Earlierthis year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me.  Irealized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing thanin San Francisco.  I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China,after all—just more comfortable than at home.

That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much thingshave changed since I first got started here in 2005.

Itseems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year.  Debating a controversial idea, even if you95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.

This will be very bad for startups in the Bay Area.

Restrictingspeech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the mostsuccessful societies have generally been the most open ones.  Usually mainstream ideas are right andheterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive theworld forward.  Also, smart people tendto have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeingmany of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

Itis bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, thatevolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.

Morerecently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals forintelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extensionleave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be sotoxic.  “If people live a lot longer itwill be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must bereally unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

Toget the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy(the British authorities banned work on this because they feared thedevaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen bythe almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture.  

Youcan’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right, andnearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out soundinglike terrible ideas.  So if you want a culture that innovates, you can’thave a culture where you allow the concept of heresy—if you allow the conceptat all, it tends to spread.  When we movefrom strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas asheretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas.

Thisis uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparagingthings about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things aboutphysics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but wecan’t just call the person a heretic.  Weneed to debate the actual idea. 

Politicalcorrectness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing tomake accommodations to treat others well.  But too often it ends up beingused as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims.  The best ideas are barely possible to expressat all, and if you’re constantly thinking about how everything you say might bemisinterpreted, you won’t let the best ideas get past the fragment stage.

Idon’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would havebeen able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture ofSan Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too manyways to go wrong.  If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assumethey would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doingsomething the government had already decided was too hard.  I can pictureGalileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

Followup: A Clarification

[1]I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gaypeople are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such astatement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say "gay people are ok" to make the progress we've made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

Infact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I thinkmay be true and that I don’t like.  But I accept that censorship is notgoing to make the world be the way I wish it were.