomena can be divided between these two great theories. In one case, that of Einstein's General Relativity, it's been known for about a hundred years that the substrate of the theory is Reimann's theory of differential geometry, that is, Reimanian geometry.

What is much more recent, perhaps slightly less than 50 years old, thanks to Jim Simons and C. N. Yang, is the knowledge that the classical theory underneath Quantum Field Theory is in fact a different form of geometry, known as Erismanian geometry, Fiber Bundle Geometry, Gauge Theory, or Steinrod Geometry, whatever you want to call it. So the idea that geometry is the birthplace of fundamental physics, I think is now generally understood by all practicing theoretical physicists functioning at the top level.

Inside of that complex, we've been stuck for approximately, I don't know, 47 years, where theory used to lead experiment, and we used to make predictions and the predictions would usually be confirmed in relatively short order. We have not had a period of stagnation inside of theoretical physics that mirrors this, with the closest comparable period perhaps being the period from the late 1920s, with the advent of quantum electrodynamics, to the late 1940s, with the beginning of renormalization theory being ushered in at the Shelter Island Pocono an Old Stone conferences.

So that 20-year period is now more than doubled, and we haven't been making progress. And I've been very uncomfortable with the idea of coming forward with ideas. Why? Well, to be honest, it's very rare for anyone outside of theoretical physics to have reasonable ideas in physics. I could explain why, but the physicists are fantastic. They've got all sorts of no-go theorems, and all sorts of considerations that have to be kept in mind, and effectively what they've got is a world that is so tightly constrained when it comes to understanding where we are that almost every new idea is instantly dead on arrival, and this is been incredibly demotivating to people in the field. And it does feel, from many different perspectives, like we're almost at the end, if not of all of physics, at least of this chapter of physics.

But what I'm starting to see is that the field has become exhausted. It has been telling the same story since 1984, about how String Theory is our leading theory of quantum gravity, that quantum gravity is the replacement for Einstein's search for a unified field, and as the accelerator turns up the Higgs and little else, as effectively no new physical theories arise with confirmations, as the only major updates to our model of the physical world are things like massive neutrinos or the accelerating expansion of the universe coming from experiment, the theoretical physics Community has been very slow to own up to just how much trouble it's in. It's an incredibly demanding life. It has incredible standards for rigor and intellectual honesty, and quite honestly, it's been lying for far too long to sustain the kind of integrity that's needed in that community.

I don't know whether I'm nuts, but I do know that at previous points, I've suggested things into the both the mathematical and physics communities that have later been shown by other people to be correct. And while I was waiting for a some kind of confirmation, I was being told "Eric, you're completely off base. You're not getting it." One of these situations involved something called the Seiberg-Witten equations, which I put forward in the 1980s, around probably 87, and I was told that these couldn't possibly be right, that they weren't sufficiently nonlinear. I'll tell the whole story about how if spinors were involved, obviously Nigel Hitchins would have told us so, blah, blah, blah. None of this was true, and in the 1994, Natty Cyberg and Edward Witten made a huge splash with these equations. I remember being in the room, and seeing the equations written at MIT on the board, I was thinking "Well, wait a minute. Those are the equations that I put forward. If those equations are being put forward by Witten, why is it that the community isn't telling him that they're wrong for the same reason that they told me that they were wrong?"

====The Legend of the Mugnaia====

This is also how idea suppression works. When you are young, and when you are vulnerable, and when you need the help of older members of your academic community to bring you forward, you're extremely vulnerable to what might be termed the Droite de Señor—or the Prima Notte—of the academic community. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, there was an old legend that the Lords of the Manor would command the right to take the virginity of every bride on her wedding night, until there arose a Miller's daughter known as the Mugnaia.

And the Mugnaia had a different plan, for she wished instead to be with her husband, and not the evil Lord of the Manor. So what she did was she smuggled a knife underneath her robes and appeared in the bedchamber of the Lord of the Manor, and killed him.

