We need a scientific revolution | Eric Weinstein full interview

science cares about you no matter whether you love science or hate science as people come to understand the power of it everyone's going to [Music] Care hi Eric thanks for coming down for the interview we're going to start with just a very broad general question and it's what does good science look like and where where have we gone wrong well it's odd that you ask me of all people because I think I'm one of the only people who would give you the answer that part of the problem is that we have too much good science and that in fact good science and great science are not exactly the same thing good science is what we're most familiar with because we know how to train people in it it has to do with uh being extremely careful um not falling for uh artifacts in your data um making sure that you have high statistical significance being extremely modest in your claims and your thought process it's extremely important that there is a core in fact the majority of science is good good science what's really disturbing and I think something that really hasn't been seized upon is that great science is often very different it's not just good science turned up to 11 which is my usual line it's in fact a different process and it borders on the irresponsible it has to do with crossing the Adaptive Valley to posit something that makes no sense to say things that are in fact wrong for a period of time before they're right and perhaps the only two really accomplished uh scientists who written on this topic with which I'm familiar might be dck who wrote about it in 1963 in Scientific American an article that needs to be read by everyone is widely misinterpreted saying that beauty is more important than agreement with experiment and Jim Watson who uh had rules for succeeding in science and in fact these are clearly not rules for good science because he was never a good scientist he was merely a great one so so maybe maybe another example um is someone like Fineman right so the way the way he behaved the way he toyed with ideas was I imagine not very popular at the time not the not the kind of thing that constituted good science but he's sort of gone down in history as one of the century defining physicists right yes although you have to realize that if you really understand Fineman he was in fact not understanding of his own work he viewed uh much of his work as being a dippy process for sweeping away Infinities that had plagued the equations of quantum Electro Dynamics or Quantum field Theory and in fact uh it took Ken Wilson to really say why Fineman and schwinger and tominaga techniques uh in fact worked that they weren't a an Infinity cancelling trick but rather they were a reflection of scale and something much deeper which is the Restriction of one's questions to the layer or strata at which those questions do not depend on certain inaccuracies or distortions every model has distortions some questions are dependent upon the distortions that that layer others are not if you're very careful you stratify the questions and the layer of the model and you can work with a flawed model without getting flawed answers and so Ken Wilson really elucidated that Fineman um in fact didn't follow his own Theory far enough one of the reasons he failed to predict the uh Zed not particle uh was that neutral currents were needed for renormalization he had introduced renormalization he said that's not a good enough reason to predict a particle and he missed a great opportunity yeah yeah yeah yeah interesting so the I'm just thinking about what are the characteristics um of of the people who have been great scientists or have done great science so things like uh creativity I imagine bravery as well um self-confidence so these are because they have to say and do things say again well with Gregor mle for example we think he fudged his peod data to be artificially perfect so so uh in fact skull duggery deception all sorts of uh very strange characteristics have crept into good science drug use in the case of car Mullis uh believing in dreams in the case of cul and Benzene so I think we have to understand that great science is an entirely different kettle of fish we're very uncomfortable with it because how do you teach people it's like verer Herzog the great film director um made a point of saying you have to uh lie beg borrow and steal to make great art and I think that that this is really unexplored because we're uncomfortable transmitting the rules for great science and we've fallen into stagnation because of it yeah so let's think then about the Practical consequences of this observation so there's something ever so slightly well there's a tension in the idea of trying to create an environment which breeds more great science right because part of the characterization is linked to this main body of good science such that one can strike out from it to be a great scientist um so how can we Foster an environment is it just that we need to be more accepting at those figures those moments when they come or is there something positive we can do to create the possibility this is a great fear of mine about the UK it's you who should be teaching us how to do this because you've been punching above your weight what you do is you put people under incredible pressure to show their competency but once they've actually revealed themselves to be part of a naturally self- selecting Elite you embrace elitism for all of its positives rather than uh decide that these people have to be subjected to all the horrors of normal life and I think that the uh the Oxbridge system um is in danger of succumbing to America's current passion for uh equity and egalitarian outcome when in fact um what you want to do is not self- select on Bloodlines but self- select unability and then allow the truly extraordinary the eccentricities of their minds because it's like great wood has a