back to indexEric Weinstein's Harvard Story - The System Breaks Down in Novel Situations | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 |
- Without naming names, can you tell the story 00:00:05.000 |
of your struggle during your time at Harvard? 00:00:15.880 |
that are trying to come up with big, bold ideas 00:00:20.320 |
within the institutions that we're talking about? 00:00:31.800 |
with a couple of Croatians in the math department at MIT. 00:00:44.640 |
and math and physics and love and all this kind of stuff 00:00:49.000 |
as Eastern Europeans loved to, and I ate it up. 00:00:54.600 |
And my friend, Gordana, who was an instructor 00:01:02.160 |
said to me, and I'm probably gonna do a bad version 00:01:07.640 |
- Will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar? 00:01:18.860 |
I said, I'm not used to this style of humor, Gordana. 00:01:24.160 |
Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running, 00:01:32.600 |
You know, your advisor is running a secret seminar 00:01:47.280 |
I've never known her to make this kind of a joke. 00:01:56.880 |
And I went to this room like 15 minutes early 00:02:10.580 |
And I sat there and I let five minutes go by, 00:02:17.640 |
I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke. 00:02:40.140 |
And finally, the person who was supposed to be my advisor 00:02:51.740 |
And I realized that the secret seminar is true, 00:02:56.660 |
that the department is conducting a secret seminar 00:03:08.700 |
that the Rudolphs of the department are not invited to. 00:03:12.420 |
And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it. 00:03:19.620 |
And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey 00:03:40.860 |
and scientific transmission of information was all a lie. 00:03:51.860 |
there's a second system that's about closed meetings 00:03:56.480 |
and private communications and agreements about citation 00:04:01.480 |
and publication that the rest of us don't understand. 00:04:21.720 |
you don't realize that there's an entire second structure 00:04:34.340 |
And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel 00:04:42.400 |
So that's what I found, which was in essence, 00:04:45.420 |
just the way you can stay hotels your whole life 00:04:50.940 |
that you're not supposed to see as the guest. 00:04:53.600 |
There is a second structure inside of academics 00:05:02.700 |
how this person comes to have that thing named after them. 00:05:25.660 |
back with the same people who played hardball with me. 00:05:53.460 |
and find the groups of people who do aspire to-- 00:05:59.380 |
was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar. 00:06:06.860 |
- I'm just trying to say-- - Who are outside of this? 00:06:19.400 |
You have a simplification that isn't gonna work. 00:06:44.780 |
There might be a reason to have a secret seminar, 00:06:47.340 |
but they should detect that an individual like you, 00:06:51.300 |
a brilliant mind who's thinking about certain ideas 00:07:24.700 |
You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded, 00:07:32.540 |
- They live in a world which reached steady state 00:07:47.940 |
and you'd have 20 children that is graduate students, 00:07:50.780 |
and all of them would go on to be professors, 00:07:52.420 |
and all of them would want to have 20 children. 00:07:55.380 |
So you start taking higher and higher powers of 20, 00:08:01.540 |
it's not just about money, the system couldn't survive. 00:08:07.380 |
is that we should shut down the vast majority 00:08:10.380 |
of PhD programs, and we should let the small number 00:08:19.160 |
and research departments that aren't PhD producing. 00:08:23.500 |
We don't want to do that because we use PhD students 00:08:33.100 |
And in that world, you see all of these adaptations 00:08:37.500 |
to a ruthless world where the key question is, 00:08:40.320 |
where are we gonna bury this huge number of bodies 00:08:43.980 |
So my problem was I wasn't interested in dying. 00:08:52.620 |
of the system that are broken, but as an individual, 00:08:55.180 |
is your role to exit the system or just acknowledge 00:09:03.100 |
- My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye. 00:09:06.920 |
In other words, when you have an escapee of the system-- 00:09:26.000 |
Let me show you that all of marginal economics 00:09:30.300 |
is supposed to be redone with a different version 00:09:37.940 |
in topology and physics because they're in fact 00:09:41.900 |
much more broadly found and it's only the mutations 00:09:54.420 |
like if you just take, where are all the Gen X 00:10:11.740 |
was it an older professor and a younger graduate student? 00:10:20.460 |
So for example, orcas try to drown minke whales 00:10:24.220 |
by covering their blowholes so that they suffocate 00:10:32.140 |
They try to make sure that you can't be viable, 00:10:35.580 |
that you need them, that you need their grants, 00:10:48.180 |
Well, my point is, okay, what's the cost of this? 00:10:56.340 |
You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher 00:11:08.320 |
