A few days after the US election in November, I rewatched Oppenheimer. It’s a strange film, mostly because it’s two films. Going in, we think we’re getting a movie about the construction of the atomic bomb, but we also get a second story about a failed US Senate hearing in 1959, and this turns out to be the climax. A man called Lewis Strauss – a former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission – has been nominated to become the US Secretary of Commerce but (spoiler) is blocked.
The movie is split into two timelines. The first, in colour, is called fission, set before and during the war and centred on J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb. The second, in black and white, is fusion, depicting the post-war era, in which Strauss is the main character. The connection between the two is that after the war, Strauss had Oppenheimer’s security clearance withdrawn and his motivation is the suspicion that Oppenheimer said something to Albert Einstein that turned him against Strauss. But it all feels a little anticlimactic. The first film is about science, the bomb, apocalypse; the second is about bureaucratic manoeuvring, politics, gossip. What’s the message here?
Oppenheimer was based on a biography called American Prometheus, and reading it, you’re struck by the number of world historical geniuses with whom Oppie (to his friends) associated, as well as being one himself. You get some of this in the movie. At Princeton, he can run into Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel walking in the woods; in Europe, he encounters Niels Bohr then travels to Göttingen to meet Werner Heisenberg. But it doesn’t convey the astonishing density of genius at Los Alamos. Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard make brief appearances but running around in the background, off screen are John von Neumann and Richard Feynman, as well as numerous sundry Nobel laureates, who built the modern framework for our understanding of the world.
What happened to that culture of genius? The early- and mid-20th century was a period of astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs – humans landed on the moon – but it slowed down sometime in the 1970s. Science marches on, new technologies come to market – our phones are cool – but the rate of truly transformational discoveries died away. My computer is faster than the prototypes designed by von Neumann but it still uses the same architecture he conceived in 1946.
Innovation stifled
This is the technological stagnation that some economists talk about, the sustained decline in the growth rate of productivity and innovation. There are so many more people trained in science, the world’s population is larger, research labs are everywhere, instead of in a handful of cities in Europe and the US. Why hasn’t scientific progress experienced a rapid acceleration?
There are many theories. One is that there was something unique about the intellectual culture of the West before the war, especially in Europe, especially among European Jews, and that society was systematically destroyed; turned to ash. Another is that people like Einstein, Gödel, von Neumann, etc, were smart but not unusually so. There are no “world historical geniuses” – that model of history is wrong. Instead, those discoveries became available because of new technologies and intellectual shifts, and those were just the people who happened to map out the idea space that opened up during that period. If it wasn’t them, it would have been someone else. The ideas were one-offs, low-hanging fruit. Our species picked that fruit and now here we are, grasping for breakthroughs that are harder to reach.
Lots of smart people endorse this explanation but Oppenheimer has a different theory. It suggests Oppenheimer’s pre-war world of genius was destroyed by the second subject of the film: the bureaucrat Lewis Strauss.
Fooled by randomness
In August, the American statistician and political pundit Nate Silver published On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a book identifying a growing divide in our intellectual class. On one side is the group Silver labels “the Village”. It’s the current intellectual establishment: the universities, much of the public sector and the mainstream media, the NGOs, the cultural class and their institutions. In conflict with the Village is “the River”, an emerging counter-elite who thrive on uncertainty and risk.
While the Village is conservative, conformist and left-wing, the River is contrarian, numerate, extremely competitive and increasingly aligned with the political right. Silver identifies its thought leaders as members of the tech industry – Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen – and locates its heartlands among professional gamblers, venture capital, the mathematical segments of the finance industry. The “Effective Altruists” are an important part of the River, so are the San Francisco Bay Area-based rationalist community, many AI researchers and parts of the cryptocurrency movement.
Silver dislikes the Village for the same reasons everyone else does – it is censorious, self-important, boring – but he thinks its influence will decline and the River’s will increase, so his primary goal is to document the River in all its many guises and flaws. He thinks there are two key intellectual habits common across most of his Riverians but deeply alien to nearly everyone else: probabilistic thinking and decoupling. And both of these are recurrent themes in Oppenheimer.
Near the beginning of the film, our hero attends a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, who is describing the philosophical implications of quantum physics. The quantum revolution exposed an element of randomness and uncertainty built into the fundamental nature of reality: a blurred, messy aspect to existence, and we’re tempted to think we can see beyond it to “the real world in which causality holds”. But, Heisenberg cautions, there’s no such thing.
During the 2016 US election, Silver’s statistical model showed Hillary Clinton had a 70% chance of winning. Obviously, this did not happen, and this was widely cited as a failure of Silver’s predictive powers.
