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|timestamp=4:08 AM · Jul 19, 2023
|timestamp=4:08 AM · Jul 19, 2023
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=== 2024 ===
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|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1763970721074786531
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=You aren't signed up for Democracy if you think government should be dismantled each time you lose,  yet must be revered whenever you win. That's just being an ass.
This court may be accused of overstepping. As the Warren court was once. Think about it.
[[Morals|Moral]]: Don't be an ass.
|timestamp=4:52 PM · Mar 2, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1816900447170625826
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=Is immigration simply “good”? Why are we not more alarmed about its impact?
———-
I saw the '''Harvard Economist George Borjas''' years ago. He was about to retire.
“I love your work.” I said sadly. “Are you going to miss doing research?”
“No! Not at all.” he said unexpectedly.
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “How can that be?”
“You see,” he said in Cuban accented English, “I spent my entire life trying to make one simple point to my academic colleagues. And I must accept now, at the end, that I have simply failed. And, at just one point!”
“You mean
” I began.
“Yes: immigration also has negative effects in addition to the positive ones
just like everything else in this world.”
There was a *long* silence. And then, at the same moment, we both started laughing. I don’t know why exactly. It was as if we both realized there was nothing else to do. The career was ending, and we both knew exactly what had happened.
———————-
Academe when it comes to immigration, economic indices, Neo-Darwinism, String Theory, Neo-classical economics, etc. is no longer an academic environment.
This is not true for many subjects that are continuing to function: effective field theory, machine learning, algebraic geometry, etc. would be examples.
[[Morals|MORAL]]: Universities are neither fully  failed in 2024, nor successful. There is serious rot that is growing and eating away at them, but there are stillmany good researchers and scholars trapped inside, who are being driven to silence, in order to hold onto their remaining zone of scholarship and research “autonomy”.
I was in the economics department at Harvard for a while. During that time I had many bizarre conversations about free trade, free migration, stable preferences, etc. I would point out that the field’s policy recommendations to lawmakers simply did NOT follow from the field’s methodology. It was as if the field was often going backwards from what it knew it had to conclude if it wanted to weild power in Washington, rather than forward from scholarship.
You could go to a microeconomics seminar that had nothing to do with policy and everything would be scholarly.
Then you would go to a seminar in Macro or Labor economics and it would be essentially a competition between professors in Cambridge MA who were desperate for influence in Washington, trying to reach conclusions that would change the lives of all Americans.
Academe isn’t dead yet
but we aren’t removing the cancer either. We are just letting it go untreated.
|timestamp=6:16 PM · Jul 26, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1823030895617745235
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=A “GET A ROOM” theory of political Schelling point polarization.
What I think I learned from this poll:
A) The pure Pro-Life and Pro-Choice positions (I.e. “Life begins at conception” vs “my body, my choice”) with their perfect clarity, were only held by 1/3 of respondents when lumped together.
B) The 2/3 of respondents whose position on abortion changes as the fertilized egg develops into a baby are mostly cowed into silence in the comments by the perfect clarity held by the minority.
C) Those respondents who believed that a fertilized egg and a baby about to be born have equal rights, discourage and inhibit (both intentionally and passively) the pure abortion rights and the “things change over pregnancy” respondents from joining the conversation.
D) This mirrors my experience. I am in the 2/3 group and am forced to caucus with the “My body, my choice. Full stop” crowd who do not represent my position in the slightest.
E) This feels almost EXACTLY the same as every other polarizing issue:
Immigration</br>
Firearms</br>
Ukraine</br>
Gaza</br>
Gender</br>
J6</br>
Religious terror</br>
Democracy</br>
Free markets</br>
Taxation</br>
Crypto</br>
Vaccination</br>
Free speech</br>
Redistribution</br>
Science, TheScience, Pseudo-Science</br>
Etc
In all of these there are clear positions that likely do not attract the majority, but where the majority is forced to caucus with the clear position that at least vaguely more resembles their own. 
