There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.