The end of that video is actually worth a watch where two high level physicists admit they don't know anything and that reality might not be "real".

Weinstein is obviously an incredibly smart guy; he's a great mathematician and seemingly very good at running a hedge fund. However he's not been in academia for decades and it is obvious from the debacle surrounding his theory of everything that he is largely clueless about the processes involved within academia. Presenting a new theory as a major breakthrough but then providing no background information, or even a draft of a paper, and expecting to be taken seriously is at best wildly optimistic and at worst a purely opportunist attempt for publicity.

I would tend toward giving Eric the benefit of the doubt and that he genuinely did believe he had a theory with true scientific merit. It's even possible that his theory could provide genuine insight into the field (although given this was 7 years ago and as far as I can tell he never went any way towards even writing a paper that seems unlikely). The one thing that is clear from this though is that while he is a very smart guy, his view of academia is not worth giving any significant weight to.

Actually, he is very aware of the processes. He spends hours and hours critiquing them. His general argument is the processes do way too much stifling of new ideas in favor of propping up the same (baby boomer) ideas for decades on end, even when it has become clear those ideas have run out of juice. And in fact, he believes stifling new ideas is the actual goal of the processes.

It is entirely possible his talk was in part a publicity stunt, but not for the reasons you suggest, but to demonstrate how academia is generally resistant to novel ideas.

He acknowledges his ideas may ultimately prove incorrect, and the naysayers might be right. However, he feels his ideas (and a lot of potentially good ideas) were never given a proper shot, and in fact were actively suppressed, and the processes themselves are in desperate need of reform.

Well, then you should climb up to the top of the highest building you can find, jump off, and you probably have nothing to worry about, because reality might not be real.

I am of course being sarcastic. But I think your general inclination to hold modern physics on a similar plane as mysticism and religion is incorrect. Not understanding everything does not mean that physics isn't extremely useful in making extremely accurate, extremely useful predictions about how reality operates.

Love how someone is considered a genius if they made money running a hedge fund during a booming economy. Like, my investments have been on fire, maybe I should explain to physics dudes why general relativity is all wrong.

This paragraph is the whole problem. There were many physicists wanting to actively discuss and investigate his theory. They just weren't able to because there was nothing available to look at. His attempt at pointing out problems with academia consisted of making a high profile claim to have something new and then never providing literally any specifics to the people who would be able to look into the theory and have the insight and ability to be able to test its accuracy.

It's one thing to claim that academia is resistant to ideas from outside of the direct academic realm, its another entirely to suggest that his ideas were never given a proper shot when he never provided any of the detail that would have let anybody consider it.

Academia, in the hard sciences especially, is generally open to outside ideas. It might be somewhat difficult for an outsider to initially get their work noticed but if there is genuine substance then the vast majority of the time it will be considered and analysed. Eric essentially did things entirely backwards by getting himself noticed but not having the substance to then go anywhere with the theory.

Academia is not perfect but Eric's example is almost exactly the opposite of where issues generally lie.

Reminds me of the Castaneda books
This is a bit of a strawman (obviously) and I'll elaborate why maybe in a week or something. But we've had this discussion before in our conversations on determinism.

This is orthogonal to the actual argument, but I am interested how it may play out, so I will elaborate further what he claims happened (at least as well as I can remember)

1. He claims as a grad student he listened to a lecture given by a cancer researcher on telomere end shortening in somatic cells following each mitotic division and wondered whether this might be proof of concept of a mechanism of an evolutionary adaptation against cancer.

2. He looks into the science further and discovers that the scientific literature claims mice have unusual long telomeres. This knowledge is based entirely on study of Jackson mice.

3. He wonders if mice don't actually have unusually long telomeres, and if this is a product of artificial selection in Jackson laboratories.

4. He calls Carol Greider, who is the leading expert in telomere research, and asks if she knows if this may be the case. She says she doesn't, but agrees it is an interesting question and will assign one of her grad students to look into it. She confirms that they looked at another strain of mice, and it did have significantly shorter telomeres.

5. He goes on to write a draft of a conceptual paper outlining his theories based on this information. He sends a draft to Carol Greider to look at. He says she completely pans it with critiques he did not find reasonable. (He says he still has the copy of the paper and her critiques).

