Difference between revisions of "18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020"

We just held our first live show at the Ice House in Pasadena, and thanks everybody who came out. The show sold out extremely quickly, even though we sort of didn't exactly advertise where and when it was, except for cryptically at first. And, one of the things that allowed us to do is to meet the listenership en masse, and, you know, it was a truly interesting, and, in many different ways, diverse group of people.

And I want to give a huge shout out to Kast Media, who has been the original studio and effectively a co-producer of the show, along with Jesse Michaels, and the advertisers and the sponsors who have been paying for the equipment, for the people who work on the show, so that nobody had to shell out anything in order to get this. The show would never have happened if it wasn't taking place as a commercial enterprise.

We've been doing that through the YouTube videos, and in that respect, I feel like, in general if you're willing to sit through maybe an initial ad that rolls before the video goes, you usually have an uninterrupted viewing or listening experience thereafter. We'll try to get the videos a little bit in better sync with the audio, but most importantly what I want to get to is what the show is really about.

Now, to my way of thinking, since the early 1950s, there has been no comparable explosion of wisdom to go along with this newfound power that humans have–this new godlike power. So I've called this the Twin Nuclei Problem of Cell and Atom.

Now, in the story that has this major through-line that we've been following, the next thing that happens that's really important is a guy named Derek de Solla Price starts to calculate that science is on an exponential trajectory, and rather than thinking that that's a great thing, he starts to understand that anything on an exponential trajectory can't really go on, because it's going to burn itself out. And if science is the original seed corn, if you will, of technology, and technology of economics, then effectively what's going to happen in science is going to percolate through a chain, through technology and into the economy, with a potential stagnation coming.  

Now, he started to arrive at these ideas, I think, at Yale in the late 1950s. It was not well understood what he was talking about–and still I'm always shocked that the book Science Since Babylon, which he wrote, and which discusses this issue, is so much less well-known than, say, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For some reason, this is so dispiriting to so many people that we actually don't discuss it much.

Studying this work led to the idea of talking about EGOs, that is, embedded growth obligations. Now, embedded growth obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance, technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s. And yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.

We have effectively become a growth cargo cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.

All right. What then happened was that a different structure, which I have termed the gated institutional narrative, came to become repurposed. Now, the gated institutional narrative is like an exchange–a financial exchange, if you will, except it's an exchange of information and ideas. And in order to actually participate in this particular special conversation, you need to have a seat on the exchange. That is, you need to write for an important paper, like the Wall Street Journal, or you need to be a senator or a congressman so that you can gain access to the news media, or you need to be sitting at a news desk.

These sorts of ideas can't be entertained inside of the gated institutional narrative, and that's where the gating function comes in. What was originally a function intended to ensure quality control of the narrative became an instrument for something else. And this is where I want to introduce the most important concept that I think we will be dealing with on a going-forward basis in 2020 on this program, the DISC. What is the DISC? The DISC stands for the distributed idea suppression complex.

So the first thing I want to do is recommend that you Google "MSNBC" and "Andrew Yang", and "#YangMediaBlackout", and look at the impressive data set that has been collected, which shows a singular focus that can be inferred from the data on Andrew Yang. Now, to an extent, this has also happened with Tulsi Gabbard. To an extent there's been some carryover from Bernie Sanders, but Bernie Sanders' showing in 2016 was so strong that the same games that were applied to Sanders then cannot easily be applied now.

What's fascinating is that, if anyone remembers the Watergate era, the news media used to go to federal agencies and ask whether or not something was true or false, and this gave us the phrase "a non-denial denial". When is the question arises, let's say, in this case, "Does Jeffrey Epstein have any ties to any known intelligence community?", that question can be asked, let's say, to the CIA, to the State Department, to the NSA, and you might expect that you'd get an answer, "Absolutely this person had no ties", because the idea of the intelligence agencies being connected to a known sex trafficker seems preposterous at one level, but you can also imagine that they'd get "No comment".  

All right, in those two circumstances, that gives you an idea about how the DISC, the distributed idea suppression complex, works inside of journalism. There is some sort of editorial function that is keeping us from learning certain things, because certain stories do not run. With a little bit of poetic liberty, this seems to be what Paul Simon was talking about in Sounds of Silence. What we're listening for now are the silences. Where else are we confronted with silence? What are the other things we would expect, where we don't hear particular ideas?

What some of you don't know is that I believe that, inside of that group of four, one of us wrote a book immediately after getting a PhD, which is Heather Heying's book, Antipode, about her solo travels to the jungles of Madagascar. So if you have a young woman in your life who is looking for a pretty impressive female role model, I would say Heather's toughness, intelligence, and grit makes for pretty terrific reading, and I'd recommend buying the book Antipode for that young lady.

