>"This perhaps is not so true of the founders [of Silicon Valley], but certainly for many of the rank and file people," he said. "If you're a really good engineer or really good at some specific thing, your education typically does not involve you thinking that much about politics, so [being liberal] is not necessarily from deep ideological conviction, it's often more of a fashion statement than a question of power."
Peter Thiel thinks that only CEOs are capable of holding authentic political views. Everyone should find this offensive.
The questions is also, why should anyone listen to what Peter Thiel thinks? Because he made money with Paypal and is now a VC? As if that somehow means he is more qualified than your post man in terms of political views.
If people get really brainwashed by having higher education or spending more time in college maybe there is something wrong with the education system, but maybe (just maybe) being brainwashed is just a try to smear everyone with a different opinion.
Maybe the brainwashing that is doing the most damage, is the ideation around, and elevation of, idols and figureheads. We can't seem to do anything in society unless an authority tells us its okay - or worse, not okay - to do it. This is both a blessing and a curse - sometimes we need figures to rally around. Other times, not so much.
So mostly I think the most damaging brainwashing going on is that of cult figureheads being elevated beyond their station. We see this everywhere - not just Silicon Valley. Literally, everywhere.
A large part of the HN audience seems to struggle to read straightforward assertions without freaking them in some polarizing all-out us-vs-them war.
"If you're a specialist, your education typically did not involve you thinking that much about politics" != Only CEOs are capable of holding authentic political views
Reminds me of the reaction to his 2009 essay
"welfare beneficiaries and women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians" != women should not have the right to vote
I can assure you, I have no problem reading straightforward assertions. I am a mathematician. The thing is: language and humans are rarely straightforward. Pretending otherwise is dangerous.
> “it’s super hard to know whether people really believe this, whether they're just going along"
If only there was some way for people to demonstrate their political preferences in a way which was costly, but not something that was generally talked about or publicized.
Or if there were some way for them to express their collective political preferences in a quantifiable way, with secrecy ensuring there was no possibility of virtue-signaling.
Not quite the most telling statement is something close to: engineers are intellectually invested in their work that most don't have time for caring about politics, so they just follow what people around them are doing.
Having lived here for the past few years, originally from the Midwest in an area much different than SF, my best take on the younger generation working in tech is that most do not hold strong views in terms of fiscal policies and generally equate politics to social issues. There is a fear of not being "politically correct" and offending someone. Most do not actually care and just lean with the side of least resistance.
It’s about worldview and which things are taught. Curriculums are biased. Think back: How many right-of-center professors did you have? How many were open Marxists?
Ha, you're right. Economics is an exception. I minored in economics, and found it amusing that professors who expounded on the virtues of capitalism were doing so within an socialist institution.
However, looking back, I'd probably place most of my economics professors in the neoliberal camp. I'd propose that the left/right divide is primarily about nationalism vs globalism now -- my professors would have tended to support international capitalism rather than national capitalism.
Figures like Mises weren't mentioned in my classes, despite his famous prediction that the economic calculation problem would cause the fall of communism. Yet Keynes was discussed thoroughly.
Left/right dichotomies are completely useless when you get to the scale of an individual, so I had profs who had opinions that would be called left and ones that would be called right. Both in the same person.
That said, sure academy leans “left” - but i’d argue that’s because seeking knowledge is inherently liberal. I.e. if the present is good and we should not change (one definition of conservatism), what’s the point of persuing new knowledge/ideas?
That relies on a rather specific definition of knowledge. Thomas Sowell has done a lot of good writing on these topics: the nature and varying definitions of knowledge, the role of academics and intellectuals, etc. It's ironic because he doesn't like them much despite being one himself.
Conservatives tend to place more emphasis on earned experience than liberals do. Experience and "book knowledge" are both different aspects of the concept of knowledge, but it's certainly untrue that universities teach everything that could be called knowledge. Indeed they're famous for not doing so, hence the fact that "it's academic" is an insult not a compliment.
Whether this means conservatives value experience more than book knowledge is unclear, it may be that they consider both important whereas liberals consider experience relatively unimportant and thus cluster in academia.
Efficient brainwashing disables "its subject’s ability to think critically or independently". It changes the quality (of the thinking process), and brainwashed people (subjected to framing or other techniques) may acquire information and think all day long without being able to take into consideration some pertinent facts/arguments, to consider them as what they are.
It's interesting to see such a high profile person refer to higher education this way. I've been thinking the same myself for a while and I recall a few comments on HN expressing the same sentiment ... do universities make people somehow educated but stupid simultaneously?
I've personally concluded that they do, and that society would be better off if all government money was removed from the higher-ed system entirely (which would presumably shrink it a lot, at least outside of the USA).
