Reaction & Commentary
Thinking which is this person is not fit to be the president of Harvard University and why is that because they’re going to get called a name this was made all about race oh what you can’t tolerate scholarship of this quality from a black female it’s like you’re starting I wasn’t even
Questioning this before but now you’re saying a Scholar’s scholar me thinks that does protest too much there’s a quote from Howard Jacobson that said I hope Claudine gay marks the start of people who know nothing losing their jobs look we need to bring back exclusion we’re talking way too much
About inclusion inclusion and exclusion are two halves of normal process Claud and gay needed to be excluded from that office not included now if you told me that condalisa Rice was the president of Harvard she’s black she’s female and I don’t agree with her politically but I don’t think many
People would have a qualification issue with cond Lisa rice or let’s say James Gates is a black man distinguished physicist this has to do with people coming from weaker subjects particularly activist subjects subjects that didn’t exist before the late 60s early 70s when all of these things were created you know to
An extent when you had I don’t know if you recall the the pictures of what is it Willard straight Hall at Cornell with the black students emerging with weapons um you know there was a revolutionary fervor at the end of the’ 60s early ’70s and you have people
Creating women’s studies uh you know black studies African-American studies and these these departments were basically born of activism more than scholarship I’m not saying no scholarship gets done there but scholarship and activism are essentially fused and many of us think activism is great just don’t do it next to our
Physics and math and computer science and music departments you know if what you’re really there to do is to ignore certain things and accentuate others and not search for the truth um that’s not an ignoble Pursuit it’s just that’s not what scholarship is scholarship is about understanding
Things and getting them right and we we’ve gone down a terrible turn but you know just consider I think your listeners uh might enjoy Googling the string um cook cook something up to ease him out that was a phrase that was used uh internally in documents within
Harvard when um a Kenyon was ejected from the Harvard economics Department um back in the 60s and what had really happened is that this guy had had passed all of his exams he was fully qualified was working on his dis ation to become a Harvard PhD in economics and the university I think
Decided that it didn’t like an African man sleeping with white women in in America and it got rid of him even though he was in good standing that the only reason we know about that is that turned out to be Barack Obama senior so Harvard conspired 100% with the state department
To destroy the career of Barack Obama senior and that’s how Harvard works in the star Chambers it cooks and what does it do it Cooks things up it Cooks up stories it Cooks up um attribution it gives people credit for things that they didn’t do first it takes credit away from other
People um I was there in the mid90s when it destroyed my wife’s career um through something a Star Chamber called the Harvard jobs uh Market meeting and all the economists go into a closed room they lock the door and they say who’s got a good student and my wife was the
Student of a Nobel uh Award winner in economics and she had um done something which was to bring an entirely new kind of mathematics into economic theory to replace something called the marginal Revolution a new form of differential calculus called gagee Theory and a guy named Dale Jorgenson who recently died said
Nope so even though a Nobel level Economist was promoting her and saying this is great stuff she should go anywhere in the country a woman of color from the developing World um an old white guy just said no and you know in a second uh she her position in
The world is reordered in the pile and why were they doing this because they wanted to fix the CPI uh and I don’t mean fix as in cure it I mean fix as in fixing a baseball game um because the CPI is used to transfer wealth what’s CPI the Consumer
Price Index and the reason it’s important is that mostly what the government does after its military is uh entitlements Social Security payments Medicare payments and those are indexed to inflation and the way in which it takes in money is through taxes and those tax brackets are indexed to
Inflation so it’s very funny everybody focuses on like Central Banking and the FED but the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains the statistic that transfers billions and billions of dollars and if the CPI is overstated uh it pays out a lot of money and takes in very little money and if
It’s if you can get it to be understated uh then you get to take in much more money you don’t have to pay old and sick people and that’s what the Harvard Department was doing there’s a single figure that mediates everything that gets squeezed through how funny and
And so what we we were doing as a collaboration was showing the right mathematical framework to calculate the CPI but that would have allowed less [ __ ] it would have allowed less yeah to use the technical term sir so uh but but the point being that the Harvard jobs Market meeting inside of the
Harvard economics department is a St chamber the way the uh immigration um status of Obama’s father was a star chamber as was the way in which my PhD was over and over again Harvard closes its doors and it makes stuff up this sounds unsalvageable as somebody no no
No it sounds like it sounds like we’ve got the people leading it have gotten in through some combination of diversity Equity inclusion nepotism gameplaying harsh elbows seems like the people they just hired a guy named Daniel S Fred who’s one of the greatest mathematicians alive in my
Area um Dan and I might disagree about string theory we can have scholarly disagreements just had lunch with him in Austin Texas um that guy’s a scholar through and through I can disagree with him I can fight with him uh I can I can have my differences I would support him 100% as
A scholar to take over uh you know as a as a Provost or Dean if they were interested there’s no shortage of absolutely fantastic people at Harvard but if that unable or unwilling to play the political games in know that are required unless they’re prepared to file
Their elbows down to a sharp Point well this is what Bill Amman is doing this so confusing I just I have the feeling I don’t know this guy at all don’t have positive negative I thought you would have cross paths with him at some point you would think there are various people
Who I don’t cross paths with for whatever reason um I don’t even think we follow each other or maybe I follow him but I don’t think he follows me um I think that the problem is is that a lot of of these people don’t know how the research Game Works they think about
This in terms of the Harvard Business School the law school the undergraduate Alumni network they don’t see the part of Harvard that actually produces the Mystique you know the analogue of the racing for the exotic car and I I worry that the right thing to do right now is to appoint a
