32: J. D. Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares: Difference between revisions

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked multiple times every day what I think about Stephen Wolfram’s supposed announcement of A Theory of Everything two weeks ago, on April 14th. I thought perhaps I would take this opportunity to clarify what I do think. The short answer is that I don't think that this is what happened. I think he announced a program in line with previous investigations of his into the properties of cellular automata, where simple computational rules result in output of unexpected intricacy, richness and beauty. If you have ever toured the famous Mandelbrot set, played the late John Conway's Game of Life, studied Go, or even played Cat's Cradle with yarn, you're familiar with this phenomenon of explosions of unexpected structure from minimal assumptions. My interpretation of Wolfram's announcement is that he believes he has a research program that will one day show that the richness of our world can be found to result from a specific computational rule that his team will be able to locate using tools of modern computing. I'm happy to be wrong if this is not what he announced, but that's what I gleaned after a short look at some of the video and materials that he released. It looks to me like a program to search for a final theory, rather than something close to a final theory. The next two questions, however, are often where things become complicated. Question 2 can be phrased as something like, why do you suppose he doesn't simply write a paper and submit it for peer review? And question 3 would be, do you think he's a crank? The short answer to question 2 is, I think, like many other experts, he lost a good deal of faith in the ability and willingness of the community of theoretical physicists to fairly judge in good faith new, idiosyncratic work via an anonymous and unaccountable system which is always ripe for abuse. As for question 3 the simple answer to whether or not he's a crank has been, I'm not going to dignify your ugly question with an answer. Theoretical physics, you see, at its absolute highest levels, has been in some strange state of advanced crankiness for decades. But what does it really mean to say that the mainstream and leadership of the field are “cranky”? Can the mainstream truly be fringe? Wrong, perhaps. But fringe in some sense means both distant from the center and wacky.

Once you have a concept of a dependably crazy bipartisan center ignoring reality to quickly extract as much as possible from the accumulated wealth and credit of civil society before the bills all come due and are sent to the next generation for payment, you realize that if there are any reliable experts left, you would expect them to be straddling the worlds between the central knarcs and the cranks of the fringe. And this gets to the difficult problem we now face, but which we cannot face up to: the coming total collapse of authoritative sources. You will notice that Wikipedia's history of surprisingly high quality comes from an insistence on using reliable, published sources of information as primary material. But don't take it from me. In Wikipedia's own words: “If no reliable sources can be found on the topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.” In short, when reliable sources cannot be found, communal sense making breaks down and comes to an end. In my lifetime, I have seen the universities, the scientific journals, the papers of record all succumb to the political economy of perverse incentives in a low growth world. Said differently, we now run the risk that if previously reliable published sources, which prided themselves on a goal of objectivity, become captured by political incentives, secondary structures like Wikipedia will begin to degrade and unravel as a result. Thus, we can formally at least understand the logic of the CEO of YouTube when she tells us that she must remove videos that contradict authoritative sources to protect the public health during a pandemic. But when she tells us that the World Health Organization is such an unquestionable source, we must, by the same logic of public health, actually consider whether YouTube should be nationalized, given that the W.H.O. appears to be in thrall to mainland China and unable to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan's efforts to control the virus, while they continue to spout nonsense about the transmission of the virus and PPE.

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Yeah, yeah. You know, I sort of grew up, I'd say, from the time I was born till when I was 13 or 14, kind of oscillating between working class, lower middle class and sort of right on the edge of, of what you would call poor. And then by the time I was in high school, I was living with my grandma full time. My grandfather died and we were, you know, genuinely poor. I think I never really felt hungry. There's sort of ways in which the social safety net definitely worked for us, but we were very, very, you know.

Yeah, we were very marginal. Resources were very tight. And the idea that, you know, you could afford things that seemed necessary, like a college education to get ahead in America, just seemed totally out of reach. It's one of the reasons that I joined the military, not the only reason. I was very patriotic family, of my grandma’s six grandchildren, three of them joined, enlisted in the Marine Corps. It was right after September 11th, I think, that I enlisted like three weeks after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003. So it wasn't just sort of that it was my pathway to a better life, but definitely we grew up in a pretty rough environment in a lot of ways. And the fact that I made it is, on the one hand, I think, evidence of the American Dream, but on the other, you know, I don't think you can read too much into one person's story because there is a lot of evidence that that people are struggling in the

And it's—I got rejected from all sorts of tiny schools which said we have no jobs this year. I don't think people who say, “well, you know, of course will be fine. I worry about the rest of the country.”

I think it has to do with the idea that the generations—first of all, let me say something controversial: I think that the baby boom takes a lot of heat for the Silent Generation. A lot of these problems began with the generation before the baby boomers. They tried to figure out how to save the world from stagnation and low growth. And when they couldn't do it, they started realizing, okay, well, these fake growth stimulus techniques are sufficient to grow certain slices of the pie at the expense of others, if not the entire pie. And the baby boomers just sort of signed on to that and made everything completely insane. The weird thing about the universes is that there was a cultural thing—all of these people go back and forth between different universes with different levels of endowments, right? So here's the weird thing. Choose any one of the great research universities. Without knowing it, which one you chose, it is almost certainly headed by a baby boomer, whereas in the 1970s and early 80s it would have probably a 50% chance of being headed by a Gen-Xer or a Millennial. So they changed the retirement age and you couldn't discriminate on the basis of age. So now almost all of these institutions are headed by baby boomers. Without knowing anything further, I can also say that almost all of them have had the number of administrators on payroll skyrocket above the number of new enrollments. Their tuitions have climbed above medical inflation, the number of old professors getting grants has climbed relative to the number of new professors getting grants. In other words, there's one superarching, overarching story, which is a story of intergenerational warfare. And the funniest part about it was that if you were part of the generation that had declared intergenerational warfare on the Gen-Xers and Millennials, and then now the Gen Z crowd, if anyone mentioned what you were doing, you would accuse them of intergenerational warfare. So my claim is, is that Harvard could afford to buck this trend. They could lead! You know, oddly, I think Ohio State, where you were, decided to lead against the protesters who showed up in the office, you know, and said something to the effect of, we understand that you feel very strongly about your views, and we're going to give you the right to go to jail for them. And you'll notice that there's no administrators, there's no office staff here because they've all gone home, because this is no longer a safe space for them. And by reading them the riot act, Ohio led the way, and Chicago led the way, saying, this is not a safe space. This is an educational institution. There are a tiny number of schools that are bucking this trend. Harvard could have been one of them, but Harvard doesn't believe enough in itself. And this is the thing that really makes me angry, which is there is a pride in believing in the United States. you know what I love about your story is how many American dreams have you lived, sir? There's one about the Marine Corps,

JD, you're welcome back any time. It's an absolute thrill for you to come and visit. His book is Hillbilly Elegy, soon to be a major motion picture, fingers crossed! You've been through the portal with '''JD Vance:'''. Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And after you're done, head over to YouTube and both subscribe and click the bell icon to make sure that you're notified when our next episode drops. And thanks everybody. Be well.