Eric Weinstein

Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media. Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy". This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble. This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this. law360.com/articles/2542517/…

Existence of Yang Mills? It’s just tying up a lose end for the hyper mathematically minded. I don’t think any physicist gives af. We have been doing precision calculations for decades. Of course it exists. But sure, would be nice to have a proof.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."

Immigration policy must be driven by the present, not the past, and business leaders are too terrified of the left AND the right to acknowledge this. Recent H1B discourse revolves around a longstanding immigration sleight-of-hand. H1B proponents point to exceptional people who came here decades ago as if they represent the current state of the program in the same way that advocates for low-skill/illegal immigration point to very favorable immigrant crime/welfare/education/etc statistics that do, in truth, have them beating native-born Americans on many fronts. It is all a sham. The world that created those statistics, people, and businesses no longer exists. Brilliant but desperate Vietnamese fathers who fled communism have nothing in common with young men from Honduras, and the crime rates/economic acccomplishments/integration of the former should not be used to justify mass migration of the latter. Nor should the accomplishments of people who managed to get an H1B visa in the 90s (when the program was capped to just 65,000 visas) be used to justify staffing agencies and tech companies using the program to replace American jobs for less money. The obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on, no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on. I am a longtime outspoken advocate for stealing the best people from other countries to make our own better, runaway abuse of existing programs robs the government of the worker trust required to do so. Lots of people in the tech space know this. Even the dumb people are smart enough to see it. Nobody actually believes these are all incredible people with unique talents performing jobs no American can. Everyone knows the guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn't meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa. Unfortunately, most people with power or profile are terrified that any public statement or acknowledgement will get them attacked by the right (You guys have been screwing over American workers for years with visa abuse, you damn hypocrite!) or the left (You are racist, sexist, misogynist, and sucking up to this fascist administration!). Or, more likely, both. I know too many tech execs in particular who feel trapped, like the only winning move is to stay silent. JD is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with. Critics will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people.

Could it happen here? ‘France is a warning that our civilisation is not immortal.’ My column in this week’s @spectator spectator.com/article/france…

China has selected its first group of young researchers to receive funding for up to 15 years, in one of the longest research grants on offer to scientists globally go.nature.com/4z4Q3pw

I am researching now. And they were heavy weights in questions of immigration, yes. I also realised that people like @ericweinstein were actively working on alternative solutions, better ways to deal with immigration by adapting the Coase theorem. He saw it coming. As a young man, working actually for the UN! The UN did obviously not listen. Guess it was "too sophisticated" and most of those illiterate didn't even understand his approach/solution. And as per today, some lunatics are smearing him being the Immigration Ultron. Just saying.

In the US, we graduate on the order of 1000 math PhDs a year, and there are about 300 postdoc jobs (and ~70 tenure track jobs three years later). So no, a math PhD is not, and has never been, a "gold medal" (in the sense of an academic position). And is "merit" about potential or about actual results? I really hope it's not the former (which is much more error prone to measure)! About Zhang specifically, there's much more to his story than what's been reported, and it's devastating how much he suffered before his breakthrough.

In April 2013, a 58-year-old mathematician named Yitang Zhang submitted a paper to the prestigious Annals of Mathematics. At the time, he was virtually unknown in the mathematical community. After earning his PhD from Purdue University in 1991, Zhang struggled to find a permanent academic position. For years, he worked outside academia, including at a Subway sandwich shop, before eventually becoming a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught undergraduate mathematics. Yet throughout those difficult years, he continued pursuing his own mathematical research, particularly the mysteries of prime numbers. In July 2012, while visiting a friend in Colorado, Zhang was sitting quietly in the backyard when an idea came to him. He had spent three years working on a problem involving the gaps between prime numbers, and suddenly he saw a way past an obstacle that had frustrated some of the world's leading number theorists. Over the following months, he carefully developed that insight into a rigorous mathematical proof. On April 17, 2013, he submitted his manuscript to the Annals of Mathematics. The response was remarkable. Within just three weeks, the referees had delivered an unusually enthusiastic report, recognizing the work as a landmark achievement. The paper was formally accepted on May 21. For centuries, mathematicians had wondered whether infinitely many pairs of prime numbers could occur within some fixed distance of one another. The famous twin prime conjecture predicts that infinitely many pairs differ by exactly 2, such as 11 and 13 or 17 and 19. Zhang did not prove the twin prime conjecture itself. Instead, he established something that had never been proved before: there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes whose difference is less than 70 million. Seventy million might seem enormous when compared with 2. But the crucial breakthrough was that the gap was bounded by a fixed number, no matter how far along the number line one went. It was the first proof that bounded gaps between consecutive primes occur infinitely often. His discovery opened an entirely new chapter in number theory, inspiring mathematicians around the world to improve his bound. In 2014, Zhang received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his extraordinary achievement.

FRANCE: Rioters have set fire to the historic City Hall in Limoges, France, causing its roof to burn and its clock tower to collapse. Built in 1883, the 143 year old landmark survived 2 world wars and was designated a protected historical monument in 1975. It’s gone now.

JUST IN: Association for Human Mathematics urges all mathematicians to boycott OpenAI following its release of 700+ mathematical research files.