Eric Weinstein’s Interview with TRIGGERnometry - Insights and Takeaways
Who: Eric Weinstein
Where: TRIGGERnometry
What: Rise of Artificial Intelligence, State of Our Institutions, Need for a New Economic Model, Unleashing Our Creative Spirit, Finding Meaning, and much, much more
When: June 28, 2023
How Long: 96 minutes
How to Access: YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts
“Eric’s the sort of guy who calls a spade a mono-handled manual earth extraction device.”
This is the top YouTube comment on Eric Weinstein’s interview with TRIGGERnometry. I love me some Eric Weinstein, but there’s certainly a grain of truth to that comment.
Eric is a polymath who holds a massive web of interconnected ideas, experiences and interests in that big, beautiful brain of his. He sometimes expresses these ideas in seemingly abstract, disjointed and confusing ways. He has mentioned elsewhere that he does this deliberately, because he trusts his audience’s intelligence enough to follow his chain of thought on complicated topics, and to do their own research if he can get them interested.
Compared to some of his other interviews over the years, this interview with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster from TRIGGERnometry was relatively easy to follow along. But this is Eric Weinstein we’re talking about. His “relatively easy” talk was still complex enough that I found myself constantly falling behind, pausing, reflecting, and scrubbing back and forth throughout the podcast.
But I also felt that this conversation was important enough that it deserved all that effort, and then some.
A Brief Overview of the Conversation
The interview opens with Eric sharing his observation that major areas of scientific and economic study have stagnated over the past few decades. When the hosts point to the effects of social media, and the rise of artificial intelligence as possible justifications for slowing things down, the conversation kicks into higher gear.
Eric explains why dealing with those specific issues requires more innovation, not less. Specifically, he talks about how our current economic models are unfit to tackle the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. He then goes into outlining how institutions manipulate scientific consensus to achieve certain goals, which, in turn, leads to people losing their faith in those institutions, inviting even higher levels of manipulation by institutions. Eric points out that some level of manipulation might actually be desirable. He points to how we, as a society, agree to believe in certain fictions, and why we need to be careful about choosing which ones we believe in.
The hosts then bring the conversation back to the need for a new economic model, and Eric shares his vision for a more inclusive, idea-based economy. Finally, Eric talks about why and how we can encourage people to unleash their creative potential, so that we can all find our own purpose and meaning in life.
Mind Map
Eric takes us on a number of different tangents throughout the conversation, and while they’re almost always fascinating and relevant, they do make me feel a bit lost when he returns to the larger points. I ultimately decided to create a mind map so that I could merrily follow him into the various rabbit holes he leads us to, and then find my way back home to have it all make sense in the end.
Here’s the mind map of Eric Weinstein’s conversation with TRIGGERnometry on June 28, 2023.
Click here (or on the mind map itself) to view a high resolution PDF version.
Click here (or scroll to the bottom of this page) to view a simple, text-based version of this map.
Memorable Quotes
Eric drops a boatload of fascinating quotes, made memorable due to their wit, wisdom, poignancy, or a combination of all three! Here’s a small selection:
This is the golden age of AI complementarity where a human being, making prompts, can ask the the large language model or the neural net questions, and the two of them, in dialog, can create something. It’s sort of like when humans and computers started playing chess together. This is going to quickly give way to the AI saying, ‘I can take it from here’.
All hell’s about to break loose. My question is, are you trying to figure out which way the wave is going to break, and get your surfboard in the water? Are you trying to figure out how to anticipate this? No! In general, we sit around worrying about it in the most inert way possible, and I just don’t understand the learned helplessness.
Does this query make my ass look fat?
Most of us die never having heard our own voices.
We went through life and death situations, but we didn’t have your hardship of lack of meaning. I think I’d asphyxiate if I had to lead your life.
It’s funny that people at the top are always rooting for you, and people a couple levels under are always trying to take the piss out of you.
The people you meet after cancellation will blow your mind. I never rode on a private plane until I’d been cancelled.
We started to get into a place where we couldn’t sustain the science, the science couldn’t sustain the technology, the technology couldn’t sustain the markets, and everything had been built with an obligation (of growth).
What we do is we keep you in a perpetual state of stupidity.
A nation is defined to be a group of people who’ve agreed to forget something in common.
If you’re not excited about the future, that code - society functions when old men plant trees under whose shade they’ll never sit - that broke.
Who are you, and what are you doing in my lab?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee may have a preference between the two of them (capitalism vs communism), but everything is telling you to innovate in a new economic market-based system.
You probably shouldn’t be telling Elon Musk that he’s not invited to the electric vehicle summit at the White House lawn. Get over yourselves!
Peter Theil and I have radically different politics. We can also finish each other’s sentences at times.
They keep talking to us about Schrödinger's cat, but they don’t even understand the beauty of Maxwell’s equations.
Come up with a jar with 5,000 sweets in it. Just take one out every week, and watch as the odds that you’re ever going to accomplish anything, or do anything, or inspire somebody, go down further and further.
There’s a last time you do everything, and you don’t realize when that is.
You take an ice cream cone, and boy, that ice cream cone looks good to you. But you only have one of them, and you could have (it yourself), or you could feed it to your kid. You’re gonna taste that ice cream cone so much more if you give it to your kid, coz to you it’s just an ice cream cone.
We have better guitarists right now than we’ve ever had. But they don’t mean as much as they meant in the 70s, when we were having idiotic arguments about (whether) Clapton, Page or Hendricks was the greatest guitarist of all time.
Pop Culture and Other References
Of course, as with most Eric Weinstein conversations, this one is sprinkled with a healthy dose of pop culture references, especially towards the last 30 minutes.
Songs
Poems
Shows
Stories
Books
Key Insights
If the mad map is too visually distracting for you, here’s a text-based outline of the key insights from this conversation.