Now this is celebrated in the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Oranges Festival of the Oranges], which is potentially the world's largest food fight in which armed combatants throw oranges at each other. I think it's in Italy, if I'm not mistaken, celebrating the victory of the Mugnaia. But right now, we have a problem in our intellectual disciplines, which is that when we come forward with our best ideas, very often, even if they're slightly wrong, they're slammed, and when they're slammed, sometimes the the older members of the community then take the ideas for themselves at a later point.  

====Finding the Source Code====

I think it's time to simply ignore these people and realize that the leading lights of our most important community have failed. If we don't figure out the full source code, going beyond Einstein, going beyond the Standard Model, we can't know whether we're actually literally trapped in our local area, or whether we have some hope of going out and looking at the night sky with an idea that that might be the roadmap to our future. So whether or not we're consigned by Einstein to the Elon Musk program, let's say, of exploring the Moon and Mars, or whether, in fact, we might get on the Star Trek or Star Wars program, of exploring the cosmos has to do with whether or not we can get the Source Code.

So the next thing has to do with who we are, what is this place, and what I've called Geometric Unity. It is the aim of making the Portal a place where I can have a channel that cannot be controlled by the academic complex, and I'll come back to that in a second. The third area that I want to talk about has to do with markets. Now markets are really the sponsor of our freedom. By having non-centrally directed, locally organized human activity, free agents are able to contract freely with each other, exchange with each other, build prosperity, lift each other up, and if you are a progressive, you almost certainly really have to appreciate the power of markets. But our markets are in great danger at the moment, in my opinion, because they're being meddled with, and they are returning results that indicate that only a tiny fraction of us are worthy reaping the true rewards of the markets, while many of us feel that we're being left behind.  

So, in so doing, economics is the logical meeting place for the two greatest theories man has ever had. And this was explored in the early—rather, the mid-1990s, early to mid-1990s, by Pia Melaney, my wife and collaborator, and myself, in work that never got out of Harvard University. That's not quite true. There is a book called The Physics of Wall Street, by James Weatherall, which touches upon this, but this work died because of something called the Harvard Job Market Committee.

And my wife went into that job market committee meeting, having her work presented there, thinking that she could apply anywhere in the country, and being told, instead, that she had almost nothing, and that she'd be lucky to escape with a PhD. Now in these three cases, that is, a Theory of Death that comes out of my brother's work at the University of Michigan, a Theory of Productivity, and how our wealth is inflated away, coming out of my wife's work at Harvard, and another theory about "What is this place?", and "How do these different geometries come together?", which would be the subject of Geometric Unity—all three of these ideas met a level of resistance that none of us had ever anticipated or encountered, and I think that it's been terrifying to me to think about the idea of going up against the institutions.  

====Effect '64====

However, last year I made an interesting calculation. I decided to look at the presidencies of all of our leading research institutions, and to try to figure out how many of them belonged to people who came after the Baby Boom.

In a previous world, let's say the world of the early 1980s, approximately half of the heads of research institutions would be Gen X and Gen Y, that is, Xers and Millennials. However, almost no research university, certainly almost no leading research university, with, I think, the exception of the University of California at Berkeley, when I did this calculation last year, was under anything other than the presidency of a Baby Boomer. Now what had happened? Well, we got rid of a mandatory retirement requirement that probably affected things fairly significantly, and we began to concentrate all sorts of power in one generation's ideas. Now generations aren't magical things—what they are, are instead cohorts that are exposed to some set of circumstances that is peculiar to the time in which they are growing up.

The for example if your primary experiences that you work hard as a kid, with a paper route and an internship, you go to college, you work your way up a ladder, and everything works out fine, and pretty soon, before you know it, you've got three kids and two homes, that's your idea of what a normal life is. Now this is sort of the basis of the meme "OK, Boomer", because many of the rest of us who followed this generation have no idea how you would accomplish that in these times. I actually put the blame slightly more on the Silent Generation than most people do. I think if you look at it you realize a lot of the problems that we're having now began through intergenerational issues initiated by the Silents rather than the Boomers, but, it's a pretty stark division between the Xers, Millennials and Gen-Z, and the Silents and the Boomers, as the major generations that are still extant.

