Edit: Whoever doesn’t like it, go watch his discussion with Roger Penrose, etc. He’s so obviously out of his depth when he’s not talking about speculative pop science bullshit.
A TLDW on the rest of the video: “Gell-Mann Amnesia” is a term Michael Crichton coined. It refers to how people read articles in a newspaper about a topic they are experts in, realize it’s all horribly written trash, then turn the page and happily read the next article about an unfamiliar topic forgetting they just learned the newspaper is trash.
Collier expands on the idea to include the Gell-Mann Complement and Gell-Mann Recollection. The Recollection is what Kaku does, where he doesn’t know anything about a topic but presents a simple explanation on it anyway just because he’s an expert in something different. This frequently gets him into completely bonkers territory, like Deepak Chopra level bonkers.
It’s not like Penrose doesn’t get out of his depth pretty rapidly. I read The Emporer’s New Mind and my first reaction was has the guy never heard of a heuristic? Brains aren’t perfect Turing machines but sloppy approximaters that make “eh, good enough” decisions.
![References: [1] out of his ass](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/7d954d56-4739-4230-b641-f7a2ed05fa5c.jpeg){kind=link}
Yeah, this guy is so full of shit.
Edit: Whoever doesn’t like it, go watch his discussion with Roger Penrose, etc. He’s so obviously out of his depth when he’s not talking about speculative pop science bullshit.
Angela Collier’s video about this: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?t=2213 (Kaku part starts at 36:50).
A TLDW on the rest of the video: “Gell-Mann Amnesia” is a term Michael Crichton coined. It refers to how people read articles in a newspaper about a topic they are experts in, realize it’s all horribly written trash, then turn the page and happily read the next article about an unfamiliar topic forgetting they just learned the newspaper is trash.
Collier expands on the idea to include the Gell-Mann Complement and Gell-Mann Recollection. The Recollection is what Kaku does, where he doesn’t know anything about a topic but presents a simple explanation on it anyway just because he’s an expert in something different. This frequently gets him into completely bonkers territory, like Deepak Chopra level bonkers.
It’s not like Penrose doesn’t get out of his depth pretty rapidly. I read The Emporer’s New Mind and my first reaction was has the guy never heard of a heuristic? Brains aren’t perfect Turing machines but sloppy approximaters that make “eh, good enough” decisions.
Kaku is very good in physics, he just decided to make money instead of doing proper physics.
Penrose is also considered somewhat wacky in the field, mostly because of conformal cyclic cosmology, but does proper physics