The Weinstein Brothers: Nobel-Prize Level Scientists or Self-Aggrandizing Woosters?

Okay, I think it is time to check in on Bret Weinstein.

Remember when I was saying all kinds of mean things about how he had gone into Alex Jones territory. I think some might have thought that a little hyperbolic.

But not anymore...

Here they are doing a Valentine's Day broadcast. They are here to warn you about the end of civilization!

 
Also, he was recently blocked by Elon Musk for spamming him. LOL! Elon Musk will tolerate catturd, Alex Jones and Kanye West, but apparently Bret Weinstein is too annoying for him. I'm actually inclined to agree.

Anyway, after whining about being throttled and suppressed because of some "gremlins" in the works at Twitter (literally it's all about systemic oppression as he doesn't want to blame the richest man in the world for principled reasons), he's now crowing about how the Joe Rogan and Alex Jones appearances have been a shot in the arm for the attention people are paying him. Let's face it, he needs to inject, as it were, some relevance given his flagging Patreon earnings...

He also went on Rogan to promote Peter Duessberg's theory of AIDS. He was persuaded by Luc Montaigne and Robert F Kennedy, because of course!

This is exactly what a grift looks like.



 
This is quite sweet. Professional skeptic, Michael Shermer (remember him?) is trying to persuade Bret Weinstein that actually, yes, HIV does cause AIDS. What's sweet about it is that Shermer thinks Weinstein is honestly amenable to actual evidence rather than spewing out garbage theories at the rate of knots to raise his profile.

Link

He's interested in money and attention, Shermer! No the truth.
 
Puppycow said:
Wow.

Do his wife and Eric agree? Or is this just a Bret thing?
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Not sure, Eric seems to be more interested in getting the job of President of Harvard. He claims they wronged him in many ways, so his pitch to them is that he will come in and purge the university of everything that doesn't work. He says it will be ugly, unpleasant and will create a civil war on the faculty.

Link
 
Puppycow said:
That's a hard sell. Sounds like a man who knows that he will never be offered the position.
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One of the critiques of Claudine Gay was that she had very few academic publications.

What are Eric Weinstein's academic publications? Almost zero as far as I know. His big theory is one that he tried to announce on Joe Rogan's podcast, and it was a major embarrassment as Rogan got annoyed with him and told him that this was boring to listen to. :(

I think that what did it was that Weinstein wanted to explain it all on a website he made specifically for the episode called PullthatupJamie.

Other people who would be his peers, physicists, mathematicians and economists, have all essentially said they are baffled by what he has claimed is some ground-breaking theory.

So of course he would never be offered the job. The man is a complete crank. No doubt he sees or rather promotes this as evidence that academia is lined up against him in order to suppress the truth.
 
angrysoba said:
One of the critiques of Claudine Gay was that she had very few academic publications.

What are Eric Weinstein's academic publications?
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One has nothing to do with the other. Gay is a career academic. Weinstein is not. And even if he had been, you can't compare numbers of publications across academic fields. Mathematicians tend to publish very few papers.
 
jt512 said:
One has nothing to do with the other. Gay is a career academic. Weinstein is not. And even if he had been, you can't compare numbers of publications across academic fields. Mathematicians tend to publish very few papers.
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Does he have more than ONE publication? Besides, if you want to interview for a job, what are you bringing to the table? Academic credentials? NO! Then what? A promise of a civil war in the faculty? Wow! How enticing!

Surely you have to bring something. The last I have seen, he was looking for UFOs. Has he found any yet? Or is he just spending all his time getting upset with skeptics who point out that the videos he is in thrall to are actually just balloons?
 
angrysoba said:
Does he have more than ONE publication? Besides, if you want to interview for a job, what are you bringing to the table? Academic credentials? NO! Then what? A promise of a civil war in the faculty? Wow! How enticing!

