I don't know if you listened to the podcast or not. Eric acknowledges it is likely neither of them has the answer. But he also says the string theorists have held up the field way too long without delivering, and it is time to let some new ideas in the door.

Is this critique fair do you think?

If nothing else Eric is a good story teller, but of course you never know how accurate the story is, so it is nice to get a more informed take.

The telomere stuff I can actually follow. And I kinda agree it would have been interesting to study possible effects from long telomeres in Jackson mice circa 2000 (or even today really), and it is a little suspicious there doesn't seem to have been any interest in doing so at that time. Although the doom and gloom narrative that Bret was pushing was probably over the top too.

But I can also see where Bret was coming from. For good or bad, evolutionary biology suffers from mainly being a descriptive science, and not having much predictive power. So Bret sees an opportunity to actually make a prediction, and test it which is a big deal for him, and no one is interested in facilitating him studying his prediction and as he sees it is actually running interference on him.

I haven't listened to the podcast and I do not think the criticism is fair. How are string theorists to blame for Weinstein not writing a preprint or the failure of Lisi's model to reproduce the standard model from an algebraic standpoint?

Ironically, the failure of Lisi style models gives more credence to something like string theory because it avoids some of his issues in a very non trivial way via super-symmetry and going from Lie algebras to super-algebras. I'm not an academic (I have a very similar background/career to Weinstein) but I have a math PhD and have dabbled in string theory adjacent math/physics in the past. It's true string theory hasn't yet succeeded in creating verified beyond the standard model physics, but nothing else has either and I see even less promise from the non string theory approaches supposedly being blocked. If you look at them on their own merits they aren't up to snuff imo.

I would not be able to understand any of the telomere stuff and I'm very wary to listen to him given his takes on the stuff I can follow. Intentionally or not, his audience is probably not going to be able to evaluate the merits of what he says.

Ok. Fair enough. Thanks.

I am about halfway through the Weinstein-Lisi pod. So far it is kind of a "history of modern theoretical physics" from their perspectives, with a little technical detail sprinkled in. You might enjoy it if you have a couple hours to kill driving somewhere sometime.

And FWIW you probably would be able to understand the telomere stuff if you put a little time into it. The dirty truth of biology/medicine is it actually isn't very difficult to understand at all, as long as you avoid the sub-disciplines that rely a lot on advanced math/physics.

Moral panic? Little melodramatic huh? Trump is a reality TV star ffs I don't see history being all that kind to him or his supporters. He's a cartoonish buffoon and a boor--who just happened to have a dad give him a bunch of loot. If anything I think history will probably nail it. Dude is pretty much a perfect example of several decades of all the negatives of AM radio/then Fox etc and the boomers rolled up into one.

This raises a lot of interesting points I think about the nature of the IDW. But I could imagine a black women getting that sort of attention if the goal was to turn her into a podcasting star for disaffected black women.

Well, if you really want to conspiritard about it, you could note that Peterson goes into rehab, there is this void and the IDW seems to be running out of steam, and then coincidentally this is when Rogan convinces Weinstein to start The Portal, and the IDW is back baby.

All you had to say was "Rogan convinces him..." and that would be enough. The fact that he is associated with Peter Thiel and cranking out psuedoscience and getting lauded in The Guardian is all extra.
That doesn't mean of course that he can't be spot on with 75% (or more) of what he says--he can be. It's the 25% you have to watch out for.

What has two arms, can't talk, and crawls all over

My God Trolly is just the worst. It must take a hell of a lot of arrogance to assume you have an issue all figured out based on minimal information the way he does in every thread.

I've listened to most of the podcasts Weinstein's put out so far and they were all interesting. His podcast philosophy is to do minimal tailoring for the layman so you get an idea of what a high level conversation on a topic sounds like instead of being spoonfed the same simple analogies as you get in other interviews. The one with Roger Penrose was surprisingly enjoyable despite me not understanding ~any of the physics (Penrose seemed to broadly agree that the string theorists are stifling other potentially useful lines of enquiry in physics fwiw). Inspired me to pick up my copy of The Road to Reality that's been weighing down my shelf for ten years. Hopefully I'll make it past page 100 this time.

Hah, I will never understand 100 pages of The Road to Reality.

My favorite Penrose book is easily Cycles of Time, even if the idea is probably wrong. The discussion of entropy is really fascinating.

That's my point. A black women would probably never be given the platform to complain about her lack of platform like the IDWers have. I don't think I've ever actually consumed an "IDW" pfoduct but it seems heavily targeted to outsider/crackpotish white men who are getting sort of affinity scammed.

