Eric Weinstein calls Trump an “existential risk,” and no one calls him out on it, neither Joe Rogan nor anyone in the comments. It completely goes over everyone’s heads. Maybe Joe didn’t understand what Eric meant by existential risk. In layman terms, it means that Trump being in office is a threat to the existence/survival of humanity.
Yeah…Eric is not exactly holding back. To say that Trump threatens the survival of humanity itself, is a worse indictment than Trump merely being racist or ignorant, but such comments would have generated much more rebuke if uttered by someone with 50 fewer IQ points and not a mathematical physicist, such as a journalist or politician. Same for Eric calling ‘gender binaries’ a form of oppression, which Joe pushed back on minimally and was ignored in the comments.
This agrees with the post earlier about intellectualism and social currency. Eric wins the approval of Rogan and viewers by arguing that facts and science should be separate from politics, which is the IDW-equivalent of preaching to the choir, and builds intellectual credibly by talking about advanced physics topics, so people are more inclined to take his non-physics observations equally seriously, because he’s perceived/judged by viewers and Rogan as being motivated by facts, reason, and intellectual inquiry, than mere partisan bias.
The way to thwart intellectual wizardry and misdirection is to ask specific, clarifying questions. Joe should have asked how Trump is a risk or what evidence there is of Trump being a risk, which would have forced Eric to have to explain his reasoning and evidence. Empirical evidence is also useful, but can be dismissed as being insufficient: evidence that Trump is not a risk does not prove he is not (argumentum ad ignorantiam), but given the epistemological limitations of knowing how a non-determinate system will unfold, reason and empirical evidence is our only recourse.
But Eric being a genius among geniuses (and a contender for one of the 500 smartest people alive) does not change the fact that his fears are almost certainly irrational. Trump is not a threat whatsoever. Trump is someone who want to be liked and project the outward appearance of being extremely wealthy and successful. You think ending the world would help in that regard? If Trump is supposed to be a threat to society, the evidence in terms of geopolitical stability, Trump’s tendency to defer to experts, and willingness of foreign leaders to work with Trump, shows otherwise.