I think Weinstein has a shitty attitude against academia, but I also see the point of how the process of coming up with new ideas in academia is a Catch-22 situation where you have to develop and thoroughly prove your theories through published literature and peer review before you can even start getting the discussions and feedback needed to develop your theories to the point where you can submit them through peer review, especially ones as ambitious and grandiose as a theory of everything.
Does academia lack a playground where new theories can rise and fall as they're presented, discussed, and played with by people in the relevant fields? Perhaps a pseudo-academic arena of journals, conferences, etc, where people just get to fuck around with ideas without taking them too serious, and give them room to grow if there's really something there?
A snark response is that they already have that and it's called the Internet, but I'm talking about something tightly intertwined with actual academia.
The main schism seems to be from both sides here (which is why I called Weinstein's attitude shitty): one where the claimant has to sound like a raving lunatic with no hard evidence to back him/her up, desperate to be taken seriously, and the establishment has to dismiss the claims for those reasons and not even entertain the possibility (who can blame them, crackpot theories aren't in short supply). All because both sides are too fucking serious. Like fucking chill. Your theory could be bunk, so have fun with it, but it could develop into something nice too, so maybe have a space for it in academic circles to give it a chance to evolve instead of strangling it at birth.
1/2
