Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’re now out in the Bay Area. How has living amongst the so-called world of tech changed your nonpolitical views? It’s a good question. I don’t feel I live too much in the world of tech because over the last year, I’ve mostly just become a parent and haven’t gone out that much. So, my belief that I was going to spend . . . and with the election and impeachment, everything, I’ve not dug into some of the tech questions as much as I would like to. It has definitely changed some of my views on California governance. We were talking about that earlier, and just watching it up close . . . I’ve gone to planning meetings and stuff, and that’s been an education in its own way. I think the view that has changed more than any other is, it is a really interesting intellectual culture to see up close. And in a lot of ways, for all that it gets lionized, I actually think I prefer the way DC thinks about problems. The tech conversations that I’m part of, when you go to these dinners and so on — it’s interesting. It’s like an intellectual culture that is very venture capitalist in its approach. So, it’s like, “Here are 20 ideas. They’re all very interesting. Nineteen of them are probably quite wrong, not even a little wrong, like very wrong. But that last one might be great, really important, and if you could just figure out which one it is . . .” Now, that works really well when the question is money, and it works less well when the question is, you’re trying to rebuild society in the image of your own ideas. I have heard you on Eric Weinstein’s podcast recently, and the word you used for Eric was generative, and I think that’s actually a good word for what is prized out there. There’s a kind of generative thinking. Like, here’s a bunch of ideas, and they’re all kind of cool, kind of interesting, and they all may be very ungrounded in the bureaucratic or emotional or human or social realities of the thing they’re talking about. They’re very smart people, puzzling about how a system works from the outside. On the one hand, that sometimes lets you cut away a lot of the BS and see what is going on, but oftentimes, it just makes you miss why the system works the way it does. It makes you miss the Chesterton’s fence dimensions of a system. I have been struck by the way I instinctually recoil from that way of thinking, even as I find a lot of what it comes up with interesting. I think that the thing it has probably changed the most is, I have a little bit more appreciation, even than I did before, for the work that people do when they’re actually doing the hard work to understand bureaucratic and human and social complexity because that is something that, when you’re trying to build things, it will scale, or build ideas that really sound great when you say them at a party or something, you tend to underrate. l complexity because that is something that, when you’re trying to build things, it will scale, or build ideas that really sound great when you say them at a party or something, you tend to underrate. Again, I want to note that you really can go too far in the other direction and get trapped in the realities of how things exist now, and so be unable to imagine how they could exist in another dimension, or another reality, or in a future that you have built by creating Uber, or whatever it might be. But what is great as a way of thinking about ideas for new businesses, or even great as a way of thinking about investments, is not always great as a way of doing big-picture political and social analysis.…

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