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

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

This has to stop, and I think I've been trying to gather courage to put forward some ideas, which I think some aspects of them may be wrong, but are certainly quite interesting, and given that our leading theories have completely stalled out and failed to ship a product for—depending on how you count—you know, nearly forty years or fifty years, depending upon whether it's the Anomaly Cancellation or something called the Vanetsiana model.

If you look at the wealth structure of the Silent Generation, Boomer Generation, Generation X, and the Millennials, or Gen Y, you see that the Millennials have at this age of amassed far smaller percentages of the wealth, than the Boomers did at the same age, and I don't think it's because they're lazy or they're not talented. So we have a very dangerous situation shaping up, where our younger generations are not fully bought in. In fact, in the last year I just bought my first house. I'm 54 years old, born in 1965. I bought one car, and then had to re-buy it when it got rear-ended. There's something very bizarre about that pattern, for somebody who is educated at an Ivy League undergraduate institution and has an advanced degree from potentially our leading institution in the country. We've created a world in which it's simply too hard for regular people to advance properly, because the society is not growing.  

Now, rather than complain about it, I'd rather do something about it. So partially what I hope to do is to show you what's been going on with GDP and inflation, by introducing a new theory that combines the two greatest theories we have. So if you think about biology as being driven by the theory of natural and sexual selection, and if you think about physics as being driven by Geometric Dynamics, either coming from Reimannian or Erismanian Geometry, then, in fact, what would be the the meeting place of our two greatest theories? The only place that I'm aware of is that it takes place in economics. And why is that? Because you have apes carrying on the Theory of Selection, but by other means, through markets. And what are markets? Markets are an attempt to create an ''as if'' physical system by uniformizing apples and oranges, so that we have a basis for their comparison by using mediums of exchange, like money.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

You can look at an old controversy about David Baltimore and a woman named Margo O'Toole, and the courage of Mark Patashney and Walter Gilbert in fighting a Nobel Laureate when Margo O'Toole accused a colleague of the Nobel Laureate of misconduct, or, at least, irreproducibility of results. We have a long and storied history that has gone wildly off the rails with the crisis in current sense making. And the purpose of The Portal was always to set up a channel by which we would have enough people watching that we could attempt to keep people from being rolled in the alleys when they contradicted the institutions, and that is in large measure what we're here to do. If you look at our episode with Timur Quran, we introduced you to a concept of preference falsification. Right now, the danger of the Andrew Yang in the Jeffrey Epstein situations, is that they have conveniently communicated to many people, "Of course, we're going to mess with your sense-making. What is it that you're prepared to do about it?"