What keeps Elon Musk and Eric Weinstein up at night?

So Eric Weinstein has tended to frighten me since I first heard him on Rubin. He frightens me in the way I imagine a young skateboarder is frightened standing on top of a large ramp waiting to "drop in" for the first time.

His intellectual values are a near inversion of mine, with the exceptions of free speech and honest inquiry. In a way I see him as something of my intentionally created shadow self .. the road not taken so to speak .. Lets call it the "marginalized" interests I created as the structure of my personality was formed around the pursuit of different goals.

In 4th or 5th grade I started telling people I wanted to be a physicist when I grew up. By 7th or 8th grade I was also thinking about psychology. In high-school I fumbled my way through reading all of Einstein's papers. Sr year of high-school I did a 30min speech for one class in which I defined wisdom as "perception, perspective and prediction" and presented it as a path toward interpersonal problem solving. I was 17.

I don't know that a person's life can truly be separated from their ideas, so primarily I'm just using that to illustrate how, by that age, I was already doing philosophy, although I didn't realize it. While I've wished on occasion that I had a mind like Musk or Weinstein, and I admit that I was tempted toward physics again, after attending a lecture by Brian Greene following the 1999 release of his book The Elegant Universe .. but it was never going to be a serious interest. -- And it's essentially because of my response to the questions he asked on Rogan's recent episode #1320.

What good does it do to unlock the secrets of the universe when we as a people are most likely to use those secrets to exterminate ourselves in some way? What if we create AI that decides to kill us or "hack" the very structure of the universe in a way that exterminates all life accidentally?

The ompa-loompas continue to "science" while the narcissistic moralist continue to undo "wisdom." Did they learn nothing from Jurassic Park?

How did philosophy stop being about the love of wisdom? Do we need a new field? - Wisdom studies? -- And how is it these great minds - Musk and Weinstein - have spent so much time frightened by the immaturity of the species to make good decisions with the products of science -- while continuing to work those problems, rather than the human problem? Hmmm.

We need a new Renaissance. An entire flattening and ground-up reconstruction of the Academy from 1st grade through the PhD level. We need a positive definition of mental health as well as a healthy society (rather than a perfect society). And, most importantly, we need a focus on the development of wisdom on the micro (individual) and macro (memeplex) levels.

(Well GOSH that was MUCH longer than intended.)

#philosophy #education #wisdom #EricWeinstein #Rogan