grain to it and a sculptor would never impose the figure without first Consulting the wood as to which way it wishes to be to be moved and shaped so this complacency that we we're worried that perhaps the scientific Community or perhaps the epistemic community at large is slipping into yeah um so what exactly is is the danger that is the danger that there will be missed opportunities for discoveries for revolution and Paradigm shifts or or is there is there a sort of it's far worse than ethical danger as well I think it's a tremendous ethical danger but I think people don't understand it we've LED people into the valley of death right uh our previous 20th century Adventures were so powerful that they're we're probably not compatible with the leverage of our discoveries particularly from the years 1952 and 53 when we discovered Fusion and the threedimensional structure of DNA leading to the genetic code 1963 10 years later that is so much power that as we've seen with Co and as we've seen um with the H bombs that have never been used against humans uh we're probably not compatible with a single planetary surface so at the moment you actually need a Hail Mary and nobody wants to work on a Hail Mary because it makes us look non-resectable now if somebody had said um you know in the 1800s we're going to have the power of the sun on the surface of the Earth they would have sounded like a lunatic on the other hand now we know that that's entirely doable so at the moment worry that even over my lifetime we've learned how not to take our dreams seriously how not to channel them into science how not to bring rigor to our imagination and so we're chasing people with true imagination out of the Sciences because what we're saying is is that that's not good science and by the way they're it's not incorrect it's often not good science right and it's very important not to fetishize good science because that's Humanity's death now right so so there's there's there's also an interesting community Communications question here right so um we want to be fostering uh fostering the kind of opportunities for great science which often as you mentioned uh involve soly irresponsible outlooks um but there is also a need to be uh communicating with some areas of society who don't even understand you know what good science is um and there seems to be both a both a kind of need at one level to be creating great science and another to be communicating what the point of having good science was how do you think we can give those messages simultaneously you've had Co I have yeah yeah so have I yeah uh I knew that we both had it and probably this comes out of science now whether or not you care about fur and cleavage sites and whether you care about amino acids and four of them strung together and the spike protein making uh Corona virus virus incredibly virulent uh your lungs cared about it your Ace receptors cared about whatnot so my my feeling about this is science cares about you no matter whether you love science or hate science as people come to understand the power of it everyone's going to Care Now the problem is when we disguise the interest in science and say well how where did this virus come from did it come from a Pengalin did it come from a Civic but instead say any questioning of this virus in fact is tent himount to racism well now what you've done is you've killed the scientific impulse and all sorts of children you've told told them that scientists are not powerful enough to rule their own Roost in fact we are playing games engaging in skull dugery so in some sense the tal the sort of tolerance for bad behavior was spent on somebody like Anthony fouchy when it should have been spent on somebody like a Francis Crick or for in in fact the person who stopped theide from being a problem inside of the US was Francis Kelsey educated at the University of Chicago to be highly disagreeable and she simply stood in the way and said I don't think you've proven to me that your drug is safe uh would such a person be tolerated if they said to fizer to Mna uh I don't think that these platforms are actually sufficiently tested and you're asking to undergo a huge experiment when the virus appears to be targeting the elderly and obese uh in fact the problem is is that we've diminished scientists so far below administrators that we have to seek their permission and I think what it's time for is a scientific revolution in which we tell the administrators to get the hell out of our Labs right right so so am I am I to hear that the um because I take it that the usual line is that covid though obviously wreaking havoc was a great opportunity for boosting people's interests in science and boosting some progress on certain specific areas sure do you realize that with 12 nucleotides you can shut down planet Earth and that you have a child who might have access to PCR and and maybe chrisper C9 of course you can interest anybody in science but the problem is this idea science is interesting take an interest in science it's a terrible idea science is extremely frustrating but it's got very high leverage yeah we should actually be truthful about science and we're not being truthful we're trying to make science into something that is mildly interesting yeah and you're you're signing up people for careers that are incredibly frustrating uh decreasing in Prestige uh and in fact one of the few things you can do with science is shut down a planet with fair fair ease so so do you think that um one way to get across this lesson about the power of the leverage of science which has been lost in the communication is doing the history of science sure but that might include for example the kid who scavenged uh smoke detectors for their radioactive element amorium and built a working reactor I think in Brooklyn right right so in other words if you're going it's like trying to sell skateboarding skateboarding is an activity for n duells