Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Completing Oppenheimer's Vision for a Better Future

Robert Oppenheimer emphasized the importance of openness in political life and the need for style to navigate the complexities of the world. He criticized the culture of secrecy and closed-door decision-making, advocating for a system that values reason and transparency. He highlighted the dangers of power without wisdom, citing the excessive production of nuclear weapons based on misguided notions of superiority. Oppenheimer faced adversity and exclusion due to his liberal views and opposition to McCarthyism. He proposed a political party committed to open debate and harnessing the wisdom of the entire community. This party would create a transparent platform similar to Wikipedia, dedicated to evaluating policy options through thorough cost-benefit analysis and open debates. Such an approach could prevent past mistakes and ensure that decisions are based on reason and evidence. Oppenheimer also warned against alliances with corrupt leaders and the risks of uninformed decisions, citing In the Open Minds, a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, on October 10, 1949, Robert Oppenheimer eloquently expressed the significance of openness in our political life. He said, our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. However, he also understood that open inquiry alone isn't sufficient to address the complexities of our world. Oppenheimer widely noted, the problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is, of course, not unique to politics. It's always with us in science, and in the most trivial of personal affairs, and in all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style that complements affirmation with limitation and humility. So, in other words, we can't know. There's infinite amount of chaos all around us. We can't know the best path. But it's style that navigates through this limitation. So, he continues, it is style that makes it possible to act effectively, not absolutely. So, if we can do good, we can't be perfect. In the domain of foreign policy, it enables us to find harmony between our essential goals and the perspective of others, even when they see the problem differently. It is through style that power defers to reason. And that's really the essence of what I'm trying to do, is find a way to get power to defer to reason. Reason is everything. You can't have reason, I propose, without good reasons. You can't have good reasons without a system that scores reasons, that bases your conclusion strength on the relationship between reasons, and their score, if they're related or if they're unrelated, if they're true. And truth can have two different types of truth. It can be true as in free from logical fallacy, and it can also be true as in it has been verified with sufficient independent observations. And then if you group similar ways of saying the same thing, you can have a system where you have the number of reasons to agree and the number of reasons to disagree. And you get rid of duplication, so you have the number of truly unique reasons to agree and disagree. So you can't have reasons without good reasons, again. And you can't have good reasons if you just say everything is believable. You know, the world is flat has the same score as, you know, the world is round. It's just we all carry around different scores in our brain. Some people think that one is true and the other is false, and other people think that one is false and the other is true. The problem is there's no system out there that tries to relate the strength of the conclusion to the strength of the evidence and organize all of the pro and con sub-arguments. So that's my goal is to find a way to use style to ensure power defers to reason. Oppenheimer's experience as a scientist and advocate for openness highlighted the pitfalls of power wielding without wisdom. We produced an excessive number of nuclear weapons, spending trillions of dollars to maintain them based on misguided notions of superiority. Instead, we could have asked, how many do we need? But we had to have more than the Russians, and so we had at the peak 32,000 weapons. Now we only have 5,000. So we spent $10.9 trillion on nuclear weapons. We probably could have done better. 32,000 is much more than 5,000. And is 5,000 enough? Are there 5,000 cities in Russia that they could have destroyed and still be a power? Did we ever need 32,000 of them? No, we weren't making rational decisions. We were making politically motivated decisions where people within an organization had to outdo each other. And I am more of a patriot because I don't only want 10,000, I want 11,000. Oh, yeah, well, I'm more of a patriot because I only want 12,000, not 11,000. Oh, yeah, well, you both are stupid. Look at how extreme I can be. I want 13,000. And so that's how our country was ran for a number of years. Oppenheimer faced adversity and exclusion due to his liberal views, his previous liberal views, his Jewish background, and his opposition to McCarthyism or his insufficient conformity with the political nature of what was going on in Washington at the time. Because of his ordeal, he criticized the culture of secrecy and closed-door decision-making, emphasizing that secrecy denies the government the wisdom and the resources of the entire community. So there was a debate. Should we develop the thermonuclear or not just the atom bomb, but the hydrogen bomb? And he wasn't allowed to discuss that with his scientists or with the public. So the public was not involved in the discussion because they said it's top secret. Well, it's top secret because the Russians are going to find out about it. Well, the Russians already knew about it. And so the secrecy was mostly designed for control and so that the people in power wouldn't be opposed. But if we had a system that automatically put all arguments in a forum where there were reasons to agree and disagree, we would inherently