Here is a link to the abstract of the final paper. Note, this is not the version that he sent to Greider.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11909679

6. He submits the paper and it is sent out for blind peer review. He says one of the reviewers was especially harsh and in his opinion their critiques were unreasonable. He suspects it was Greider but has no way of knowing. He tells the journal he feels the critiques were unreasonable and asks them to adjudicate. They respond by accepting his paper for publication without addressing the critiques at all. He says this is an extremely unusual process and leads him to believe the journal agreed the critiques were unreasonable.

7. He goes on with his life, and later discovers Greider published a paper documenting that Jackson mice had shortened telomeres relative to another strain of laboratory mice. He is not acknowledged at all on this paper.

8. At all points in the process, he feels his very real concerns of the implications for Jackson mice (which at this time are the mice being used for all biomedical research) having artificially elongated telomeres is not being addressed adequately by the research community and there may be something more sinister behind The antagonism to his concerns.

Anyways, it would have reached a much bigger audience if he had given the story on Rogan's podcast, instead of his brothers. But Eric Weisntein's podcast has a pretty big reach too, and I am sure this is going to get back to Greider, so it will be interesting to see her response.

If he is making it up, and she challenges him on it, it seems Bret Weinstein should be the one who could be in pretty serious trouble, including lawsuits. FWIW Eric Weinstein has an open invitation to anyone involved in the process who remembers it differently to come on his podcast and give their version, so we shall see what happens.

I think this would be a great thread for that discussion. Please proceed.

Thread is locked so I can't quote but start from here and scroll some and read my posts. But you were there posting and have already seen them.
Actually start from this post or post #367.

Please copy and paste to this thread. kthx

It's too much of a mess to do that and I can't preserve the links or the formatting or what I'm responding to. If I wanted to discuss it here I'd have to start over--which I'm not inclined to do currently.
However if you want to copy something from that thread to discuss it here then I would be happy to discuss it here.
The key point from there is that physicists don't have any sort of shared understanding about what reality actually is and they are forced to pick and choose their own interpretations of quantum mechanics based on their own inclinations.
But I think it's too early into Kelhus' thread for this. That being said I'll guess that Weinstein's TOE involving 14 dimensions and dark matter or whatever is nonsense.

Orthogonal is how I felt about you spending all this time talking about this particular personal conflict. Like if Carol is a horrible person and the nefarious conspiracy theory about her - which is exactly what it is - is true, ok, bad bad Carol. That doesn't add up to a critique about academia. However, there is a mechanism in science for this. If there is substantial evidence for plagiarism, journals will retract articles. It happens all the time because plagiarism is taken very seriously in academia, yet another huge strength of academia. However this guy has clearly not followed appropriate protocols.

Let's see what his brother does:
I wasn't talking about either of those. I was talking about his utterly laughably foray into physics which if the wikipedia is correct demonstrates that he - like his brother - has utterly failed to follow basic academic guidlines by claiming some big theory with no preprints, no papers, no equations, no attempts to publish, etc. And then he whines about physics being resistive to new ideas? He didn't even write up his new idea! FAIL.

Which brings us to the criticism of mouse models, the only actual scientific claim being discussed here. It's hard as a layperson to assess significance. As in, even if the claim is completely correct, is this supposed to be a huge gutpunch to the drug instustry and FDA approval process (and to a lesser degree academia?)? Or is the issue of telomeres more an interesting fact, but one that given the length and scale of the FDA approval process is just one more among many ways in which "cure the mouse, doesn't mean you cure the human" is true and that this does NOT in fact disrupt the current paradigm. If the former and being too ignored there is a clear pathway: do the basic science and publish the results to support this theory. The brother has completely failed to do this and for the third time in this reply they have taken to complaining on a podcast opposed to actually engaging the proper way with academia.

I do kinda like that this parallels where I (a PhD in math) and my brother (a PhD in human genetics) basically think the critique of academia by this other math/bio PhD brother pair is FOS.

That's why you can't be part of the IDW and why you don't have a podcast influencing minds.
You need to work on putting out more nonsense ideas if you want to make it big.

Part of the critique that I didn't fully articulate is that Bret did try to pursue this avenue of research further, but was blocked entirely along the way. Part of the critique is that at this time (and probably still today) it was extremely easy for established members of a field to run interference and block other's ideas/research, for a variety of reasons, including to later publish it as their own ideas/research. This is especially easy to do in a field like biomedical science where it requires very expensive grants (and often private funding from pharma's) to do any research, and academic thought leaders have huge influence over who gets funding.