Sounds like a really good way to give your audience a completely misleading and superficial semblance of whats going on. I could imagine the discovery institute or some other creationism outfit hosting biology phds that can correctly use enough proper syntax to mislead a lay audience politically predisposed to their message.

Penrose, while a true giant, is pushing 90. Science, more than any other field is about constantly re-evaluating old ideas. Not all that surprising that he has (probably worthless) critiques of the field. Same with Einstein, Dirac, Grothendieck and many others.

Yes, if only Tim Cook would allow black women to have podcasts.

That's not what we are talking about. Lisi and Weinstein were covered by the Guardian and New Yorker before they were whining on podcasts about being ignored by academia just because their ideas have no merit. In terms of the podcast, there is just not a large enough audience of willing morons (no offense) for anybody but white men to say obviously wrong stuff and gain semi-mainstream prominence in an IDW fashion.

You can see this in politics as well. There is no party pandering to dumb black women like the republicans pander to dumb white men. Black women with hard science PhDs are just as likely to prefer dems over republicans as black women who drop out of high school. White men who drop out of high school are way more likely to support republicans than white men with hard science PhDs.

I feel like you're starting with the bolded premise and it's heavily affecting the way you're interpreting all the other information itt. The Penrose podcast is 99% just a conversation about the developments in physics over the last century without any further agenda. If you gave it a listen I'm sure you'd find it a lot less objectionable than you currently assume it is. Give it a go
https://open.spotify.com/episode/33E...RQi9XhvdWm2ilw

Fwiw I think the idw label is stupid and I'm surprised the weinsteins and Harris are okay with being grouped under that umbrella. They are very much not the same as Peterson, to say nothing of shapiro, who do seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of whispering to dumb guys. (though tbf I only gave Peterson about 3 appearences on other podcasts before i decided he wasn't worth spending time on and even less for shapiro)

Sam Harris’s stock-in-trade has always been edgelordy books for pop consumption. It’s not at all remotely surprising that he’s jumped on the IDW/podcast bro grift.

This post just shows your ignorance to anyone who actually pays attention to what he puts out, but keep on assuming you've got him all figured out i guess.

I feel like Penrose's views on this are largely known. He's written and talked about it a lot. I'm definitely not lumping in Penrose with someone like Weinstein and calling them all IDW. Penrose is often super insightful and worth reading (twistors, conformal geometry) and sometimes completely ridiculous and worth ignoring (computer science, interpretations of formal logic). In general, I'm highly skeptical of the podcast interview format for anything other than entertainment. Especially for someone like Penrose who can simply upload preprints or even get oxford press to publish if it's more accessible and longer form. That just might be a personal trait though. Even in school I never came out of a great talk thinking "wow,that was great I learned so much" it was always "wow that was great, I want to go and try to learn what (s)/he was talking about".

I've read more than one of his books, but thanks for playing.

Well, your streak of being absolutely wrong is still in tact. IDW is Eric Weinstein's brainchild. I can't recall ever hearing Sam Harris use the term himself, and seemed very uncomfortable when others brought it up.

Sam Harris is literally the first person Bari mentioned in her infamous IDW op-ed, what in **** are you even talking about.

It isn’t an infamous piece. It is infamous to you because you are completely ignorant and uninformed. You have obviously never listened to one second of Sam Harris. I doubt you even read Weiss’s piece. You just know there was one and have some bad, uninformed takes what it says.

To those of us who have actually listened to Sam Harris, instead of just making **** up like you do, know it was never a part of his platform, and he never promoted the term at all. It is such a small part of his platform I am not sure if he has ever actually spoken the term out loud before.

And besides that, just because Bari Weiss wrote one op ed and used the term, doesn’t mean that he does.

Just face it. You are an uninformed clown giving an uninformed clown take on the whole thing. Per usual.

You are always so wrong about the basic facts of pretty much everything, especially as it pertains to the “IDW”, by this point I have to assume it is intentional, and your ploy is to make us constantly have to waste time and energy correcting you.

Well, this is 10 minutes of my life I will never get back. So mission accomplished on your part.

Kel, it really would help if you'd actually read Bari's IDW editorial.

I read it when it came out. I don’t even remember what it says, but I guarantee There isn’t a single quote of Sam Harris using or endorsing the term. Because he doesn’t ever do either.

Show me a quote from the piece proving me wrong or shut the **** up.

You are just a pathetic, uninformed troll that has a lot of trouble processing very simple facts about the world.