fix our system where you have a political party and they're able to say stupid things because there's a guy at the top that will punish anyone who disagrees with him. And so the Republican Party says all of these totally stupid things because no one on their side is allowed to publicly say the truth without being punished. So the emperor has no clothes, but no one can point it out because they'll be punished in both parties. And that's because of the way systems are with groupthink and politics and anecdotes and popular opinion. That's the way things are when you don't have a web page with reasons to agree and reasons to disagree. And so the Republicans read all the Republican propaganda and the Democrats read all the Democrat propaganda. And we're becoming crazy because we don't even... It's not that we don't agree. We aren't even seeing the same facts. Both sides have an endless pornography of all of the stupid things that the other side does. And so both sides have an extreme self-righteousness and condescension and laughing and hatred towards the other side because they're only fed all of these stories of the stupid extreme things of the other side. And so everything is broken. But Oppenheimer and our founding fathers all saw a way forward. Our two founding fathers, George Washington and John Adams, our first two presidents, as well as other leading founders of the country, including Benjamin Franklin, opposed political parties. They said, hey, political parties are just going to make you stupid. Groupthink never works and don't do it. And we totally ignored our founding fathers. What if we could address these challenges with a new political party committed to open debate and the wisdom of... harnessing the wisdom of the entire community? So that's like what Oppenheimer said. He said, again, secrecy denies the government the wisdom and the resources of the entire community. So what if you had a system? Oppenheimer didn't live long enough to see Wikipedia. But Wikipedia harnesses the knowledge of the entire community, but it's not really linked to power. People, I guess, could use Wikipedia to make decisions, but it's not inherently tied to the mechanism of power. And so what I want is a political party. We're going to keep our current mechanism of the constitutional government that we have that is beautiful and wonderful. Nothing changes. We just have a political party that supports candidates that tie their vote to outcomes, to something like Wikipedia, but only instead of having information about some bridge in England, it'll be a Wikipedia dedicated to the cost-benefit analysis of public policy. And so people can comment, but the comments aren't just comments as in discussion. And here's a bunch of words. The comments are organized as reasons to agree or reasons to disagree, and reasons to agree that something is true, whether something is important, whether a cost or a benefit is more or less likely, or a reason why. And there's different types of truth. I already went into that a little bit. I don't want to get sidetracked because I want to stay focused, but I don't know how to stay focused so that I can explain this. It's really the culmination of everything that is evil in the world, is aligned on the side of backroom deals and secrets and stupidity and propaganda, and everything that's beautiful and good in the world is all about order and transparency and reason. So I propose a political party that supports candidates who base their decisions on thorough cost-benefit analysis and open debates that consider the strength of pro and con arguments for each cost or benefit. We create a transparent platform similar to Wikipedia dedicated to evaluating policy options by assessing the strength of their supporting arguments and evidence. This approach could have prevented numerous past mistakes. As Oppenheimer wisely pointed out, the purposes of this country in foreign policy cannot be achieved by coercion. However, our history is littered with failed alliances with corrupt leaders who promise to be anti-communist or they're bad guys, but at least they are bad guys. And these were people who were anti-democratic and oppressive themselves. They were evil and anti-democratic. And whenever we partnered with these evil institutions, it always backfires. Well-intentioned but uninformed decisions led us to costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They led to mistakes in World War II when we had racist under-estimation of Japanese ability to win. We would always win even though the evidence wasn't there and we kept thinking we would win even though the evidence wasn't there and we should have been careful and cautious. But we were arrogant and thousands of lives have been lost because of stupid decisions of people who were all in the room and agree with each other. And these decisions were made with looking at both sides. Oppenheimer's insights can guide us towards a better future. He emphasized that in the 18th century, politics and science were closely linked and we should strive to reunite these realms by making decisions based on the weight of the evidence. We need an Oppenheimer political party, one that designs political systems to channel power through the disciplined application of style and reason. This style should organize pro and con arguments, weigh them with humility and prompt action or cause action within our confidence levels all while continually improving the system. Oppenheimer's wisdom can encourage us to embrace the truth that we cannot know everything but we also must act and so those are kind of two contradictory... We have to do things but we can't be sure. But we can at least measure our level of confidence and we can do those things which seem to indicate that they have a much higher benefit to cost ratio or a lower cost to benefit ratio. But it's used style to organize arguments, weigh them and act within our confidence levels while always seeking to refine and improve our system.