Kenly research oriented person in a super rigorous field it doesn’t even have to be stem like music is an incredibly rigorous feel but what we need right now is rigor we don’t need another person from uh the social sciences at this moment we need somebody to reestablish that Harvard is an
Intolerant place that it has the highest possible standards it’s unabashedly elitist it’s unabashedly American and it cannot live with Dei Dei is a parasitization of our best hopes and dreams and we have to recognize that Dei has to be destroyed so that goals like diversity and getting the right people into the
Room are not sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity and lack of Ethics it’s interesting that at places like Yale they had made some changes to the ways that grades and diversity account for admissions but they didn’t get rid of legacy admissions which kind of tells you everything that you need to know
About what’s being protected no I don’t think it does is this not another way to ensure that the people just to ensure that power is is held in the people who already have it but very soon this thing isn’t going to be worth very much I don’t think the
People care I think this is the same as looking at why Marvel are going downhill yeah same there are a lot of movies coming out at the moment I think the most recent Star Wars director openly said I enjoy making movies that make men feel uncomfortable to John Stewart Star Wars
Yeah maybe one of the most male dominated audience movies that I can think of yes it’s self-destructed so what I’m trying to say is is that you can you can say oh we’re going to keep things open for legacy admissions right but very soon you’re not going to want to be
Associated with I mean already Yale has mismanaged its research University for years it made a very bad decision not to go hard on on sciences and stem uh and focused in my opinion too much on on softer Fields um you know so what happens when Harvard is no longer that
Prestigious if people start laughing at Harvard uh what good is it going to be that you can get your kids I don’t disagree but I think people are so out of touch the people who are in power are unable or unwilling to see just how just how quickly the stock price is
Plummeting I don’t think that they’re able to see this thinking about it especially using the the Marvel example again or some of the things that are coming out of Disney you have a Quantified figure what was the opening weekend at the box office you know exactly where this
Is there are fewer places to hide when it comes to that here’s the number what did it cost what did you make opening weekend right you have projections and you have targets presumably that you want to hit if that number doesn’t cause people to think maybe we don’t need
Another narrative about an all female cast that is better than the men without overcoming any chall not looking at is um you know if you look at Mike Hopkins work on the con karian variant in the mathematics Department that’s like opening opening weekend statistics man great stuff happens at
Harvard make no mistake about Harvard is an amazing and horrible place and we’re going to all now focus on how dumb it is and how horrible it is and like then you’re not seeing the tragedy you’re not seeing look I didn’t have an adviser I one of
The only people you’ll ever meet with a PhD that had no advisor um but the guy who saved me was named RL bot and RL bot discovered something that’s so important called bot periodicity that if I could convey it to you your mind would be uh you you’d think DMT was
Children uh it has to do with the fact that there are only four systems of numbers that have particular property and one of those sets of numbers spins a Maro around with the other three with an eight-fold sort of symmetry who knew that this thing was even possible it’s
Just it’s an incredible fact about the world um I associate him with Harvard that’s unud there’s no there’s no one in the world who can tell me that bot periodicity wasn’t one of the most important things that happened in the 20th century and to have a person like
That you know just feet from John Tate uh I could go on and on about all the real things that happened in Harvard what we need right now look I would love to run for president of Harvard if claudian gay can be president of Harvard so can I and
What we need is somebody who’s been wronged by Harvard you need somebody who has not been on this kind of escalator to power who’s constantly shown Love by the system there are all sorts of people that represent what I call Black Sheep Harvard you’ve got white sheep Harvard
And black sheep Harvard and black sheep Harvard is no less important but it’s the people who are not loved by the system who don’t know when to shut up the people who will take a stand and who will zig when everyone else zags why would that be
Useful because we’ve got to purge the University of the things that don’t work and it’s going to be ugly it’s going to be unpleasant it’s going to be a civil war on the faculty I was learning about an idea the abalene Paradox it’s one of my one of
One of my favorite ideas from last JM the abalene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group’s members because each member assumes the others approve of it that explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together
Kind of like the emperor new clothes an acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there at a business meeting someone suggests an idea that he thinks
The others will like recruiting a trans influencer is the face of the brand each member has misgivings about this but assumes the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out so everyone app approves of the idea despite no one liking it abene Paradox
Yeah um I like it uh it has a lot to do with Timor quran’s theory of preference falsification I think that that’s not exactly how it happens Al so most of the way these things work is that you’re afraid to speak like Le let’s predict what’s going to be said when this
Debuts sour grapes uh grifter charlatan uh Eric doesn’t like women Eric doesn’t like black people oh uh such snobbery what has he ever done you know we know what every action brings about in terms of its response and that’s kind of why we don’t speak up it’s just not worth it there
These horrible people that follow you around looking for you to say anything like I don’t know I don’t I don’t know if she’s qualified it’s like did he say it can we get our knives out that thing has to be driven out of the University we can’t
Have these people it’s not just in the University no no but I’m saying the universities are special because the if everyone is going to take power later passes through them you can’t afford to lose them you can’t afford to lose your news media you can’t afford to lose your universities you can’t afford
To lose your political parties three for three at the moment that’s right yeah but look it’s worth fighting for so you know they’ll call me a bunch of names they’ll try to deface my Wikipedia entry that’s what they’ll do in other news this episode is brought to you by
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