Postponing Hereticon
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Founders Fund is postponing Hereticon, our inaugural conference for dissident thinking. We’re likely to reschedule for spring 2021, and in the meantime we’re fully refunding everyone who purchased tickets.
A few thoughts.
We conceived of Hereticon as a way to provide some room for misfits to think out loud, to be wrong a thousand times if that’s what it takes to find some new, important idea or technology, and for those of us in positions of relative privilege to platform, and protect as best we can, our culture’s most provocative thinkers. The events of the last two months have only reaffirmed to us the importance of this goal. Our society is increasingly paralyzed by groupthink, a point that until recently felt obviously true and yet abstract. But today, beneath the cloud of COVID-19, it is evident our culture’s commitment to consensus carries with it an existential cost.
In January of this year, a well-known entrepreneur and investor in the technology industry began tweeting about a new strain of coronavirus plaguing the Wuhan province of China he believed posed a deadly threat to the rest of the world, and that he did not believe was being taken seriously by our government or media. He drew on his background in systems biology and statistics, and suggested, breathlessly, to anyone who would listen, strategy for averting a crisis he was increasingly convinced was on our doorstep. The reaction from many journalists who cover the technology industry was as predictable as it was unfortunate. For his prescience he was ridiculed, and accused of racism — a defamation that has still not been retracted. While frustrating, and in hindsight truly unfortunate, this was not nearly as bad as it could have been. In China, a country where cultural authoritarianism has been enshrined in law, in actual political authoritarianism, the young doctor who first identified COVID-19 was coerced into signing a statement agreeing he had made “false statements” about the virus that “severely disturbed the social order.” A canary in the coal mine — he succumbed to the disease himself and passed away a month ago.
Dissident thinkers have been ridiculed and marginalized — and worse — throughout history. Our generation did not invent the dynamic of the persecuted heretic vindicated in posterity, and this dynamic will likely persist for generations to come. But we can at least work into our culture some antibodies for the impulse. We can at least acknowledge the dynamic, and try — as best we can — to get a little more comfortable with uncomfortable ideas. Back in October, when we first called for folks to join us, we were met with both overwhelming enthusiasm and considerable, vitriolic criticism. Most of the criticism was focused on politics, full of assumptions about the kinds of political thinking we were looking to platform, as if the only thing affected by our cultural aversion to dissidence is our political system. But of course the truth is almost exactly the opposite. Our political system is built to platform dissidence, and we listed the kinds of topics we were looking to explore. None of them were conventionally political.
What are the blind spots in science? This is less a question of what new, scientific discoveries are worth exploring than it is more generally the question of how have the words “science” and “scientific” been turned against working scientists dissenting in every field from astrophysics and evolutionary biology to genomics and neuroscience? UFOs and parapsychology are fun topics, but they’re also ridiculed in ‘serious circles’. Why? And how many people gate-keeping the ‘serious circles’ can really explain why? Are people working from data, or are they parroting arguments from other people in their ingroup? What about adult entertainment, and faith? What about polyamory, pronatalism, and anarchy? Speaking of viruses, what about vaccines, and what is it about biological self-determination that bothers so many of us? From high-risk medical treatments and gene therapies to body modification and sex work, why does the weight of our culture war so often fall on the individual, and what he or she chooses to do with his or her own physical self? “My body, my choice” — are there limits to this conversation? Why? And why does this all feel, in some sense, connected?
This is our century, the 21st, and we are facing no shortage of challenges. At this point, the threat of pandemic is obvious. But we also need enough power, water, and food for 8 billion people. Globally, bacterial infections are increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Geopolitically, the frozen borders of the world post-Bretton Woods seem to be thawing, and with that thaw all manner of potential conflict. The proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue nations has never been a greater outlier threat to global safety, and now as well we must at least consider the possibility of some weaponized artificial intelligence. But these are just the things we can imagine. The question, always, is what don’t we know we don’t know? And in a world where anyone interested in exploring any topic outside the Overton Window of acceptable conversation is attacked, what possible hope do we have of even perceiving our greatest challenges, let alone meeting them? On New Year’s Eve, 2019, no one anticipated COVID-19. What aren’t we anticipating today? Our challenges are, for lack of a better word, weird. We should expect the men and women capable of meeting such challenges to be weird in kind, and these are the people we have to protect.
It’s unusually unclear what our world will look like six months from now, so it’s unclear in what dimensions Hereticon will change once our global health crisis is averted. Many of the topics we planned to explore, especially in biology and medicine, are fairly obvious now and may themselves be paralyzed by groupthink in the months to come. But one thing is absolutely clear: self-silencing new ideas, strategies, and questions about our world because of the assumed preferences of a mob on social media has never been more dangerous. Consensus thinking can’t protect us from the things we can’t see coming, and it can’t build a better world. We have to think for ourselves, now.
You have to think for yourself.
Be safe, and see you on the other side of this.
-SOLANA