Surely you have to bring something. The last I have seen, he was looking for UFOs. Has he found any yet? Or is he just spending all his time getting upset with skeptics who point out that the videos he is in thrall to are actually just balloons?
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I have no idea what your point is. Until 2022, he was a managing director of a hedge fund.
 
jt512 said:
I have no idea what your point is. Until 2022, he was a managing director of a hedge fund.
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What do you mean you have no idea what my point is? If you want to hire someone and they turn up saying that they will make things ugly, unpleasant and create a civil war among the faculty, would you hire that person?
 
angrysoba said:
What do you mean you have no idea what my point is? If you want to hire someone and they turn up saying that they will make things ugly, unpleasant and create a civil war among the faculty, would you hire that person?
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I guess I missed the one sentence in the thread where you said that Weinstein thinks he should be the next president of Harvard.
 
jt512 said:
I guess I missed the one sentence in the thread where you said that Weinstein thinks he should be the next president of Harvard.
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Yeah, there is a video of him saying he would like to be president of Harvard and I linked to it.

I guess if you missed the point of the conversation then no wonder you were confused.
 
Puppycow said:
In general, I would expect career academics to be more likely to become the president of a university than people who are not career academics.
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At a prestigious academic institution like Harvard, yeah. But it is not uncommon for lesser universities to hire presidents from the corporate world.

But, when I made that comment, I had not realized that the conversation had turned from general nuttery of the Weinstein brothers to the specific nuttery of Eric wanting to be president of Harvard.

As to the latter, the probability that one of the most woke universities in America will replace its unqualified "progressive" black female president with an unqualified ultra-conservative Jewish white male is essentially nil.
 
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There is some cringe on display here where Nobel-prize worthy physicist and mathematician, Eric Weinstein, complains that people like Sean Carroll are stopping him from achieving his destiny.

Sean Carroll is having none of it and says that there is a known procedure for getting your ideas to the attention of scientists. Publish papers! Then he reads out Weinstein's own description of his online paper which even reads that it is stitched together, half remembered and the work of an entertainer (these are Weinstein's own words) to which Weinstein says "How dare you, Sean". Weinstein also tries to go after Carroll on the same credentialist grounds he dismisses other scientists on ("You were denied tenure at the University of Chicago!" Weinstein crows)

 
angrysoba said:
There is some cringe on display here where Nobel-prize worthy physicist and mathematician, Eric Weinstein, complains that people like Sean Carroll are stopping him from achieving his destiny.

Sean Carroll is having none of it and says that there is a known procedure for getting your ideas to the attention of scientists. Publish papers! Then he reads out Weinstein's own description of his online paper which even reads that it is stitched together, half remembered and the work of an entertainer (these are Weinstein's own words) to which Weinstein says "How dare you, Sean". Weinstein also tries to go after Carroll on the same credentialist grounds he dismisses other scientists on ("You were denied tenure at the University of Chicago!" Weinstein crows)

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PMDW (Piers Morgan , didn't watch)
Well, I watched 30s, which was quite entertaining, and enough to see Eric is a tool, but everything I see Piers' face I'm swamped with the vision of a boot stamping on it forever. :p
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
PMDW (Piers Morgan , didn't watch)
Well, I watched 30s, which was quite entertaining, and enough to see Eric is a tool, but everything I see Piers' face I'm swamped with the vision of a boot stamping on it forever. :p
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The thumbnail itself is a pretty good indicator. Piers watches with smug glee over the fence as the two neighbours argue about something that he stirred up in the first place.

Yet it is fun to watch Sean Carroll casually destroy Eric Weinstein’s pompous claims to be considered a genius. It’s good old fashioned skepticism in that Sean Carroll talks to illuminate and Eric talks in order to baffle and confuse.

Later, Piers tries to shift the conversation to God asking if Sean Carroll can comprehend what came before the Big Bang, and if he can’t he must accept God exists (it’s a fundamentally idiotic argument). Carroll says that while we don’t know he has a theory that there were infinite sequences of events before the Big Bang. Piers cries foul and says that nobody can comprehend what it even means to say that. Carroll makes a simple analogy - numbers stretch into infinity both before and after zero. Piers continues to insist that that is impossible to understand so he asks Eric who says he will “help out” Sean and then gives an absolutely level-inappropriate response that almost nobody watching will have any idea what he even means. Piers simpers about how smart Eric is and then finishes up.

