Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Transparency and Privacy ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take a slightly different tack. Two statements that I found later in life unfortunately, but have both been meaningful to me. One is Weber's definition that a government is a monopoly on violence. And the other one, it's a guy I can never remember who said, I think it was a French political philosopher who said, "A nation is a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common." If you put these things together, if you imagine that somehow we've now gone in for the belief that transparency is almost always a good thing and that what we need is greater transparency to control the badness in our society, we probably won't be able to forget anything in common. Therefore, we may not be able to have a nation, and therefore the nation may not be able to monopolize violence, which is a very disturbing but interesting causal chain. Can we explore the idea of transparency, given that people seem to now associate certain words with positivity, even though normally we would have thought about privacy, transparency, trade-offs, let's say?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Well, I always do think there's a privacy-transparency trade off. One thing that's always confusing about transparency to me is there's transparency in theory, which is like this panopticon-like thing where the entire planet gets illuminated brightly and equally everywhere, all at once. So that's in theory. But then in practice is often it sounds more like a weapon that will be directed against certain people where it's a question of who gets to render who else transparent, and maybe it's even a path-dependent sequencing question where if you do it first-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' First strike transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' First strike transparency is very powerful. So you have to think about Mr. Snowden against the NSA, and then the NSA trying to expose Mr. Snowden's Swedish sex cult, whatever you want to describe it as. I think a lot of it ends up having that kind of an-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You mean Assange's.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sorry, Assange. Assange's Swedish sex cult, Assange against the NSA, NSA against Assange's Swedish sex cult or something like that. I think in practice full transparency, it assumes people can pay attention to everything at once or equally. That seems politically incorrect. Then even if you had this much greater transparency in all these ways, there are all these ways that that would seem creepy totalitarian. If you stated in terms of the problem of violence, you can think of the trade-off between transparency and privacy as transparency is we're looking at everybody and therefore they can't be that violent, but the state may be very violent in enforcing all this transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Privacy is you get to have a gun and you get to do various dangerous things in the dark and no one knows what they are. So there's probably more violence on the individual level, but then less control on the state. It's, again, this question of are you more scared of the violence of individuals or more scared of centralized violence? Probably one should not be too categorical or too absolute about this, but it can show up in both places and that's why it's a wickedly hard problem. Wickedly hard.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It does seem to be. I have to say I've started to hate the transparency discussion, because if you'll notice there's a vogue in 2019 for simply saying, "Well, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant," as if that constituted an argument. Now, first of all, one thing that people don't understand is that there are infections, like brucella, that are actually accelerated by sunlight, so it's comical. It's not even true. Bleach is probably a better disinfectant. But the idea that that constitutes an argument in our time, to me, speaks to the fact that we're living in a very strange moment where if you go back to Ecclesiastes and the inspiration for Turn Turn Turn, there was an idea that there was a purpose to everything and inclusion or exclusion were both needed. "A time to kill, a time to die, time to refrain from killing."

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There does seem to be an absolutist mania in which it would be hard to imagine writing a song about a time to kill in the modern era. And likewise, I'm not positive that people recognize how imperative it is for a well-functioning government to have places where it doesn't have to constantly account for itself.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you have no back room deals, maybe that's less corrupt, but maybe nothing gets done.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Not functional.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The US Supreme court still doesn't televise its hearings. I suspect that's the right call. I think part of it is that if you know that everything is going to be transparent, you will censor yourself and you won't say things. So it's not like the same thing happens in a transparent way. Maybe it just stops happening altogether. If you're a politician or an aspiring politician, you're not going to engage in bold ideas. You're not going to experiment with different ways about thinking about things. You're going to be super conventional, super curated.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's not like we get all the benefits of transparency with none of the costs. They come with a very, very high cost. I do wonder if one of the strange dynamics with the younger generations in the US is that there's a sense that you're just constantly watched. There's this great Eye of Sauron, to use the Tolkien metaphor, that's looking at you at all times. It would be good if you could act the same way and if something bad happened, we could take care of you. But if you're always being watched, I suspect it really changes your behavior.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's interesting, in a moment where I wanted to make sure that my son didn't misbehave, I toured him around our neighborhood and pointed out all of the cameras that would track anybody on the street where we live. I had never noticed them before, but sure enough there they were in every nook and cranny that we don't realize that if it has to be stitched together, there's an incredible web of surveillance tools that are surrounding us at all time.