and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year. 00:11:12.240 |
Do you mean their career, their dreams, their passions? 00:11:14.120 |
- Yeah, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead 00:11:19.200 |
- Okay, so as a person who's escaped the system. 00:11:26.680 |
- Can't you, 'cause you also have in your mind 00:11:30.560 |
a powerful theory that may turn out to be useful, maybe not. 00:11:40.200 |
like with the children, so like publish, but also-- 00:12:06.140 |
- That's interesting, sorry, what do you mean by a field 00:12:10.620 |
- H index counts somehow how many papers have you gotten 00:12:20.780 |
Like for example, I don't have an advisor for my PhD, 00:12:28.220 |
as far as something called the Math Genealogy Project 00:12:36.180 |
So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop, right? 00:12:41.020 |
How many students do I have an infinite number? 00:12:47.380 |
so I have to have formal advisor, Raoul Bott, 00:12:52.380 |
says that I was advised by Raoul Bott, which is not true. 00:13:01.460 |
We have to know, you know, where are you a professor 00:13:12.420 |
This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting, 00:13:21.900 |
as a professor of physics and engineering, right? 00:13:30.860 |
You know, like, it'd be great to have Elon at Caltech, 00:13:48.860 |
Well, I don't wanna tell you what I'm gonna do. 00:14:01.300 |
Here's where it's, the place that it goes south is 00:14:07.500 |
that get you into this more adversarial stuff, 00:14:14.980 |
and they're not things that are necessarily aggressive, 00:14:17.500 |
but they're things that are making assumptions. 00:14:26.200 |
It's just like, okay, well, why did you frame that that way? 00:14:31.540 |
do you think that you should have a special exemption 00:14:35.100 |
and that you should have the right to break rules 00:14:36.720 |
and everyone else should have to follow them? 00:14:40.980 |
It doesn't really come out of anything meaningful. 00:14:42.900 |
It's just like we feel we're supposed to ask that 00:14:45.100 |
of the other person to show that we're not captured 00:14:48.860 |
That's not the real question you wanna ask me. 00:14:52.540 |
you wanna ask, do you think this thing is right? 00:15:04.460 |
and it's gonna have an interesting evolution. 00:15:10.340 |
Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship 00:15:14.460 |
well with people outside of the institutional framework 00:15:18.300 |
and it re-inflicts us into the institutional framework 00:15:24.880 |
It's like these are positive uplifting questions. 00:15:31.500 |
Frank, let's be honest, you have done very little 00:15:56.580 |
with the equivalent of a theory of everything for AGI. 00:16:00.700 |
- And I use my own radar, BS radar, to detect. 00:16:06.940 |
- Unfairly, perhaps, whether they're full of shit or not. 00:16:12.700 |
I love where you're going with this, by the way. 00:16:22.460 |
there's elements of brilliance in what people write to me 00:16:25.860 |
and I'm trying to, right now, as you made it clear, 00:16:30.660 |
the kind of judgments and assumptions we make, 00:16:42.060 |
Because my radar is saying you're not full of shit. 00:16:44.920 |
- But I'm also not completely outside of the system. 00:17:09.760 |
whether your theory turns out to be good or not, 00:17:17.780 |
- I appreciate that and thank you very much for saying that. 00:17:28.620 |
And I would like to systemize that, I don't know. 00:17:40.900 |
No, I say it every turn, I'm not a physicist. 00:17:47.320 |
you say, well, can you explain it differently? 00:17:49.760 |
I'm pushing around on this area, that lever over there. 00:18:09.280 |
you don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing chorus? 00:18:15.840 |
So I put up this video from this Oxford lecture. 00:18:20.760 |
I understand that it's not a standard lecture, 00:18:23.060 |
but you haven't heard the most brilliant people 00:18:28.220 |
in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense. 00:19:03.520 |
- Like without actually ever addressing the content. 00:19:18.080 |
You don't know whether the theory is gonna work or not. 00:19:21.200 |
And you know that it's not coming out of somebody 00:19:26.780 |
There's enough that's new and creative and different 00:19:32.880 |
that your real concern is, are you really telling me 00:19:41.200 |
and it's become really vicious and aggressive? 00:19:54.100 |
My profile just doesn't look like anybody else's remotely. 00:19:57.560 |
But as a result, what that did is it showed me 00:20:03.400 |
Or does it just follow these weird procedures 00:20:13.540 |
is it just says, well, he completely takes the system 00:20:26.860 |
Now, if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests 00:20:58.320 |
- But to me, the painful and the tragic thing 00:21:02.240 |
is it, sorry to bring out my motherly instinct, 00:21:14.560 |
- First of all, I've got a podcast that I kinda like. 00:21:22.280 |
I have a life which has more interesting people 00:21:24.800 |
passing through it than I know what to do with.