{"id":2931,"date":"2016-10-19T20:52:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T00:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2016-12-10T05:02:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T10:02:55","slug":"may-reason-trump-the-trump-in-all-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2931","title":{"rendered":"May reason trump the Trump in all of us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two years ago, when I was the target\u00a0of an online\u00a0shaming campaign, what helped\u00a0me through it were hundreds of messages of support from friends, slight acquaintances, and strangers of every background. \u00a0I vowed then<\/a> to return the favor, by standing up when I saw decent people unfairly shamed. \u00a0Today I have an\u00a0opportunity to make good.<\/p>\n

Some time ago\u00a0I had the privilege of interacting a bit with Sam Altman<\/a>, president of the famed\u00a0startup incubator Y Combinator<\/a> (and a guy who’s thanked in pretty much everything Paul Graham writes<\/a>). \u00a0By way of our\u00a0mutual friend, the renowned former quantum computing researcher Michael Nielsen<\/a>, Sam got in touch with me to solicit suggestions for “outside-the-box” scientists and writers, for a new grant program that Y Combinator was starting. I found Sam eager to delve into the merits of any suggestion, however outlandish, and was delighted to be able to make a difference for a few talented people who needed support.<\/p>\n

Sam has also been one of the Silicon Valley leaders who’s written<\/a> most clearly\u00a0and openly about the threat to America posed by Donald Trump and the need to stop him, and he’s donated tens of thousands of dollars to anti-Trump causes. \u00a0Needless to say, I supported\u00a0Sam on\u00a0that as well.<\/p>\n

Now Sam is under attack on social media, and there are even calls for him to resign<\/a>\u00a0as the president of Y Combinator. \u00a0Like me two years ago, Sam has instantly become the corporeal embodiment of the “nerd privilege” that keeps the marginalized\u00a0out of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Why? Because, despite his own emphatic\u00a0anti-Trump views, Sam rejected demands to fire Peter Thiel<\/a> (who has an advisory role at Y Combinator) because of\u00a0Thiel’s support for Trump. \u00a0Sam explained his reasoning<\/a> at some length:<\/p>\n

[A]s repugnant as Trump is to many of us, we are not going to fire someone over his or her support of a political candidate.\u00a0 As far as we know, that would be unprecedented for supporting a major party nominee, and a dangerous path to start down (of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator) …\u00a0The way we got into a situation with Trump as a major party nominee in the first place was by not talking to people who are very different than we are …\u00a0I don\u2019t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump.\u00a0 But I\u2019d like to find out, because we have to include everyone in our path forward.\u00a0 If our best ideas are to stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, we\u2019ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020.<\/p>\n

The usual criticism of nerds is that we might have narrow technical abilities, but we lack wisdom about human affairs. \u00a0It’s ironic, then, that it appears\u00a0to have fallen to Silicon Valley nerds to guard some of the most important human wisdom our sorry species ever came across—namely, the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. \u00a0Like Sam, I despise pretty much\u00a0everything Trump stands for, and I’ve been far from silent about it: I’ve blogged<\/a>, donated money, advocated vote swapping<\/a>, endured\u00a0anonymous comments\u00a0like “kill yourself kike”<\/a>—whatever seemed like it might\u00a0help even infinitesimally to ensure the richly-deserved electoral thrashing\u00a0that Trump mercifully\u00a0seems\u00a0to be headed for in a few weeks.<\/p>\n

But I also, I confess, oppose the forces that\u00a0apparently see Trump less as a global calamity\u00a0to be averted, than as a golden opportunity to take down\u00a0anything they don’t like\u00a0that’s ever been spotted within a thousand-mile radius of Trump Tower. \u00a0(Where does this Kevin Bacon game end, anyway? \u00a0Do “six degrees of Trump” suffice\u00a0to contaminate you?)<\/p>\n

And not only do I not feel a shadow of a hint of a moral conflict here, but it seems to me that precisely\u00a0the same liberal Enlightenment principles are behind both of these stances.<\/p>\n

But I’d go yet further. \u00a0It sort of flabbergasts me when\u00a0social-justice activists\u00a0don’t understand that, if we condemn not only Trump, not only\u00a0his supporters, but even vociferous Trump opponents who associate with Trump supporters (!)<\/em>, all we’ll do is feed the narrative that got Trumpism as far as it has—namely, that of a smug, bubble-encased, virtue-signalling leftist elite subject to runaway political correctness spirals. \u00a0Like, a hundred million Americans’\u00a0worldviews revolve around the fear of liberal persecution, and we’re going to change their minds by firing anyone\u00a0who\u00a0refuses to fire\u00a0them<\/em>? \u00a0As a recent Washington Post<\/em> story<\/a> illustrates, the opposite approach is harder but can bear spectacular results.<\/p>\n

Now, as for Peter Thiel: three years ago, he\u00a0funded a small interdisciplinary workshop on the coast of France that I attended. \u00a0With me there were a bunch of honest-to-goodness conservative Christians, a Freudian psychoanalyst, a novelist, a right-wing radio host, some scientists and Silicon Valley executives, and of course Thiel himself. \u00a0Each, I found, offered tons to\u00a0disagree about but also some morsels\u00a0to learn.<\/p>\n