This reinterprets Yeats:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;</br>
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,</br>
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere</br>
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;</br>
The best lack all conviction, while the worst</br>
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Here it is the clear and not the worst that are full of passionate intensity, because they have a “Schelling Point”
Those of us with inferior Schelling points can admit that openly. My position on abortion for example depends on embryology and situational context. That is not as good of a Schelling point as conception or birth. I admit that.
But the quality of my Schelling point is not the quality of my position. I think I have a superior position at my inferior Schelling point than either pro-life or pro-choice.
My dream is that those with perfect Schelling points should have one conversation and the rest of us should have another. Otherwise we never get to the debates that would depolarize us.
So just as I say to the “Open Borders” vs “Closed Borders” people or the “Ban all guns” vs “Personal Nukes at Walmart”: get a room kids.
We need to split these conversations apart. I don’t want to caucus and discuss with pure pro-choice, open borders, and All weapons in private hands groups anymore. I want to cede the clarity arguments. “Your Schelling point wins
congratulations. It is better than mine.”
So that is it. I think I’ve had it with clarity.
[[Morals|MORAL]]: those with the clearest Schelling points need to get a room and have one debate, so that the rest of us with less clarity can book a stadium and have a second discussion. But we need to stop mixing up the two explorations.
This wasn’t about abortion after all. It was about political clarity: its benefits, its dangers and its inability to represent the majority of us who lack it.
Thanks for your time. As always. 🙏
|timestamp=4:16 PM · Aug 12, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1828467697312731195
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=There is an old suite of ideas from a different time:
What appears to be coordinated is actually emergent.
What appears to be malice is actually incompetence.
What appears to be a pattern is generally random.
What appears to be doable outside of markets isn’t worth attempting because it can’t be coordinated and/or it is against human nature and/or has too many unintended consequences.
——
When enough people were educated to believe that suite as a sign of membership in the sophisticated elite, it then became possible to weaponize those ideas because they all shared a hidden feature: enervation.
People too sophisticated to believe in conspiracies, blame, patterns or the possibility of change will not only tend to do nothing, but they will tend to ensure that nothing can be coordinated around them except by narrow self interest. Which means markets/commerce/business is the only thing left.
In this clip, “Is Google trying to influence the 2024 election.” Chris is struggling to point out that it doesn’t require a conspiracy. Of course that is true.
But it is much more helpful to notice that if you have a portfolio of explanations and with allocations to emergence vs coordination, it would be insane to have a zero allocation to conspiracy.
[[Morals|Moral]]: Learn how to be a [[Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing|responsible conspiracy theorist]]. There are no lizard people. But there are sure a lot of back channels and algorithms you know nothing about.
NOTE: Zuckerberg’s letter pointing to such a coordination in an earlier election appeared after this was taped. So

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|timestamp=4:20 PM · Aug 27, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1834702103211917754
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=For some reasons that have never been explained or justified leaders in physics started making the claim that GR *was* also a gauge theory. This was done by claiming that general coordinate invariance in the form of the diffeomorphism group is a kind of Gauge Transformation. Which it clearly is not.
This is absurd. Gauge transformations move the fibers and are defined not to move space time where as diffeomorphisms move space time directly.
So: why claim that GR is a kind of gauge theory? The only payoff I see is that this allows us to pretend that the SM vs GR incompatibility is classical vs quantum where it is staring us in the face that it is instead contraction-based (GR) vs Gauge Transformed (SM).
The only reason this is at all controversial is that the people saying it were thought to be the leaders 40 years ago.
That didn’t work out. We have 40 years lost as a result.
But the truth is anyone can see the incompatibility between gravity and gauge theory if they are not being told that gravity is a special kind of gauge theory. Which it absolutely is not as formulated by Grossman, Einstein and Hilbert.
[[Morals|Moral]]: The problem holding us back from a Theory of everything is **Classical**, and not Quantum. The quantum comes as desert after classical compatibility. It’s not the main issue. A red hearing that throws us off following the scent. It’s a distraction that should have fooled almost no one who was thinking for his or her self.
|timestamp=9:14 PM · Sep 13, 2024
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