Talk:Eric Weinstein

Issues

I removed some nonsense. The page is entirely too self-congratulatory... anyone can call themselves a polymath or generously describe their work as high impact, but Wikipedia should not be written as a form of promotional materials. In addition, I removed the part about Weinstein's unusualness in not having an advisor. Clearly he has one as it is a requirement for the PhD. It may be that he didn't require the close supervision some students do, but there are actually many such independent people that get PhDs, so his situation is not so unusual. Additionally, I found his advisor was Raoul Bott (see list of PhD students in [1]). While Bott has had students like Stephen Smale that did not require much supervision, I think it's putting down the great man to view his mentorship as unworthy of even a mere mention. Advisors often do things that are not highly visible or readily appreciated by their advisees...could be a suggestion here and there, encouragement when things go badly, etc. --DudeOnTheStreet (talk) 20:48, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

I added a "peacock" tag for now. One current concern is that the article makes multiple claims of how few scholars can understand how great Weinstein's contributions are, due to their limited backgrounds... if this can't be adequately sourced, it needs to be removed. --DudeOnTheStreet (talk) 18:10, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Conflict of interest

I noticed that the uploader of the photo, who also wrote the article, claims to be the copyright holder. The photo is credited to Adil Abdulali; a Google search finds an "Adil Abdulali" who is a close associate of the subject of this article. This goes a long way to explaining the peacock language and credulity apparent in the article. I am only making this clear so that policy (WP:COI) will be followed here. I have no opinion as to the merit of the subject's work or appropriateness as a topic for Wikipedia. --DudeOnTheStreet (talk) 05:42, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Notability?

I see nothing in this article that asserts the subject's notability. The article only has 2 references, both by the article's subject and one of them is his PhD thesis! Searching the web I could find nothing on him except a Guardian article which appears to be by a friend of his. As it stands, the article seems to be a simple vanity page. Anyone who feels the page should stay (preferably not Eric himself, or a friend) needs to address these concerns, otherwise I will push for deletion. Ashmoo (talk) 11:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree that this article does not pass notability, and should be removed. --DFRussia (talk) 12:41, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Article "Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems"

"Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/23/eric-weinstein-answer-physics-problems

"On Thursday in Oxford he will begin to outline his ideas to the rest of the mathematics and physics community."

- Obviously, this is most likely to prove just an interesting failure, but I'm sure we'll all know soon.

-- 186.221.163.211 (talk) 16:35, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

OK. So he has given his lecture and hasn't really made any big impact other than a few mild "unlikely to be true, but some interesting maths". This leads me to believe that he is not really notable enough for a wikipedia article. If 3rd party commentaries start appearing from people who aren't friends or colleagues then I think he should be reincluded in the article. As it is, most of the cites are direct links to his own papers, which is a major red flag for non-notability. Anyone notable enough for a WP article will have lots of 3rd parties referring to their work. Please see WP:NOT. Ashmoo (talk) 22:35, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

He is notable due to the amount of media interest in his ideas in the areas of economics and physics. References include The Economist and New Scientist.--Racklever (talk) 06:22, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, please supply these references. As the only references so far as two mentions in the Guardian, by his friends and two blog posts (New Scientist and a personal blog at Columbia). Anyone who supports inclusion is going to need to do better than that to maintain the article. Please read WP:BIO for help in what you need. Ashmoo (talk) 09:57, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

There are quite a few more press sources [2][3][4] most just repeating the guardian article, so not worth citing but contributing to notability.--Salix (talk): 10:33, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Getting there. Sadly, these sources fail the 'intellectually independent of each other,[4] and independent of the subject.[5]' clause of the Basic Criteria section, because they are all just commentaries on the initial report. Ashmoo (talk) 12:42, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

What's more 90% of the article ISN'T about the interest he received for his TOE claims. The mentions of his economic theories is all primary sources (if at all). As mentioned, this needs to be fixed up ASAP to avoid a Request for Deletion motion being tabled. Ashmoo (talk) 12:03, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Finance section

I am not an expert on Mr. Weinstein, but I do know his paper in Risk described in the Finance section. The write-up here strikes me as distorted to suggest that the paper anticipated or predicted the 2007 financial crisis. The paper proposes a method for risk-adjustment of hedge fund returns in which some of the positions have multiple noisy measurements of value (as opposed to assets with clearly-determinable price like liquid common stocks on the one hand, or little useful market information about price like real estate on the other).

Mortgage securities are used for the example, but the suggestions in the paper apply equally well to any position with moderate pricing uncertainty. Moreover the type of mortgage derivatives (inverse floaters, which have small credit risk but large interest rate risk) are only distantly related to the credit-based structured mortgage products (with large credit risk but little interest rate risk) which were so problematic five years later. Finally, the issues considered in the paper apply only to hedge fund reporting, not to large financial institution liquidity or solvency.