In this situation, it's terrifying to say what I'm about to say next, but it is time to inflict ourselves on our own institutions. It is time to have Gen-X candidates for presidencies, not necessarily just of the political parties, because we've spent, what is it, 20 years on men born in the summer of 1946 so far. I mean, we're just at the beginning of Baby Boom presidencies, and we've been doing it since 1992.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. On the other hand, I think that the presidencies of companies, or CEO roles, I think that the issue of university presidents, many of these things have been tilted far too much towards these other generations. I think that Gen-X has a very interesting story to tell—we were not highly infantilized, in terms of when we were growing up. In fact, we had to the moniker of the Latchkey kids, and we're also not large enough to get things just by chanting them. We have always had the pressure of having to make some degree of sense, because we're just too small as a generation. So, in fact, what I'd like to do, I've said that I believe that String Theory is effectively in affirmative action program for mathematically talented Baby Boomers who do not wish to sully themselves with the problem of working on the physical and real world as we have it.

====The Failure of Peer Review====

What I'd like to do is to bring you these three theories over the course of the next year or two—that is, a theory of death, a theory of markets, and how the agents within those markets, and the measurement of those markets should be changed and understood, and a theory, also, about who we are and what is this place in which we find ourselves, called Geometric Unity. The purpose of the Portal, if you will, is to create a channel that has never existed. Now, I could try to submit everything to Phys Review of Letters. I could try to submit to Econometrica. I could try to go through all of the normal channels, and I think what I've started to realize is, part of the problem of having screwed up all of this early stuff in our lives, of having tried to do this the formal and "right" way, so to speak, the privilege of having been screwed over so directly and so beautifully by the system, is the right to raise the middle finger to the institutions. Like, how dare you expect that I'm going to use your quiet procedures.

If you think about what Peer Review is, it's the exact opposite of what Peer Review should mean. "Peer Review" should mean that you publish your article, and then the peers in the community review it, but in fact what it is is Peer Suppression, you take your article and you mail it off to somebody who you don't know. That person gets an early look at it. They might hold it up in review.

They then inflict any changes that they want, or they reject it for reasons that make no sense. And then it's handed back to you. Now, why does it have such a positive spin? It's not long standing in the community. It doesn't seem to have a very long history, but it came out of an effort to Quality Control new ideas. We wanted to know if new ideas were coming from reputable people. Were they using reasonable methods? Were they reasonably familiar with their fields? And in fact, that is the good reason that we had this is new technique of Peer Review. Previously, editors have been tasked with being responsible for the field and figuring out whether or not something was up to snuff.

In this new situation, it was perfectly constructed for abuse. In fact, what you find is that it's like what my brother refers to as the low posted speed limit in a southern town. The key question isn't Peer Review, it's how is it enforced for different people? That is, if you are a famous professor who is well plugged into a journal, where your friend is the editor, you are going to have an entirely different experience with Peer Review than if you submit the exact same article coming from someplace that is not well known to that journal, and in which there is a bias against that group.  

Now, that political understanding of intelligent design has to do with both a reasonable idea and an unreasonable idea.

The reasonable idea is that you should not be able to smuggle Jesus into evolutionary theory. You should not be able to do Young Earth Creationism inside of a scientific context. That is the previous ''reasonable'' version of Peer Review. It makes sense as quality control. But, what happens when you start talking about perception mediated selection? For example, pseudocopulation in orchids, which we've discussed before, or in the predatory system with the other muscle lampicillus, where the perception of the bass matters, because it thinks it's consuming a bait fish. But in fact, that's a fake bait fish filled with the young of the muscle. In both of those cases you have perception mediated selection, and you can make an argument that that should be called "intelligent design" but those magic words can't appear in that journal. Why? For a political reason. So what we have is we've created a system based around quality control that in fact is rife and open for abuse.

In that system, we now have to realize that we need other channels. We need an ability to route around. We need to be able to reinsert dissidents and people who do not get along with institutions back inside of the institutions. If you look at Noam Chomsky sitting at MIT, you will realize that it was once the case that such people were much more common. You can look up a fellow, an old friend of mine named Serge Lang, and you could scarcely believe that such a person could have existed at Yale, but that person very much did exist.