Friday, April 17, 2020

Here's an interesting interview with Eric Weinstein, where he complains about the elite circles of mathmeatics that kept him in the dark about what they were up to:

YouTube video

I can't speak about his physics theories, as I don't know the area (Sean Carroll has raised concern in the past on his podcast), but suspect they won't amount to much. But about the "secrets": it doesn't work quite like how he describes it, but he's right that most ph.d. students aren't going to make it, and won't get jobs. And the way elite power works is less organized than he thinks -- it's more like:

* Gossip picked-up at a conference that such-and-so student is not really as good as the letters say. Maybe everybody thinks some algebraic topologist is doing really promising work -- but an geometer hears through the grapevine, "mistake".

* Or, maybe a new department head gets in contact with an algebraic geometer who left the school, and he has some secret email contact and phone calls, to reassure him that when he becomes department head, he will "fix it". (Unbeknownst to him, the guy was actually friends with the people at the first school.)

* The editorial board at a journal has certain favorites, and these are mostly due to who their adviser is and the kinds of problems being investigated (which plug in to more trendy stuff). This comes out in the private discussions, not in the actual referee reports.

Things like that. There're also a lot of little secret chats, where somebody walks into another's office, shuts the door, and has an off-the-record conversation. For example, maybe so and so's history of sexual harassment will be discussed, and how this explains why such and so is uncomfortable to be around them. But most of the time, math at elite institutions works like how I will describe in my next post, which is that it's boring (all math, all the time). In fact, that's another way that Weinstein got math wrong: he suggested that he had warm and meaningful conversations with Eastern Europeans while at M.I.T. That may have happened to him, but that is pretty rare. I haven't heard that kind of engagement at Georgia Tech (or Berkeley, for that matter) since it ascended to a much higher-ranked school. Before the ascension, however, that kind of chit-chat was common, and fun to engage with. As I said, my next post will address the difference between medium-ranked and top-ranked academic departments, in regards to warmth and "fun".