The writer was a guest on Rogan this weekend, and he was very engaging, he did wander a bit. He has a particular kind of breadth-first associative intelligence that can cause listeners to become almost hypnotized by all the open cognitive loops his conversation creates, not unlike the kayfabe concept he's touting.
Similar things come up in the theory of musical composition where you create and resolve "tension," and you can drive the listeners perceptions by loading them up with mental anchors to notes and then resolving them all at once. If you learn to play any Bach, you can begin to see and articulate how he discovered it. Eric Weinsteins example of pro wrestling is identifying where it appears in narrative, but there are analogous concepts in areas like so-called, "neuro linguistic programming," where ideas are "stacked," and then collapsed into a conclusion. I only know about that part of it because I have some very diverse and interesting friends.
As a writer, I use a similar technique all the time, but in smaller more digestible loops, and only rarely with enough to take the reader into that kind of "hall of mirrors," effect great fiction writers use, where each new sentence introduces plot elements that cascade back through the story and closes loops on ideas you have already set up. Mystery novels are a the most simple example of it, where at the end _it all falls into place_.
Great auteur films like 13 Conversations About One Thing, and any Cohen Brother's pic uses a similar device.
Anyway it's fun and addictive, and while I'm sure smarter people than me have a more coherent theory of it, I can see why this fellow thinks it's important.
When you think about it, how our mind works is fundamentally the only actual problem. Everything else is just an artifact of it.
* "Breadth" as opposed to depth; in the sense of someone who knows a lot of relatively surface-level things across many areas, and can synthesize them. "Associative" in the way you're quickly associating concepts. In the same sense as "free association".
* The loops are analogous to the notes mentioned in the OP that are resolved all at once. Imagine a chain of associated concepts revealed over a conversation, sometimes with gaps between, that all lead towards a larger synthetic point.
They're saying that the order in which he visits topics and their details requires the listener to keep many topics in their head simultaneously for the duration of the discussion.
"breadth-first" is an order of graph traversal. In this case, it refers to covering all of the topics before drilling down into more detail in each topic, and later drilling down even further into topics.
The chief alternative order to discuss topics would be depth-first: to cover a major topic, and drill down as deep as you're going to go into the details, before moving onto the next major topic.
The open cognitive loops are the incompletely-covered topics that must be kept in the listener's head because they haven't been completely covered ("closed") yet, and will be re-visited in greater detail later.
> When you think about it, how our mind works is fundamentally the only actual problem. Everything else is just an artifact of it.
I think this nails it and is really the main thrust of the kayfabe analogy. It's also something I came to understand a few years ago, and have since had a lot of trouble getting others to understand the concept.
A bit of both obviously, but is this more “how our mind works” or “how our mind works while running the software loaded into it since birth”? (Where the range of easily available software options is surprisingly non-diverse in practice.)
Yeah... This is missing the point completely. It's a bit of a nihilistic point to understand, but essentially it's that, nothing matters except what a consensus of humans decides matters. And that consensus can be achieved by an entire country, or by a single human.
Eric Weinstein also has a podcast of his own, the most recent episode of which features his original lecture detailing the Geometric Unity model he discussed on Rogan (though even the dumbed-down version flies right over my head): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7rd04KzLcg
> He has a particular kind of breadth-first associative intelligence that can cause listeners to become almost hypnotized by all the open cognitive loops his conversation creates
Well said. Eric is also gaining a reputation for coining labels, the best known being the "Intellectual Dark Web", alongside lesser-known acronyms like EGO (Embedded Growth Obligation), GIN (Gated Institutional Narrative), and DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex).
My brother and I (both Portal listeners) were trying to recall & enumerate Eric's terms; we got the DISC, GIN, and EGO acronyms; I didn't remember that IDW was his term but that sounds right. Maybe the new one is GUT?
> If you learn to play any Bach, you can begin to see and articulate how he discovered it.
Can you elaborate some more about how Bach ties into this? I can see how sonata-allegro form goes back to the tonic key in the recapitulation, but I'm interested in hearing some more about Bach and these concepts.
Still a beginner, but in the two preludes I'm playing the phenomenon I'm using as an analogy is called "resolution," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_(music)). It happens most notably 8 bars from the end of BWV 999, and in every every 4th bar in BWV 846. We sense it as a kind of "relief." Everyone uses it, but I used Bach as an example (instead of say, pentatonic blues or jazz) because he stacks a bunch of variation in before the resolution.
The rhetorical analogue is creating tension in the listener by adding parenthetical ideas (open loops), and then making them agreeable by providing relief by "resolving," them to your theme. The link to "kayfabe," is that the stacked story lines in the wrestling narrative create the same tension and consequent audience and participant submission by overloading our ability to track the individual threads.
Eric Weinstein said on Rogan that he thinks this is what the current president did to win the last election, and that he picked it up literally from his time in the professional wrestling world. I tend to agree with him on that one, and am sympathetic to his idea because it reflects dynamics in other areas.
Similar things come up in the theory of musical composition where you create and resolve "tension," and you can drive the listeners perceptions by loading them up with mental anchors to notes and then resolving them all at once. If you learn to play any Bach, you can begin to see and articulate how he discovered it. Eric Weinsteins example of pro wrestling is identifying where it appears in narrative, but there are analogous concepts in areas like so-called, "neuro linguistic programming," where ideas are "stacked," and then collapsed into a conclusion. I only know about that part of it because I have some very diverse and interesting friends.
As a writer, I use a similar technique all the time, but in smaller more digestible loops, and only rarely with enough to take the reader into that kind of "hall of mirrors," effect great fiction writers use, where each new sentence introduces plot elements that cascade back through the story and closes loops on ideas you have already set up. Mystery novels are a the most simple example of it, where at the end _it all falls into place_.
Great auteur films like 13 Conversations About One Thing, and any Cohen Brother's pic uses a similar device.
Anyway it's fun and addictive, and while I'm sure smarter people than me have a more coherent theory of it, I can see why this fellow thinks it's important.
When you think about it, how our mind works is fundamentally the only actual problem. Everything else is just an artifact of it.