Thiel’s worldview, focused on the technological and organizational greatness that (in his view) Western civilization used to have and has subsequently lost, was a bit too dark and pessimistic for me, and I’m a pretty dark and pessimistic person. \u00a0Thiel gave a complicated, meandering lecture that involved comparing modern narratives about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs against myths of gods, heroes, and martyrs throughout history, such as Romulus and Remus<\/a> (the legendary founders of Rome). \u00a0The talk might have\u00a0made more sense to Thiel\u00a0than to his listeners.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Thiel’s range\u00a0of knowledge and curiosity was pretty awesome. \u00a0He avidly followed all the talks (including mine, on P vs. NP and quantum complexity theory) and asked pertinent questions. When the conversation turned to D-Wave, and Thiel’s own decision not to invest in it, he laid out the conclusions he’d come to from an extremely quick look at the question, then quizzed me as to whether he’d gotten anything wrong. \u00a0He hadn’t.<\/p>\n

From that conversation among others, I formed the impression that Thiel’s success as an investor is, at least in part, down neither to luck nor to connections, but to a module in his brain that most people lack, which makes blazingly\u00a0fast and accurate judgments about tech startups. \u00a0No wonder Y Combinator would want to keep him as an adviser.<\/p>\n

But, OK, I’m so used to the same person being spectacularly right on some things\u00a0and spectacularly wrong on others, that it no longer causes even slight\u00a0cognitive dissonance. \u00a0You just take the issues one by one.<\/p>\n

I was happy, on balance, when it came out that Thiel had financed the lawsuit<\/a> that brought down Gawker Media. \u00a0Gawker really had<\/em> used its power to bully the innocent, and it had broken the law to do it. \u00a0And if it’s an unaccountable, anti-egalitarian, billionaire Godzilla against a vicious, privacy-violating, nerd-baiting<\/a>\u00a0King Kong—well then, I guess I’m with Godzilla.<\/p>\n

More recently, I was appalled when Thiel spoke<\/a> at the Republican convention, pandering to the crowd with Fox-News-style\u00a0attack lines that were\u00a0unworthy of a mind of his caliber. \u00a0I lost a lot of respect for Thiel that day. \u00a0But that’s the thing: unlike with literally every other speaker at the GOP convention, my respect for Thiel had started from\u00a0a point that\u00a0made a decrease possible.<\/em><\/p>\n

I reject huge parts of Thiel’s worldview. \u00a0I also reject any worldview that would threaten me with ostracism for talking to Thiel, attending a\u00a0workshop he sponsors, or saying anything good\u00a0about him. \u00a0This is not actually a difficult balance.<\/p>\n

Today, when it sometimes\u00a0seems like much of the world has united in salivating for a cataclysmic showdown between whites and non-whites, Christians and Muslims, “dudebros” and feminists, etc., and that the salivators differ mostly just in who\u00a0they want to see victorious in the coming battle and who humiliated,\u00a0it can feel lonely to stick up for na\u00efve, outdated values\u00a0like the free exchange of ideas, friendly disagreement, the presumption of innocence, and the primacy of the\u00a0individual over the tribe. \u00a0But those are\u00a0the values that took us all the way from a bronze spear through the enemy’s heart to a snarky rebuttal on the arXiv, and they’ll\u00a0continue to build anything worth building.<\/p>\n

And now to watch the third debate (I’ll check the\u00a0comments afterward)…<\/p>\n

\n

Update (Oct. 20):<\/b><\/span> See also this post<\/a> from a blog called TheMoneyIllusion. My favorite excerpt:<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s see. Not only should Trump be shunned for his appalling political views, an otherwise highly respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur who just happens to support Trump (along with 80 million other Americans) should also be shunned. And a person who despises Trump and works against him but who defends Thiel\u2019s right to his own political views should also resign. Does that mean I should be shunned too? After all, I\u2019m a guy who hates Trump, writing a post that defends a guy who hates Trump, who wrote a post defending a guy\u2019s freedom to support Trump, who in turn supports Trump. And suppose my mother sticks up for me? Should she also be shunned?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost enough to make me vote . . . no, just kidding.<\/p>\n

Question … Which people on the left are beyond the pale? Suppose Thiel had supported Hugo Chavez? How about Castro? Mao? Pol Pot? Perhaps the degrees of separation could be calibrated to the awfulness of the left-winger:<\/p>\n

Chavez: One degree of separation. (Corbyn, Sean Penn, etc.)<\/p>\n

Castro: Two degrees of separation is still toxic.<\/p>\n

Lenin: Three degrees of separation.<\/p>\n

Mao: Four degrees of separation.<\/p>\n

Pol Pot: Five degrees of separation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two years ago, when I was the target\u00a0of an online\u00a0shaming campaign, what helped\u00a0me through it were hundreds of messages of support from friends, slight acquaintances, and strangers of every background. \u00a0I vowed then to return the favor, by standing up when I saw decent people unfairly shamed. \u00a0Today I have an\u00a0opportunity to make good. Some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[11,42,16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-obviously-im-not-defending-aaronson","category-rage-against-doofosity","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2952,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions\/2952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}