that sometimes uh you know results in greatness yeah um trying to tell people don't take drugs without mentioning that drugs are fun you know if we're constantly lying to people uh there's no opportunity to actually reacquaint ourselves with the Wonder of Science and I think that part of the problem is this idea of pro-social good for you science is too narrowly constructed you can get any child allowed to play with a chemistry kit where can have potentially dangerous explosions or you can turn something into a fountain of Goo you know those things sell themselves the real problem is trying to interest people in uh Dulles Church science that is within keeping with all of the restrictions that we're going to place on our brightest Minds yeah yeah that makes sense so maybe let's turn to the biographical now right now we're talking about how to get people interested in science what was your first interest in science how did you begin sure it might have come from my grandfather who was probably acknowledged to be the smartest person in our extended family but who could not finish University probably had pretty severe learning issues uh in modern context and he simply looked at the world through an extremely humanistic and very scientific lens and so just coming to understand that everything could be open the world was open source and user serviceable you could open any panel and try to understand what made a flower tick or uh what you were seeing during a meteor shower so I think that was incredibly empowering and then I think that um I made a radical decision not to listen to my learning differences in school and so while school was telling me that I was not very smart uh I just decided that school was the problem and I was not and so I followed that path and that battle probably for me yeah I mean I think one of the most interesting things I've learned today is that you're not the first person to say that to me in these interviews that's been a running theme actually well we're actually sort of an the tiny number of survivors of the school Wars because schools try to Stamp Out anyone with the learning difference and I believe that these things aren't disabilities but they're superpowers with negative externalities and what they do is they tease out teaching disabilities on the part of the teaching profession the teaching profession doesn't want to have teaching disabilities so they turn around and create learning disabilities which are actually non-existent for the most part right right so one thing that I think a theme that has been running through the interview is this idea of um you know stepping back and allowing extraordinary people giving them the resource they need and allowing them to essentially Express themselves to find this kind of great scientific moments um and so it it sort of leads us to this question about well what what in the lives of these people is sort of contributing to that and one one thing I was thinking was well you know what are what are the relationship that these people have to Faith right so I mean maybe could we could we talk about the relationship um in in your work between between how you see what you do and um whether Judaism has played a role in that or driven that in any particular way right so I'm a I'm I'm an atheist who prays right and you have to recognize that when you have an extraordinary contribution of a small group of people like the parses in India that there's something in the cultural practices that leads to an outsized outcome right and so would it would be entirely irrational if Jews were to throw over the irrationality of their own tradition if that was in fact a demonstrable scientifically reproducible Advantage so my belief about this is that there's something in the ethics the legal discipline from ttic thinking that actually grooves the Mind quite well in particular for physics um I worry that we've thrown over lots of things that we now know not to be true but we didn't understand that these were loadbearing um behaviors and that effectively we we knocked out the rotting pillars before replacing ing them with something else yeah so I mean when you when you were thinking about this did you look at a range of practices and traditions um because you say you're an atheist at praise right so you thought you thought about how these practices are actually incredibly important for developing the mind and giving yourself the space to come up with fantastic ideas and so forth um you know did you did you look at a number of different practices with which to engage as an atheist or was it simply obvious that Judaism was going to be I think that I had an intuition that there was a chomskian preg grammar of religion and metaphysics right and that you have a receptor that has to be bound it cannot remain Unbound so the great fallacy of atheism is is that it is safe and adaptive to try to leave the receptor Unbound because the issue is that there is some metaphysics that is going to bind to that receptor whether or not the truth value of that metaphysics can be decided yeah uh given that I found that I happened to be in possession of one of the more benign things that could bind that receptor so just the way it's very it's very unlikely that you speak no language at all right and uh you have to probably address that some way and recognize that that human need for metaphysics should Cloud your reason as little as possible and as much as is necessary right brilliant well I think we should wrap it up there thank you very much thank you really enjoyed it [Music]

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 155,226

Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, ericweinstein, eric weinstein, philosophz of science, sciencedebate, scientific method, science educatiojn, science education, scientific revolution, howthelightgetsin, philosophy of science

Id: zHAl1PHcQyU

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023