Whenever anyone say theirs is the "actual Scientific Method," you should get nervous

As they did with the increasingly obvious role of fascism in the GOP, journalists willfully refused to see what was going on in the worlds of venture capital and Silicon Valley.

And just as they clung to the idea of a basically sane and functional Republican Party, they refused to let go of the myth of techno-messiahs and all the wonders that were promised to be just around the corner.

I used the word willful because it required something close to a deliberate effort not to see sign after sign after sign.

This was never truer than with the press's reaction to the pronouncements of Marc Andreessen, most notably in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. At most, pundits like Ezra Klein have acknowledged some of the far-right aspects while framing the remainder as profound and insightful. It is neither of those things; it is, however, a remarkably useful glimpse into the culture's mentality, and it helps explain the dysfunction and general weirdness we've been seeing from these people over the past few years.

Case in point: the faith in their own omniscience—the unwavering belief that anyone in their circle who holds the right attitudes and uses the correct buzzwords knows more about any topic than the scholars and researchers studying it. They know more about bonds than bankers, more about currencies than economists, more about medicine than doctors, more about disease than epidemiologists, more about engineering than engineers, more about statistics than the professors who wrote the books they supposedly learned statistics from. 

We find this explicitly spelled out in a couple of the unsupported statements that essentially make up the Manifesto:

We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.

...

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences. 

For those of us who have been around for a while, the claim that the speaker is the one (often the only one) doing real science is a familiar red flag indicating fringe/crank theories to come. It is the standard preface for letters explaining why Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, pointing out the flaw in Cantor’s diagonal proof, or laying out the principles of a perpetual motion machine.

This idea has to be viewed as part of the larger belief that tech visionaries are omnicompetent and superhumanly intelligent. It is a notion that has been relentlessly promoted by a credulous media. Once Tech Bros internalize this, it becomes almost inevitable that they would start to treat their own idle speculations and pet theories as superior to those backed by volumes of research.

We've been seeing indicators from Silicon Valley types for ages now, going back to biohacking and cryptocurrency, but the delusion truly metastasized during the COVID epidemic.

The Google document, which was formatted in a way that made it appear to be a scientific paper, found an audience among Silicon Valley’s elite. It was shared on Twitter by a number of influential investors before it hit the virality motherlode: on 16 March, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted the link to the document to his nearly 33 million followers.

 “When someone who is newsworthy or notable that has an enormous network on social media tweets about something that could be as path-breaking as a medicine that could treat coronavirus, everyone is going to pay attention no matter if that person has expertise or not,” said Joan Donovan, director of the technology and social change research project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Elon Musk elevating and giving voice to this Google doc does act as a validating mechanism. Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur best known as a car salesman, but nevertheless people look to him for what’s new, what’s next.”

Musk’s tweet received more than 13,000 retweets. (He did not respond to questions from the Guardian about his promotion of the document.) Search interest in chloroquine soared. Mainstream media outlets covered his apparent endorsement of the drug. An 85-year-old medication was well on its way to becoming a Covid-19 meme.

 

 I don't want to suggest a simple causal relationship, but it's not a coincidence that (with the exception of Thiel who was already openly to the right of Trump, the Silicon Valley far right started emerging around this time.