I don't think anyone reading this paper in 2002 would have been more likely to expect the financial crisis before it happened, nor to understand it better once it had. Therefore, mentioning that it was published five years before the financial crisis, and describing it as highlighting risks of mortgage derivatives, are misleading.

Since nothing is actually false and others may be more familiar with Mr. Weinstein, I will leave it alone for now. But if no one posts objections, or fixes it on their own, I will remove what I consider to be the misleading phrases.

AaCBrown (talk) 14:22, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Seeing no objections, I made the changes.

AaCBrown (talk) 13:44, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

While I was in the neighborhood, I decided to add a short section on financial crisis talks given by the subject, based on a chapter in James Weatherall's The Physics of Wall Street. This forms the basis for much of the subject's reputation and media coverage, so I thought it should be in the article.

AaCBrown (talk) 20:46, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the perspective. The article suffers from mostly being edited by friends of the subject, so a more neutral opinion by someone in the field is greatly appreciated. Ashmoo (talk) 11:34, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Article for deletion

racklever, if you read this talk page, I had talked about deletion multiple times and never received a satisfactory response. My old comments address the "17 references". Ashmoo (talk) 16:27, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Time to delete

It's now mid-2016 and it doesn't seem to me to have gotten any stronger in the face of WP:NOT. The lede still needs WP:RS to support the significance (if any) "observerse" stuff, but I don't think we're going to find them precisely because the whole Geometric Unity thing isn't remotely near mainline physics. (That's not to say it's wrong, but we need an RS -- or a few in this case -- that takes it seriously and speaks for it.) Finally, there's no mention of Weinstein's position at Thiel, which is probably the only uncontroversial fact. Given the time over which this issue has been present, I reckon it now meets WP:SPEEDY. The other option would be to just fix the thing, but I think there may even be a WP:BLP issue at stake. I've heard Weinstein speak, and from that admittedly only one session he sounds smart, reasonable, and pretty straight up. If I was him, I'd be embarrassed at this article and so I think we'd be doing him a favor by deleting it. In fact I'd even go as far as tagging for WP:BLPPROD, but it looks like that's only allowed for WP:BLP articles without any references. Tagging for regular WP:PROD. Sleety Dribble (talk) 22:50, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Sleety Dribble, why not take this article to WP:AFD? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:09, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: that would be a perfectly good approach too. I only tagged for PROD because, as I'd explained, the length of time that concerns over notability have been present suggested (to me) that there would be no opposition. As was pointed out when my tag was so rapidly (in under 2 hours) reverted, "PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected", but as I say that condition was met and so I thought it worthwhile saving time and effort by going for a speedy. @Racklever: note that the policy is not (emphases added) "PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is possible", but rather "PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected". As I was the one doing the tagging, I am the only one in a position to say what I expected. Now presumably you *do* have an objection that is substantive (i.e. other than the inapplicable one concerning the suitability or otherwise of the PROD itself), so it would have been nice had you deigned to let us know what it is at the same time as removing the tag. Doing so, while not required, is recommended. Back to @Jweiss11: I only came by this page after listening to a talk by Weinstein, to find out more about him. Finding it in what I considered to be a bit of a mess, I started hunting down citations and other information (e.g. on his Thiel position), to try to help improve it and fix the problems. However, after a couple of hours or so of work, checking back and forth across umpteen sites, reading related articles and so on, I concluded that IMHO, fixing was not really possible, and that the concerns over notability, expressed for almost five years now and never really addressed (notwithstanding an assertion to the contrary by Racklever which I think was quite thoroughly handled by Ashmoo on this Talk page) were probably valid and that deletion was indeed warranted. That 2+ hours of work were discarded with what seems to me barely a thought (certainly little or no thought as to how the PROD rules actually work) by Racklever, and I hope you can understand that I'm reluctant to spend any more time, and that includes the time needed to nurse the thing through a WP:AFD, on something so non-notable when that time stands a high risk of being rendered wasted by another editor without much thought or any discussion. To be clear, my concern here is not with an objection being raised to my WP:PROD -- that's what it's there for, and the tag being removed is absolutely fine. My concern is that it was dismissed so glibly. If you think the concerns over WP:NOT have any merit, I'll leave it to you to attempt a WP:AFD. If not, no problem. Either way, I'm outa here. Sleety Dribble (talk) 13:58, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

I did some editing of this page a few years back, but I have no strong feelings about its overall quality or importance. I don't object to either retention or deletion. As I mentioned when I did the edits, I'm not a Weinstein expert, I just corrected some of the stuff I knew about. AaCBrown (talk) 17:25, 29 September 2016 (UTC)