If biology is one of the greatest ideas man is ever had in the form of natural and sexual selection in the work of Darwin and Wallace, I would say that the other complex of great ideas, truly top ideas, would be what I would call geometric dynamics. Those are the ideas that take place underneath theoretical physics, whether we're talking about the standard model or general relativity. And we now believe that all fundamental physical phenomena can be divided between these two great theories. In one case, that of Einstein's general relativity, it's been known for about a hundred years that the substrate of the theory is Riemann's theory of differential geometry, that is, Riemannian geometry.

What is much more recent, perhaps slightly less than 50 years old, thanks to Jim Simons and C.N. Yang, is the knowledge that the classical theory underneath quantum field theory is in fact a different form of geometry, known as Ehresmannian geometry, fiber bundle geometry, gauge theory, or Steenrod geometry, whatever you want to call it. So the idea that geometry is the birthplace of fundamental physics, I think is now generally understood by all practicing theoretical physicists functioning at the top level.

Inside of that complex, we've been stuck for approximately, I don't know, 47 years, where theory used to lead experiment, and we used to make predictions and the predictions would usually be confirmed in relatively short order. We have not had a period of stagnation inside of theoretical physics that mirrors this, with the closest comparable period perhaps being the period from the late 1920s, with the advent of quantum electrodynamics, to the late 1940s, with the beginning of renormalization theory being ushered in at the Shelter Island, Pocono, and Old Stone conferences.

But what I'm starting to see is that the field has become exhausted. It has been telling the same story since 1984, about how string theory is our leading theory of quantum gravity, that quantum gravity is the replacement for Einstein's search for a unified field. And, as the accelerator turns up the Higgs and little else, as effectively no new physical theories arise with confirmations, as the only major updates to our model of the physical world are things like massive neutrinos or the accelerating expansion of the universe coming from experiment, the theoretical physics community has been very slow to own up to just how much trouble it's in. It's an incredibly demanding life. It has incredible standards for rigor and intellectual honesty, and quite honestly, it's been lying for far too long to sustain the kind of integrity that's needed in that community.

Now, I don't know whether I'm nuts, but I do know that at previous points, I've suggested things into both the mathematical and physics communities that have later been shown, by other people, to be correct. And while I was waiting for a some kind of confirmation, I was being told, "Eric, you're completely off base. You're not getting it." One of these situations involved something called the Seiberg-Witten equations, which I put forward in the 1980s, around probably 87, and I was told that these couldn't possibly be right, that they weren't sufficiently nonlinear. I'll tell the whole story about how if spinors were involved, then obviously Nigel Hitchin would have told us so, blah, blah, blah.  

None of this was true, and in 1994, Nati Seiberg and Edward Witten made a huge splash with these equations. I remember being in the room, and seeing the equations written at MIT on the board and I was thinking, 'Well, wait a minute. Those are the equations that I put forward. If those equations are being put forward by Witten, why is it that the community isn't telling him that they're wrong for the same reasons that they told me that they were wrong?'

This is also how idea suppression works. When you are young, and when you are vulnerable, and when you need the help of older members of your academic community to bring you forward, you're extremely vulnerable to what might be termed the Droit du seigneur–or the prima nocta–of the academic community. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, there was an old legend that the Lords of the Manor would command the right to take the virginity of every bride on her wedding night, until there arose a miller's daughter known as the Mugnaia.

Now this is celebrated in the Festival of the Oranges, which is potentially the world's largest food fight in which armed combatants throw oranges at each other–I think it's in Italy, if I'm not mistaken–celebrating the victory of the Mugnaia. But right now, we have a problem in our intellectual disciplines, which is that when we come forward with our best ideas, very often, even if they're slightly wrong, they're slammed. And when they're slammed, sometimes the older members of the community then take the ideas for themselves at a later point.  

This has to stop. And I think I've been trying to gather courage to put forward some ideas, which I think some aspects of them may be wrong, but are certainly quite interesting, and given that our leading theories have completely stalled out and failed to ship a product for–depending on how you count–you know, nearly 40 years or 50 years, depending upon whether it's the anomaly cancellation or something called the Vanetsiana model... I think it's time to simply ignore these people and realize that the leading lights of our most important community have failed.  

If you look at the wealth structure of the Silent Generation, Boomer Generation, Generation X, and the Millennials, or Gen Y, you see that the Millennials have, at this age, amassed far smaller percentages of the wealth, than the Boomers did at the same age, and I don't think it's because they're lazy or they're not talented. So we have a very dangerous situation shaping up, where our younger generations are not fully bought in.  

So, in so doing, economics is the logical meeting place for the two greatest theories man has ever had. And this was explored in the early–rather, the mid-1990s, early to mid-1990s, by Pia Malaney, my wife and collaborator, and myself, in work that never got out of Harvard University. Now that's not quite true. There is a book called The Physics of Wall Street, by James Weatherall, which touches upon this. But this work died because of something called the Harvard Job Market committee. And my wife went into that Job Market committee meeting, having her work presented there, thinking that she could apply anywhere in the country, and being told, instead, that she had almost nothing, and that she'd be lucky to escape with a PhD.  