Ironically, this is a major complaint of historical female discrimination in STEM, is that whenever females tried to advance, the old boys club would run interference, intimidate and block them. Being the good liberal you are, I am sure you would be sympathetic to such a complaint, and say the establishment needs to change. But make it two white guys making the same complaint, one with some evidence to support it, and you can't rush fast enough to defend the side of the establishment.

Blocked (allegedly, he has no proof).....and so he just gave up? Like a guy who thinks he has discovered that critically important mouse models are critically flawed got blocked one time by anonymous reviewers as a grad student and then.....gave up? The history of females in academia who stood the **** up and overcame the obstacles placed on them puts his actions to shame.

Look everyone has had bad reviewers. I've had bad reviewers I disagreed strongly with. But part of the great strength of academia is the peer review process that while not perfect, and not without structural flaws, nevertheless on balance does a crucial job. Your criticism is backwards. If you have quality science, it will get published. Even if you think the big boys at Nature and Science are going to block you, then a second tier journal will accept it if it's legitimate and all you say it is. It's just impossibly hard to truly block legitimate groundbreaking work for your conspiratorial "anonymous reviewer was really aiming to steal the idea decades later" theory. Eric didn't even bother attempting real science for his laughable physics idea, where is the paper! How on earth can he claim to know the problem of big ideas being blocked when he didn't write a paper to even see if it was blocked!

By the way, in math there literally is zero barrier to entry. You can go right now and publish any preprint you wish on the central archive for all math preprints, arxiv.org. I can think your theory is hogwash and not worth going into one of the big math journals and you can accuse me of a huge cover up for denying you in peer review, but you can still get it out there and others, if they also think it legitimate, can build. This didn't happen here.

We end where we began: zero meaningful critique of academia.

Sorry, I was just joking about derailing kel's thread.

You on board with that now that it suits your narrative? [insert kel cog-dis rant and whatnot]

No. But I do find it amusing if Eric’s name was Erica and Brets was Beth and they were claiming gender discrimination with the exact same story I guarantee Uke’s whole approach would be very different.

FWIW (not much I know) I have some experience with telomere research, at least at the conceptual level. I actually find the idea that circa the late 1990s/early 2000s there was a laboratory strain of mice with extremely long telomeres, that it seems this would have been a very good opportunity to explore the effects (if any) from this; as a means to study the actual role of telomeres in phenotype.

And I do find the apparent non interest in taking advantage of this as an opportunity of study in the field at the time interesting.

But I haven’t done a deep dive into pubmed, so maybe my perception of telomere research at that time isn’t accurate. When I get a chance perhaps I will explore further and report my findings.

I would hope so.

Correct, although I feel your guessing about my political views pretty funny - I don't think you know me very well. Gender discrimination IS a meaningfully different claim and would require different analysis.

You are making a lot of value judgements of him based on very incomplete information. Do you honestly think this is fair? Suffice to say my brief summary is not the totality of his life's story, or even the totality of this story, and maybe given this you should be a little less judgmental.

FWIW, in this case he says he made many attempts to tell the telomere story, and explore his theory further, and was blocked every time. He says it was only through the efforts of his PI that he was even able to publish his theory at all, in Experimental Gerontology. If it wasn't for those efforts he wouldn't have even gotten that much. But he says his PI was a evolutionary biologist at the end of his career and was not equipped to wage the war that would have been necessary to facilitate helping Bret do the necessary molecular biology research to test his idea.

Also, keep in mind. This was the late 1990s, not today. There was no internet and the gatekeepers had much more control over what information was allowed to pass.

But like you said, there is a lot of stories similar to this coming from females of that time about how rigged the system was against them. And some persevered and overcame, and probably a lot didn't succeed despite perseverance. And your extreme belligerence and pro establishment bias in this case when you would be much more sympathetic if there was a gender discrimination angle is very interesting.

FWIW, I had an academic career that included getting a PhD, and my story is much more similar to the system you are describing. Very collaborative and supportive.

However, I have heard enough horror stories of how hyper competitive and ruthless academia can be, especially in past generations, that I am not prepared to completely discount his case and judge him out of hand.