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Steel-man Instead of Straw-man?
A term introduced by Peter Thiel:
“In debates and political conversations our temptation is always to straw-man the other side: to find the most ridiculous thing somebody says, to zero in on that, to exaggerate it even more, and to sort of use that to make the political opponent appear silly and ridiculous.
“And I sort of think we’d be often well-served to do the opposite of straw-maning. And a word one of my colleagues came up with is ‘steel-man.’ We should steel-man the people we disagree with. We should think about how we can make their arguments even better than they make them. Even if they’re expressing their arguments in a bad way, what are the real underlying issues that those arguments reflect? How can we address those real underlying issues?
Where is the Charismatic Technology? According to Peter Thiel
Thiel at the Economic Club of New York on March 16, 2018:
“Which aspects of technology are actually charismatic? Where it’s a good story… where it’s a story about technology making the world a better place? And it needs to also be real; it needs to be a viable business, but at least I think you want it to be something that inspires people, that motivates the people in the company. It’s not just about making money, but it really has some sort of transcendent mission.
“And I think my relatively short list on that in Silicon Valley is the crypto piece, where the people are motivated and do have this vision of a very, very different world that they’re trying to build.
“I think it’s still true of biotech, where you always have the story about creating cures for diseases and drastically improving human health.
“And I think Elon Musk is the other one where where it’s sort of deeply, deeply charismatic.”
“AI is possibly a little bit exaggerated, and it’s a hard word to get a handle on because it’s a … somewhat poorly defined term, but the thing that struck me is how uncharistmatic AI is at this point:
“‘It’s going to take our jobs, and after it takes our jobs, at the singularlity, it’s just going to kill everybody.’ I’m not sure that dystopian view is correct, but that’s what actually what most people believe. It’s what most of the Hollywood movies on AI believe. It’s what most people in New York city believe. It’s what most people even in Silicon Valley believe.
“We have to always ask this question: ‘Are these technologies good? How are they going to make the world better?’ And I think the answers for AI are quite weak.
“The virtual reality, the augmented reality. There’s parts of that that can be quite good, but again there’s this very dystopian narrative: It’s like a 20-something person in Japan holed up in their parents bedroom and never leaving their room playing video games all day. And that sort of distopian piece again seems to dominate.
“And I’d rather focus on the ones where there’s a powerful good story.”
Video interview of Thiel at Economic Club of New York, March 2018
