The Invisible World is First Detected by the Visible World’s Failure to Close
Eric has explained a method of reframing one's thinking to find "hidden worlds" or "the invisible world" by searching for "holes" or a lack of closure in the visible world. He originally discussed this concept publicly in a thread on Twitter in 2016. If you are interested in helping us animate this riff, please let us know!
Naval Ravikant once pushed me to do a Twitter thread called “The Invisible World is First Discovered in the Visible World’s Failure to Close”. Right? So the idea is we find out that there's a neutrino because a neutron has a certain amount of energy, and a proton and an electron into which it decays doesn't have the same amount of energy. So something was lost. So, you know, there was a hypothesis due to both Pauli and Fermi that there must be some particle that is diabolically neutral, undetectable by almost any means possible, that is carrying away this extra energy. And so the idea is the visible world, that is, the charged particles, or the neutron, which you could detect, that world didn't close. Therefore there had to be something else. Well you know, when Kamala goes from being incredibly unpopular to the loved candidate with no primary, the visible world just failed to close. The idea that nobody ever convenes a bunch of geriatric neurologists to analyze Joe Biden is the visible world failing to close. This is the origin of “anti-interesting”. These are all anti-interesting events, and you can measure the control of journalism by its desire to report on what everybody wants reported, and is absolutely, pathologically uninteresting—not to the journalists, but to the editors who tell the journalists what can and cannot be featured in print.
- Eric Weinstein on Modern Wisdom
Many of you are familiar with the cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach, the famous book, which uses a device that sometimes goes under the name of triplets, which is 3d sculpture that, when shadow-projected onto various walls that are sort of at right angles to each other in an informal sense, reveals different things. So you can have a block of wood that looks like it throws an E shadow, a G shadow, or a B shadow, depending upon which way light is incident upon the object. And you could make the argument that from three walls of Plato's cave, you could actually assemble a picture of the outside world, if you had enough ability to see different two dimensional projections. And so in a weird way, the idea of having information but not knowing that you can use it to assemble a picture of the greater whole is a specialty of theoretical physics, there's what you can see and what you can't. So for example, I've focused on this idea of the invisible world is first discovered through the visible world's failure to close, and it was inspired by Pauli inferring the existence of the neutrino—actually the anti-electron neutrino to be fancy about it—from beta decay. And the idea being that the products of beta decay don't carry enough matter and energy by themselves to have a conservation principle.
- Eric Weinstein on Clubhouse, Oct 10, 2021
On Youtube[edit]
On X[edit]
The invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close.
[Ex: Neutrinos, file sharing, pathogens, loyalties, bribes.]
1/ The invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close. [For @naval @johndurant @pmarca et al. A tweet storm try.]
2/ In physics we have conservation laws. We found the light/invisible neutrino because decay in heavy/visible particles violated these rules
3/ Likewise in biology we proved the germ thy of pathogens vs theories like spontaneous generation/miasma by visible effects at macro scale.
4/ I used 'failure to close' to deduce from 1st principles that the NSF must have done a secret study in '85-6 on how to *lower* sci. wages.
5/ This was b/c the incompetent 'shortfall studies' that got NSF in trouble would have lead to different visa laws than those that passed.
6/ I was shocked when a highly competent "smoking gun" study hidden in '86 showed up exactly where my thy predicted: https://t.co/VZvmupRFon
7/ This is the secret history of H1-B. The @NSF secretly studied how to interfere w/ US labor market 2 avoid paying scientists market wages.
8/ Rules:
I) Look for a macro system failing to close.
II) *Don't* posit a detailed explanation.
III) Posit a 'neutrino' place holder & dig.
9/ HW: A) Why don't top OEMs sell laptops w/ lens covers, mic kill switches & hardwired video LEDs offering security to gain mkt advantage?
10/ How do you get 9 figures of wealth doing charity work & public speaking without selling, inventing, founding or investing brilliantly?
11/ C) Why were Bernie's massive rallies often not covered @ NYT & why did a positive Bernie article go neg after massive linking from web?
12/ D) Why do laboratory bred mice used for drug testing have extra long telomeres (allowing radical tissue repair) compared to wild type?
13/ I could go on. I don't know which are nefarious. I'm a different kind of conspiracy guy. I *don't* have answers but know where I'd dig.
14/14. Thank you for your time. Feel free 2 attack. But remember, I've been here before just as w @NSF...before digging up their smoking gun
⚡️ “Hidden worlds are detected in the visible world's failure to close.” An old tweetstorm recast as a "Moment":