Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Preference Falsification ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But one of the things that I think has become kind of interesting in our relationship is that a certain class of theories that are not popular in the general population are traded back and forth between us, partially around the idea of how do we restart growth, how do we avoid violence?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I wanted to sort of alert people who are interested in the portal concept to this idea of orphaned or unpopular theories that are traded among a few but maybe not are among the many. So if we could go through a few of these, one of them has to do with how you and I both, we're much more, I think we believe that Trump was much more likely to get elected, than the general population did.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And this has to do with the theory of preference falsification, that people will broadly lie about what their true preferences are, so they'll keep one set of public preferences, but a hidden set of private preferences. And then in our culture it gets revealed every four years where you kind of have a Schrodinger's cat experiment, you find out where the country actually is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, I felt this was a dynamic that was going on in all these strange ways in 2016 there was a dinner I had in San Francisco about a week before the election with a group of center right people. One of them was a very prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, and he said, you know, I'm voting for Trump in a week, but because I'm in Silicon Valley, I have to lie. And so he was unusually honest about lying. And the way I lie is that I tell people I'm voting for Gary Johnson.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So he couldn't say that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Like the facial muscles wouldn't work or something would go wrong. But Gary Johnson was sort of the lie that you could tell. And then if you actually look at what happened in the month before the election, the Gary Johnson support, you know, collapsed from I don't know something like six to two percent or whatever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And as far as I can tell, all of that went to Trump. And the question one has to ask is were these people, you know, lying all along? Were they lying to themselves? Did they sincerely change their mind in the last month? Or some combination of that. But yeah, one sort of vehicle for this preference falsification was that you had a third party candidate who was sort of a gateway to the transition, this is what happened with Ross Perot, where the people went, you know, eventually went to Clinton in '92 or John Anderson in 1980. So that's been a sort of repeated and that's, I think that was one element of what was going on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But then I think there were also all these aspects of, of the Trump candidacy, that people were super uncomfortable about polite society. And so one would, you know, that the preference falsification was somehow perhaps much greater than in many other past contexts. And so, you know, even the day of the election, the exit polls suggested that Trump was going to lose. And so there were still a two to three percent effect like this, literally the day of the voting.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I voted for Bernie in the primaries and I felt that both you and I had realized that the Clinton neoliberal story was a slow-motion, one-way ticket to disaster if it kept going on election after election. So that both of us recognized that we had to get off the trigger.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Of course, one of the complicated questions in all this is, you know, did people actually already sense this? And were they lying about this? So, like everybody was saying all the way throughout 2016, most of the people were saying, well, there's no chance that you know, Trump's going to win. This is absolutely impossible.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I didn't really connect this before the election, but with 2020 hindsight, I wonder was the fact that everyone was clicking on the Nate Silver 538 statistical polling model site a few times a day, to reassure themselves that Hillary Clinton was still ahead, was going to win. Was that some sort of acknowledgement that on some, maybe subconscious or barely conscious level, people sensed that it wasn't really as done a deal as they were constantly saying.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, there's even a version of that question that I wonder about. You know, because there was something about the polling that took on this unusually iconic role in 2016, it was so important and there was no truth outside the polls. I remember there's, you know, one of the Democrat talking heads saying something like, you know, Republicans don't believe in climate change. They also don't believe in polls. That's why they're going to lose. And generally polls are right, but there was something about how all-important they were in 2016 that might've, been a tell that something was a little bit amiss.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I think people knew, to my way of thinking. I think people knew that there was something very bizarre about this election. I think that the Bernie scare, that if the Democratic party hadn't ... been so skillful, in sidelining Bernie and where the party regulars were, you know, clearly backing Clinton, my sense is that it could well have been Bernie versus Trump and that would have been enough to say the neoliberal story is over.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think there was that fear that this was coming to an end. My sense of it was that the major reaction to Trump was sort of a class reaction. That it was you're rejecting the entire concept of an educated group that knows the right things to say. And you know, you're clearly sort of not the kind of person who should be in the Oval Office, much more than the issue of whether or not Trump was going to be a warmonger or turn the U S into a police state, which of course doesn't seem to have happened as of this moment in 2019.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But I guess what my sense of it was is that people really were shocked. I was, because I live in a left-of-center universe, the day after-

'''Peter Thiel:''' They certainly pretended to be shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, there's no-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Look, I'll concede your point. They were pretty shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They were pretty shocked.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But you know, if, but I still have my question, why were they clicking on the Nate Silver site just a few times a day?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One version of it was, let's say even if Hillary trounced Trump, but it wasn't enough. That would be a scary thing, given what Trump had been built up to, which is a, you know, orange Hitler. You know, if you imagine that your country is supporting somebody who thinks all Mexicans are rapists and is going to take the country back to, you know, to the Middle Ages, it would be very disconcerting if such a person could get 20 percent of the vote.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think that the poll had its own significance. However, you know, I think that one of the things about preference falsification is that when you start to believe that this is a robust phenomenon, that all of the economic models that assume that your private preferences and public preferences are the same, you start to see the world very differently. And so this is one of the portals into an alternate way of seeing the universe so as not to get surprised by revolutions.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, it's always this question, in my mind, this question of preference falsification, the Timur Kuran theory is tightly coupled to this question of, you know, how intense is the problem of political correctness, where, you know, how much pressure is there on people to say things they don't actually believe?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I always come back to thinking that the problem of political correctness in some sense is our biggest political problem. That, you know, we live in a world where people are super uncomfortable saying what they think, that it's sort of dangerous. And to use the Silicon Valley context, it's a problem that Silicon Valley has become a one party state. But there are two different senses in which you can be a one party state. One sense is that everybody just happens to believe this one thing, which you know ... is one thing.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the other one is in which 85 percent of people believe one thing and the other 15 percent pretend to. And you know, sort of like, it's a dynamic with super majorities where you know, in a democracy, we think 51 percent of people believe something, they're probably right if 70 to 80 percent believe something, it's almost more certainly right. But if you have 99.99 percent of the people believe something, at some point you shifted from a democratic truth to North Korean insanity.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so there is, you know, there's a subtle tipping point where the wisdom of crowds shifts into something that's sort of softly totalitarian or something like that. So in my mind, it maps very much onto this question of, you know, the problem of political correctness. It's always hard to measure how big it is, you know, in a politically correct society. Of course, you know, we're just saying what we think. We all love Stalin, we all love Chairman Mao and, and maybe, you know, we're just singing these songs because we're all enthusiastic about it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think, my read on it is that problem has gotten more acute in a lot of parts of our society over the last few decades.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think that's gotten, well, as you know, I started this whole intellectual dark web concept in part to create kind of a broad based and bipartisan coalition of people who are willing to speak out in public and take some risk. Speaking for a large number of people, I would never have understood how many people feel terrified to speak out if I hadn't done that. Because people come up to me all the time and say thank you for saying what I can't say at work. And then when I asked them, well, what is it that you can't say at work? It's absolutely shocking. Completely commonplace things, things that are not at all dangerous, not scary or frightening.