That doesn't make a lot of sense. On the other hand, I think that the presidencies of companies, or CEO roles, I think that the issue of university presidents–many of these things have been tilted far too much towards these other generations. I think that Gen X has a very interesting story to tell. We were not highly infantilized, in terms of when we were growing up. In fact, we had to the moniker of the Latchkey kids, and we're also not large enough to get things just by chanting them. We have always had the pressure of having to make some degree of sense, because we're just too small as a generation.  

So, in fact, what I'd like to do–I've said that I believe that string theory is effectively in affirmative action program for mathematically talented Baby Boomers who do not wish to sully themselves with the problem of working on the physical and real world as we have it. What I'd like to do is to bring you these three theories over the course of the next year or two–that is, a theory of death, a theory of markets, and how the agents within those markets, and the measurement of those markets should be changed and understood, and a theory, also, about who we are and what is this place in which we find ourselves, called Geometric Unity.

The purpose of The Portal, if you will, is to create a channel that has never existed. Now, I could try to submit everything to Phys Review Letters. I could try to submit to Econometrica. I could try to go through all of the normal channels, and I think what I've started to realize is, part of the problem of having screwed up all of this early stuff in our lives, of having tried to do this the formal and "right" way, so to speak–the privilege of having been screwed over so directly and so beautifully by the system, is the right to raise the middle finger to the institutions. Like, how dare you expect that I'm going to use your quiet procedures.

If you think about what peer review is, it's the exact opposite of what peer review should mean. "Peer review" should mean that you publish your article, and then the peers in the community review it, but in fact what it is is peer suppression. You take your article and you mail it off to somebody who you don't know. That person gets an early look at it. They might hold it up in review. They then inflict any changes that they want, or they reject it for reasons that make no sense. And then it's handed back to you.

But, what happens when you start talking about perception-mediated selection? For example, pseudocopulation in orchids, which we've discussed before, or in the predatory system with the other mussel lampsilis, where the perception of the bass matters, because it thinks that it's consuming a bait fish. But in fact, that's a fake bait fish filled with the young of the mussel.

If you look at Noam Chomsky sitting at MIT, you will realize that it was once the case that such people were much more common. You can look up a fellow, an old friend of mine named Serge Lang, and you could scarcely believe that such a person could have existed at Yale, but that person very much did exist. You can look at an old controversy about David Baltimore and a woman named Margo O'Toole, and the courage of Mark Ptashne and Walter Gilbert in fighting a Nobel Laureate when Margo O'Toole accused a colleague of the Nobel Laureate of misconduct, or at least, irreproducibility of results.  

If you look at our episode with Timur Kuran, we introduced you to a concept of preference falsification. Right now, the danger of the Andrew Yang and the Jeffrey Epstein situations is that they have conveniently communicated to many people, "Of course, we're going to mess with your sense-making. What is it that you're prepared to do about it?"

My contention is that the difficult case of Charles Lindbergh may have marked a turning point. In Lindbergh's case, he had flown solo to Europe from the United States and come back a hero, I believe in the late 1920s. Now, Lindbergh was a very difficult human being to deal with, because he was an authentic hero, and he was also somebody who believed in America First, and in isolationism, and given the Nazi menace in Europe, I think it's almost an unforgivable position. Nevertheless, the fact is that Lindberg commanded tremendous popularity, and that popularity could have been used to keep the U.S. out of a war.

What I find is that, since Lindbergh, it has been very rare to elevate any individual to the point where they can oppose our institutions. The Pete Seegers and Albert Einsteins of the world, who fought against McCarthyism, were a huge danger to the industry that was cropping up around anti-communism. When it came to the Vietnam War, it was very dangerous to have popular entertainers, like John Lennon, who were against it.

We saw recently the advent of Terms of Service changes to include deadnaming. Now if I say that Walter Carlos composed the album Switched-On Bach, or performed the album Switched-On Bach, that is a true statement. But because Walter Carlos became Wendy Carlos, I have no idea whether or not I can be accused of deadnaming. Now imagine that you have a hundred such rules, rules that are never spelled out, never clear, that can be enforced any which way to deny someone access to the major platforms. This is the great danger with this moment. We have unprecedented access, but we also have a gating function, which can be turned on at any time if we fall out of line with the institutions.

I want to read you one tweet that has been on my mind for quite some time. This tweet came from a contributor to The Washington Post, who is a professor at the Fletcher School and it said, "Good morning, Eric!"–I'm going to leave out the parentheses–"So I've read up on a few of your notions, and I have some thoughts, but my basic conclusion is simple: what's true isn't new, and what's new isn't true."

I think it's fantastic. I was stung by it, because at first I was under the impression that we were still living in a world in which the Washington Post, New York Times, Harvard, Stanford, what-have-you, control the major conversation. But, coming off of a recent date at the Ice House in Pasadena, which was a live gig with Peter Thiel, I've started to realize how powerful this new movement is. We can reach anyone, anywhere, and I think that the gated institutional narrative deserves to have the battle that it's been bruising for.*