Stagnation of Science
Most branches of scientific and economic study have stagnated over the past 25 years
Reasons for stagnation
Political ideology and dogma
Real and potential tragedy arising from nuclear weapons
What’s wrong with slowing down pace of innovation?
Trying to maintain status quo when innovation is needed is dangerous
The rise of AI calls for innovation in economics and society
Only two major fields have progressed materially in this period
Computation
Communication
Rise of Artificial Intelligence
AI and economics
The recent rise in AI-driven large language models are proof of AI’s impact on current economic models
We need a new model of economics; neither capitalism nor communism are equipped to handle AI
AI and the future
LLMs currently rely on prior human works
Their overall intelligence might be limited by how clever we’ve been
They don’t do well in areas where human literature is scarce
High level scientific subjects with less than 200 authors
One of these AI outfits might figure out a way to teach these models to do this no one has done
This could be built on top of the emergent behaviors these models already have
AI and art
AI-created art is also art
Singers often create beautiful art by pouring their souls into lyrics written by other people
This is no different than them bringing an AI-written song to life
Eric sings!
Our art does not reflect our time
Art can motivate people who aren’t otherwise inclined to adopt emerging technologies
There were songs about canals, trains, and cars when they were emerging technologies
Why doesn’t our art reflect our time?
Shrinking attention spans?
Unlikely, because the same people consume long-form podcasts and epic television series spanning multiple seasons
Crisis of meaning?
Crisis of Meaning
Most of us die never having heard our own voices
Each of us has to find our own meaning
Do something that’s hard, and inspire people
Don’t join fringe movements or cults
Don’t hurt anything that anyone else has built (throwing soups on paintings)
Start small, and build on it
Try creative, non-destructive ways of getting your point across (projection mapping)
Ensure you have a way to making a living
Manipulation of Scientific Consensus
Scientific consensus is often manipulated by official bodies
Why do they do this?
We assume that whatever’s being manipulated or lied about must be false
Often, institutions lie in order to simplify things and drive political change
This leads to people not understanding the depth of certain problems
Climate change and covid vaccines are examples of this
This, in turn, leads to loss of faith in institutions
Faith in Institutions
It’s easy to say we’ve lost faith in our institutions, but that’s not entirely true
We know that the airlines will overbook flights, overcharge us, lose our luggage
We also trust them completely with our lives, and the lives of our loved ones
This means that our institutions are both good and bad simultaneously
One of the reasons for this might be found in the theory of ‘Embedded Growth Obligations’
Embedded Growth Obligations
For about 25 years post World War II, we made high levels of broad and rapid growth
We built a society that assumed and required these high levels of growth
When this growth obligation can’t be met, institutions get into trouble
Innovations like checklists in airline and medical industries keep them from collapsing entirely
Fictions such as currency influx and manipulation help keep the illusion of growth alive
There would be a complete loss of confidence in our institutions without some of these fictions
We need smart, adult-level fictions that are useful, instead of dangerous fictions that cause more harm
Useful Fictions vs Dangerous Fictions
A nation is a group of people who’ve agreed to forget something in common
Useful fictions
All men are created equal
Wasn’t true when it was created, but was open ended
Was aspirational for future generations, who took the opportunity to eradicate slavery
I have a dream
Was based on Gandhi’s philosophy of non-pacifism
Was far more hardcore than most people understood
The people who did understand it showed infinite heroism in pursuit of civil rights
This type of heroism gets even more rare as we prioritize individual pleasure over multi-generational strategies
Dangerous fictions
The 1619 project
Puts slavery at the center of USA’s national narrative
Makes some important points about the role of Black Americans in the founding of USA
Does this at the cost of founding fathers and other national icons, and is therefore a destructive and dangerous fiction
The woke mind virus
The dude wall
Rachel Maddow disparaged the legacy of highly accomplished scientists by referring to a wall of their pictures at the Rockefeller Center as “the dude wall”
She failed to show the generosity of spirit that the people at the Rockefeller Center showed in inviting her
Evergreen university
When Bret Weinstein was under attack at Evergreen university, Eric reached out to several newspapers to see if they’d write that story
Bari Weiss wrote the story for New York Times
Sam Harris started talking about it on his podcast and other conversations
We’ve got to stop blaming and alienating people like that for their blind spots
New Economic Model
Our current, fossil fuel based economic models need to break in one of three ways
A system that doesn’t have the current growth obligations
An idea-based system (ideas per unit of energy consumed)
Deregulate a small number of high-output individuals
Cultivate a culture of service to ensure a fair distribution of wealth
We’ll need to invite more people to these conversations
Freaks and weirdos by standard definition
Neurologically atypical people
“Learning disabled” people
People you might otherwise disagree with
Unshackling the Creative Spirit
Most people are unable to unleash their creative potential for multiple reasons
Nihilism / lack of belief
Stop being cynical about other people’s ideas, beliefs and actions
We need to inspire people by putting forward a positive vision and showing them what’s possible
Pick any topic you’re interested in - from something mundane like coffee beans to radical social causes
Learn the tricks of your new trade
Join up with others interested in the same subject
Find new and interesting ways of expressing it
Fear of standing out
We have slightly less than 5,000 productive weeks in life
Store 5,000 sweets in a jar and take one out every week
Watch as the odds of you accomplishing anything worthwhile dwindle
Fear of leaving comfort zone
There’s a last time you do everything and you don’t realize when that is in real-time
Think about how many of these “deaths” can you endure before you actually die
Figure out ways to reclaim some of those “dead” parts
Like I said at the beginning of this article, this is an extremely important conversation, and you should most definitely watch or listen to the entire episode - multiple times.
I hope that the mind map and other references I’ve provided here will help you synthesize the conversation.
Cheers!