There are other motivations besides money for cranks.

In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.

I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.

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qoez 4 days ago | parent [-]

The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.

> obscurantist

Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).

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hermitcrab 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading

Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.

	▲	qoez 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have, and that's definitely not my impression. Again to my ears that's just his natural way of expressing himself in a way that tries to express detailed ideas in a compact way. Nothing he says I find that difficult to understand with some effort (other than the hard physics). Personally I don't believe at all he's purposefully obfuscating what he's saying.

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crispyambulance 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading,

My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.

THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.

Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).

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qoez a day ago | parent [-]

Again I disagree. I've listened to many many of his interviews and it never comes across as indecipherable. If one person can understand it with some effort but some people find him hard to follow perhaps it's not that he's purposefully being hard to understand but that the audience not following isn't putting in enough effort or just giving up and calling him 'jargon filled' when there's actually a real clear understanding to be had behind what he's saying, to put it bluntly and at a risk of an angry response.

	▲	crispyambulance 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		... and in the cases where one does manage to put in the effort to understand what EW is actually saying, the ROI has been trite and uninteresting and could have been said with simpler words and gotten to the point in far fewer words. Example: See the conclusion of Nguyen's teardown response paper to "Economics as Gauge Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03460 Basically... 1) Tautology, 2) Inconclusive, 3) Not usable