Sadly, the inability to see the difference between charlatans like Eric and enablers like Piers, on the one hand, and the clarity of people like Sean, on the other hand, is how we have ended up with the complete mess of populist politicians and pseudoscientists who have taken over the world.
 
catsmate said:
Seriously?
Why are people paying attention to these idiots?
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shemp said:
Agreed. In fact, I don't know how this thread got on my watch list, but I'm unwatching it.
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Why? To me it seems pretty much standard operating procedure in skepticism to pay attention to idiots. James Randi, after all, paid attention to the claims of Uri Geller. This forum spent a great deal of time paying attention to the claims of Bigfoot enthusiasts, UFOlogists and 9/11 Truthers. There would be very little to talk about if we didn't.

Well, I suppose we could just talk about politics, but again, that usually involves a lot of talk about idiots as well.

So here we have a pair of charlatans, in my humble opinion, who have managed to convince vast numbers of people that they are Very Smart
TM, when many of their claims are around alt-meds, anti-vax, UFOs, and claims to having worked out a theory of physics that is ignored by academia. Why is it ignored? Because, according to the Weinstein Brothers, academia is itself a kind of conspiracy designed to suppress the truth.

The two of them have spent hours on the Joe Rogan Show spewing out their nonsense. I think just ignoring them is not a good idea. Or certainly no better an idea than ignoring anti-vaxxers in general. Some of us have noticed that their views have gone so mainstream that the current presidential administration is essentially a who's who of people that the Weinsteins themselves have been promoting, particularly Gabbard, RFK Jr, Jay Bhattacharya. In fact, I would almost go as far as to say that without Bret Weinstein, Trump would never have been re-elected. He was the one who sent Joe Rogan down the anti-vax rabbit hole, and he also organized a march on Washington that RFK Jr was the headline act for.
 
angrysoba said:
Why? To me it seems pretty much standard operating procedure in skepticism to pay attention to idiots. James Randi, after all, paid attention to the claims of Uri Geller. This forum spent a great deal of time paying attention to the claims of Bigfoot enthusiasts, UFOlogists and 9/11 Truthers. There would be very little to talk about if we didn't.

Well, I suppose we could just talk about politics, but again, that usually involves a lot of talk about idiots as well.

So here we have a pair of charlatans, in my humble opinion, who have managed to convince vast numbers of people that they are Very Smart
TM, when many of their claims are around alt-meds, anti-vax, UFOs, and claims to having worked out a theory of physics that is ignored by academia. Why is it ignored? Because, according to the Weinstein Brothers, academia is itself a kind of conspiracy designed to suppress the truth.

The two of them have spent hours on the Joe Rogan Show spewing out their nonsense. I think just ignoring them is not a good idea. Or certainly no better an idea than ignoring anti-vaxxers in general. Some of us have noticed that their views have gone so mainstream that the current presidential administration is essentially a who's who of people that the Weinsteins themselves have been promoting, particularly Gabbard, RFK Jr, Jay Bhattacharya. In fact, I would almost go as far as to say that without Bret Weinstein, Trump would never have been re-elected. He was the one who sent Joe Rogan down the anti-vax rabbit hole, and he also organized a march on Washington that RFK Jr was the headline act for.
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No it's all the republican party cheating that got TACO "elected". Both times.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
No it's all the republican party cheating that got TACO "elected". Both times.
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Sounds like you are engaging in Weinsteinian conspiracism, as Bret was one of the idiots who thought the 2020 election was stolen. Seems like you think 2016 and 2024 were stolen. You can blame the unrepresentativeness of the electoral college for 2016, but for 2024 the Republicans won by selling snakeoil which the Weinsteins provide in massive doses.
 
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