A Theory of Controversy and Christ in Technology
Why we dine with those we hate...or don't understand.
Good, obvious ideas are taken so don’t even bother with them.
They are instrumentalized almost as soon as they leap from the mind to the whiteboard. Big Tech has the Big Cash to Make It Happen. Big Tech also has the Big Lobbyists to protect them from the Big Problems should something go awry.
What then is the ambitious person to do? Look for where Big Tech ain’t and ain’t likely to go. And that, dear reader, means allowing a little (or for some a lot) of controversy into your life. What is controversy after all but being daring? One man’s controversy is another man’s provocation.
We’ve already discussed how your wealth is a function of your network, your intelligence, your taste for risk, and your ability to manage the downside so why then introduce controversy into your life? Isn’t that introducing a little unnecessary risk into your life? Won’t you be canceled? Why chance it Charles?
When networking it is helpful to know how useful your network is — and how resistant to attacks it is. Indeed everyone should at some point learn who their true friends are. Sometimes you learn this in tragedy. Other times you learn it in times of great joy but you know, deep down, that no matter what any social media platform tells you, you only get to care about a certain number of people. This limit is Dunbar’s Number. You have to make sure that those people in your network are quality people. How then to think about quality?
Quality people should be seen as those who add value to you on your personal quest.
What should be your quest? Your quest should be to find meaning and purpose in this world. And you will find, just as I have, that when you are on a quest, the universe conspires to help you.
Your quest should be a quest that only you can go on. Who, after all, wants to live other people’s lives? We look for role models, yes, but who wants to be a model? Who wants to be playing a “role”? Why not be the real thing? Are you afraid of being real?
To be real you have to be present. You have to really know yourself. What is it that I believe? Who am I? How well do you know what you think you know? Is progress possible? Does Creation have any secrets left? How will you learn those secrets if you only meet with those who agree with you?
Is every question settled? And if it is what then is the purpose of living?
I believe we are called to peace and to break bread with our enemies so that they might be friends. I believe that when we have an open heart and an open mind and meet even our foes with an open hand we are most able to meet God.
After all, “[w]hen two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20). This section of the Bible discusses how to deal with unruly church members. You’re supposed to forgive them their transgressions, just as they forgive you yours.
President Calvin Coolidge spoke out about what we might today call the cancel culture.
“[I]t is a very hasty and ill-considered judgment to conclude that there is more bad than good in any one. We are all a combination of both elements. While we ought not to approve of the evil in ourselves or in others…The only perfect man ate and drank with publicans and sinners. It did not scandalize Him, it was some of those who were not perfect who were scandalized…There is enough good in all of us to support the law of human fellowship. We shall be much more effective for good if we treat men not as they are but as they ought to be. If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and every one else only by their conduct we shall reach a very false conclusion. When we have exhausted the possibilities of criticism on ourselves it will be time enough to apply it to others. The world needs high social standards and we should do our best to maintain them, but they should rest on the broad base of Christian charity.” [Emphasis mine]
Treat men as they ought to be. In other words, give them a chance to be righteous. Forgive them even when it’s hard.
So why dine with the controversial? Because you aren’t convinced you know what’s true but you know that we will get there together.
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Most transgressions will look like heresy but this is where the interesting questions begin.
Once upon a time venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham taught you how to find them in a 2004 essay called “What You Can’t Say.” To be sure Graham plays it pretty safe these days. Perhaps he has a lot more to lose than he did but he is still worth reading. Always pay the Master his respect.
Graham told you to avoid the “ist” statements. These are but the taboos of the time. That’s socialist! That’s capitalist! That’s communist! That’s Papist! That’s racist! And so on. The real attack on something was whether or not it was false, Graham said. You can judge how serious an attack is on something if it proves it untrue.
Graham doesn’t ask the follow up question: Who then determines what is true and what is false?
This is a very big question and one that that the founders, especially Hamilton, took seriously. He wondered as Publius “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
These questions are very much alive today. The current control freaks who run our society doubt your capacity for self-government. They don’t want you reflecting and they certainly don’t want you choosing so they stack the deck with experts and bureaucrats who never have to live under the rules they mandate.
Each institution tries its hand. The tech companies import the biases of the World Health Organization which is not really organized around world health but around power politics. The media companies fact check but in their quest to “Get Trump!” they gave up whatever claim of objectivity they once held. The science community routinely gets it wrong too. Just look at all the times Fauci got it wrong. And do I really need to point all the times the financial community got it wrong?
With trust eroded every American then has to become a metaphysician, trying to piece it together for himself. This is anarchy. Or is it freedom? Or is it both?
Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun locates the solution in William James’s pragmatism. We move away from a politically difficult question — “is this true for all?” — to a politically solvable one — “is this true for me and mine?”
There’s a technological cut on this question — something that is false is something that does not work, at scale. Theranos did not work. Nor is it alone. Indeed venture capitalist Josh Wolfe notes with some alarming candor that it’s rare for others in his profession to ask the obvious question: “Does this work?” It’s seen as rude.
The question of whether or not something — a theory, a story, a model, a technology — works its its predictive power, says Scott Adams.
We don’t even need to know why something works only that it does, especially in an age of machine learning.
In our liberal society our machines are allowed to do the thinking for us especially if that thinking ventures into areas we’d prefer not to go, at least officially. Indeed artificial intelligence is a good way to avoid being honest about how little thinking actually goes on. Perhaps liberalism was always going to end in machines being freed up to solve all of our problems.
True to human form, we will find their limitations shortly enough. Just ask Microsoft’s Tay, may she rest in power.
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What then are our limitations? We must find the places where the machines can provide the best value.
It’s often said in Silicon Valley that ideas are cheap but it’s actually money that’s cheap and getting cheaper still. When money printer go brrrr!!! all that matters is quality, or brand. This is why it seems as if everyone you know is now a venture capitalist or raising a SPAC. Gary Cohn has gotten in on it. Chamath Palihapitiya’s argument here isn’t wrong. It’s supply and demand.
Money is cheap. In the 1920s cheap money transformed the U.S. economy. They didn’t call it the Roaring Twenties for nothing. It’ll transform the 2020s too. After all the only growth story right now is technology.
One of the lessons from my friend and Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler’s magnificent book, Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules For Game-Changing Entrepreneurs, is that entrepreneurs waste that which is abundant to preserve that which is scarce.
I’ll repeat this: entrepreneurs waste that which is abundant to preserve that which is scarce.
We waste information and, increasingly, we waste money to preserve that which is scare.
Growth is a function of insight and insights are very, very rare, especially insights that’ll be shared with you, the hoi polloi.
We are in an economy where information is ubiquitous but not all information is created equal. Some of it is downright scary. Information that is hostile to whatever the ascendant ideology of the time is dangerous.
“Ideas are cheap!” they bray. This is, of course, said by venture capitalists most often. If they had any real ideas I suspect they’d be making companies instead. It’d be a better return on their minds. But they’d have to get up from their overly expensive chairs. The truth is that venture capitalists really aren’t that smart. They are, instead, very persuasive and very good about getting their not quite peers — which is to say the pension fund managers, endowments, etc. — to give them money.
You should have ideas worth stealing, by foreign governments especially. Have ideas so interesting, so odd, so novel that they can’t be stolen; they are simply adopted, moving from the surprising to the commonplace. This is the way.
—Charles Johnson, charlescarlislejohnson@gmail.com