When you listen to Elon Musk talk to Tucker Carlson about putting faith in transparency on Twitter and other subjects, you feel queasy to learn this genius commits either to ignorance or to Nietzsche’s stated depravity of reason from confounding cause and consequence. Or both.
Transparency is a consequence, not the cause, of the arbitrage of a system subject to a theory that, in Einstein’s words, determines what can be discovered.
To rely on transparency as the causation of the integrity or desired outcome of a marketplace, a town hall as Elon likes to call it, is to implicitly admit there is no theory. And without a theory that uses the first-principles to determine how the engines of a rocket work, Elon would not dare to send a rocket into space.
For the uninitiated, first-principles drive the definition of a theory embedded in the systems to produce the desired outcome from a selection of input governed by a transparent rulebook that provides the crucial paradox of personal freedoms to instill trust in collective freedom.
Transparency gives insight into the application of rules. For developers only, by the way. Not very useful for the general public, who do not understand the programming language of Twitter. Transparency does not give insight into the systems, the theory, or even the first-principles from which Twitter derives its value proposition.
This is a common problem in the technology business. Benefitting from the pageantry of positivity handing out hall passes to any innovation, technology businesses get away with unproven suppositions that science cannot. What is Twitter’s theory, correlated to what first-principles, to substantiate that applying its systems guided by its rulebook will yield humanitarian merit?
Elon Musk is not rebuilding another technology company. He is shaping the implementation of humanity’s free speech without a theory determining what should be discovered. LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, and others made the same mistake. They all apply rules arbitrarily without a theory users can decide to subscribe to. That is like getting pulled over by a cop for violating a rule he, not a governing body, made up and wishes to apply that day.
In building the new Twitter, Elon Musk, just like any scientist, must be ready to explain the first-principles he uses, the proof of his theory, the workings of his marketplace system, and the rulebook he applies. In that hierarchical order. Then he will learn that freedom of speech is not a technological problem but an evolutionary one. Where is our government when we need them?
Transparency is a copout that lulls the greater-fools to sleep.
