Why Silicon Valley Thinks Differently Than The Rest of America

I received this from a friend.  It’s an article about how Google was able to amend its search engine to shift search results so that people would support different House candidates and flip the House from Republican control to Democrat control.

Right now, I am in the camp of let nature take its course regarding regulation.  I wouldn’t regulate them.  Except, I certainly would create policies so that there could be a lot of competition.  I’d make businesses be transparent without revealing their secret sauce.

I am disbelieving of the assertion that Google’s search engine could flip seats right now. I think there were a lot of other factors and trends afoot than just the Google search engine.  I will accede that there is a lot of bias and discrimination against Republicans, Christians, and Conservatives in Silicon Valley.  That’s why organizations like Join Lincoln exist.  I support them with a small monthly donation and you should too.

The article asserts,

“Upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world are being decided without people’s knowledge by Google’s search algorithm,” senior research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology told RT, calling the search engine the “deciding factor” in close races.

Epstein, who received his PhD in psychology from Harvard University and is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, said that his methodology was thorough and meticulous.

You can see why there are people on both sides of the aisle that want to regulate Big Tech.

I have a different theory.  It’s a generalization but I suspect it would be correct if you hypothesis tested it.

Engineers think differently than most people.  They are very process orientated.  Loving math, they like the outcome to be relatively certain without a huge amount of variability.  Sigma squared is the bane of an engineers existence.  This sort of mindset is tremendous when you are innovating.  It can be helpful when you are making decisions.  It’s not good for setting public policy over an entire country where there is a lot of diversity and a lot of differences.

The US is inherently a random place.  Parts of California intrastate aren’t even alike much less each region of the country.  My own state of Illinois has a lot of randomness in it.  Peoria is not like Chicago or Rockford.

If you want to control the variability or pre-determine the outcome that means you must rigorously control the inputs.  Capitalism and free markets are not like that.  Free markets are uncontrollable unless you put artificial limits on them.  This is the huge difference in framing between economic philosophies.

• Classical economics puts its faith in free markets.  People have the liberty to make their own decisions.  Friedman called this, “Free to choose”.
• Keynesian economists don’t frame things in this manner.  They see themselves as puppet masters.  Pull a string, this happens.  Pull another, this happens.  It’s about command and control.

Many of the folks in the Valley think they are smarter than everyone else.  When you have this sort of attitude, you can develop a hubris where “I know what’s good for you so I will make you do it.”  Some of the ethos comes from an empathetic place.  “I want to help people” and by God single-payer health care is the only way to do it.   Like a lot of folks, they stay in their bubble and unknowingly use confirmation bias to reinforce it.

Having freedom of choice is extremely scary for another reason.  It pushes responsibility out to the edges of the network.  When that happens, consequences are also pushed to the edges and the people making the decisions have to accept the outcomes of them.

People don’t like accepting responsibility in a lot of cases.  Ask Jussie Smollett and Kim Foxx of Chicago.