The problem is that academic culture imbues students with the notion that educated people = smarter people = better people, that the worth of people can be measured very precisely via grades, and that with education comes the ability to solve any problem.
But the problem solving value add of a degree is actually not that high even in very STEM oriented fields, and is virtually non-existent in many other fields like economics or the social sciences. So society is suffering from this huge river of people entering it who have little experience, little understanding of the real world in which success and self-worth is not entirely a function of grades dispensed by your betters, and yet who believe more than anything that they are vastly superior in almost every way (intellectual, ethical, etc) to people much older than them.
Meanwhile Silicon Valley companies drowning in money and with a culture of never returning funds to investors via dividends or buybacks struggle to find experienced employees to hire, so gorge themselves on this stream of new graduates, bloating up to enormous levels with people who believe intellectuals can and should do anything they believe will "make the world a better place".
These students quickly come to dominate, and yet nothing causes their world-views to self correct. In the artificial womb of SV where going bankrupt because you don't make money is virtually unheard of, success and self-worth is still being determined by arbitrary scores dispensed by your intellectual betters via promo committees and bonus schemes which are largely closed-loop and unconnected to real world goals like happy users. See the discussion of Googler incentives in the Inbox discussion elsewhere.
To older people who have had a much wider range of experiences, these Silicon Valley types come to seem impossibly naive in their utopian beliefs that any and all dissatisfactions can yield to their skills, if only 'experts' like themselves were permanently in charge. And the SV types see in the Republican party a bunch of uneducated angry old white men who don't value expertise and question intellectual authority all the time; and who are obsessed with the concept of markets - a concept that most of them have never really been exposed to outside the lecture hall.
It is therefore inevitable that a liberal/conservative divide springs up, oriented around the Valley. It doesn't have to be this way. If SV tech firms were culturally capable of admitting when they've run out of ideas and are generating too much money, re-allocating funds via to other firms using dividend payouts and buybacks, they'd hire fewer graduates and have a more experienced workforce overall. This in turn would reduce their "computers can build utopia" mentality, and make it easier for them to fit in with the rest of society.
That's the kind of idea that would only likely happen in the USA where education is looked down upon.
But I guess for the richest country in the world to be ranked around 30th in terms of education. A feedback look to make the country even more stupid could feasibly happen.
What about people going to university to be Doctors? Civil engineers? Architects?
Do they need educations? Or I guess in your world the only two professions are computer science and business.
I didn't say all money, I said all government money.
People who wanted the training from universities would have to get regular bank loans to afford it, not subsidised student loans. This would mean only those who are likely to be able to pay the money back would be able to study at universities: doctors and architects would probably still go.
So then universities have to completely rely on money from the private sector? Don't you think that would lead to an environment where the sponsors tell what to teach? Don't you think that could be problematic? Not to mention what your solution would mean for young people with less money or professions in the humanities. You think studying history is not important?
University is not only there to teach you knowledge but more importantly critical thinking and scientific best practices (like checking your sources). If anyone has problems with critical questions about their reasoning or their sources, that not the problem of the one who asked. If anyone think questions show lack of respect, maybe they should first think why anyone should respect them.
I'm pretty sure there is a certain culture of feeling superior if one has a degree from a university, but this is definitely not fixed by frowning upon higher education. Actually it makes everything worse.
Yes to all the questions in your first paragraph bar one. Completely rely on the private sector, check. Sponsors tell what to teach, check - that in fact is the entire point! The closed-loop unaccountable nature of current teaching is hugely wasteful and damaging to young people who frequently graduate in huge debt and essentially unskilled. Don't I think that could be problematic, no, otherwise I wouldn't propose it. I think asking whether studying history is important is a low-value question to ask: anyone can argue any field of human endeavour is "important". It's better to ask, important relative to what else? People can easily study history outside the context of subsidised academia, and the opportunity cost of subsiding huge numbers of people who (a) don't care about history and (b) won't use anything they learned post-graduation is enormous.
University is not only there to teach you knowledge but more importantly critical thinking and scientific best practices
Universities like to claim this. I do not believe them.
I think this angle is pure marketing spin that can't be substantiated and covers up the truth - universities make people worse at critical thinking, whilst giving them an undeserved sense of superiority and entitlement.
After all, if they were so devoted to critical thinking on campus, trigger warnings and safe spaces wouldn't exist. But even putting those aside, which parts of university courses are supposedly teaching these skills? I've studied computer science, history and archaeology at university and at no point was any attempt made to teach even the basics, like what the different logical fallacies are and how to spot them.
Actually it makes everything worse.
Why would it? Removing the notion of academic superiority from public life would re-orient social status towards practical experience and away from the ivory tower. That doesn't seem likely to make things worse.
Peter Thiel thinks that only CEOs are capable of holding authentic political views. Everyone should find this offensive.