A naive reading of his model implied that reality is causal, so the person predicted to win should have won. But because polls (and all other measurements) are noisy, elections are chaotic and randomness is real, Silver knows the best you can do is build probabilistic models. Based on the available data, his model predicted that if there were 100 elections held in simultaneous worlds, Hilary Clinton would win 70% of them. It’s not that unlikely that the 30% option came up. If you had bet on the outcome of the election, you would have lost, but a key River concept is that, everything else being equal, it still would have been the right bet to make.
How could the wrong bet have been the right bet? Because if reality is probabilistic then outcomes are almost always uncertain and the best you can ever do is bet based on “expected value” – a term from statistics heavily adopted in tech and finance and often abbreviated to EV – in which you calculate a weighted average of all possible outcomes based on their probabilities.
Silver loves poker and it functions as his central metaphor for expected value. You’re always uncertain about the cards your opponents hold, but you can calculate what they might hold, and if you make bets based on the expected value of those probabilities, you should always win over time. Most humans are risk-averse: we’re afraid of losing more than we’re excited about winning and expected value is a tool for overcoming that bias. Members of the River have a much higher tolerance for risk.
Decoupling
After the 2024 US election, many pundits blamed the outcome on things they cared about (Israel-Palestine, wokeness, media bias) but polling showed voters were primarily influenced by the cost of living and inflation. Riverians know the world is a noisy place and human cognition is plagued by a host of cognitive defects.
They try to filter out the noise and think rationally via an approach Silver calls “decoupling”. It involves unbundling the things you want to understand from the irrelevant variables and focusing on the information in the data. You isolate an idea or an argument from its surrounding context and evaluate it on its own merits.
Here’s an everyday example. Every few months, some celebrated artist or writer disgraces themselves, and their admirers ask themselves what they should do with the beloved art of terrible people. In July, it was revealed that Canadian author Alice Munro turned a blind eye to her daughter being sexually abused by her stepfather. Many members of the Village regretfully threw away their collections of Munro’s short stories. Members of the River would deny there’s any essential link between the stories and the author’s personal failings. Why can’t you just say that the stories were good and the behaviour was bad, and leave it at that? Why confuse the two things? Why can’t you decouple?
If you combine these two techniques – decoupling and expected value – you get a critique of the Village. Actually, you get a critique of almost everyone. For Riverians, humans are too risk averse, hopelessly baffled about causality, confused by language.
There are other intellectual tools across Silver’s communities, such as Bayesian reasoning, game theory, and decision science, but he believes expected value and decoupling to be the central conceptual tools. He is interested in how people who put these concepts at the heart of their decision-making succeed and also, how they fail.
Degenerate gamblers
Oppenheimer posits that the great stagnation – the post-war decline of creativity and innovation – was caused by the Village, personified in Lewis Strauss.
Pre-war physicists were marginal figures, free to chase bizarre ideas and think unorthodox things (ie, they were precursors of the River) until they figured out how to build something as powerful as a nuclear bomb, at which point their field was politicised and bureaucratised. People like Strauss – whose catchphrase is “power stays in the shadows” – took over all the institutions and transformed them into bureaucracies devoted to process, stasis and consumed by office politics. The movie’s big secret, the thing that Oppenheimer said to Einstein to turn him against Strauss, was nothing: the scientists were talking about science. Strauss had no interest in science, so he assumed they were plotting against him.
In On the Edge, Silver quotes the biochemist Katalin Karikó, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2023 for laying the groundwork for the development of mRNA vaccines, and who recently criticised the very political nature of the modern scientific establishment. “There is a centre where the money, the fame, is; most likely your proposal gets funded because it’s on the most favourable topic … And then there are people in the periphery. There is no fame, there is no money, no nothing there. The only thing in the periphery is freedom. You can do what you like to do, what you feel is important.”
This idea of the bureaucratisation of science contributing to the decline in innovation is not an original observation. It’s long associated with Thiel. What makes Oppenheimer such an interesting film is that it’s not sure this bureaucratisation is such a bad thing.
In the fission component of the film, we see the brilliant scientists inventing the bomb, running rings around the plodding soldiers with their rules and procedures and obsession with secrecy and security.
There’s a lot of probabilistic thinking: there’s a “near zero” risk that the first nuclear test will destroy the world, and Oppenheimer decides this risk is worth taking for the chance of defeating the Nazis and creating a weapon with a deterrent effect so powerful it will end all war.
The bomb has a positive expected value. There’s also a lot of decoupling, especially around politics. If someone is a scientist and also a communist, Oppenheimer’s instinct was to decouple these variables and disregard all the rules around security. The second part of the film points out the result of this: the creation of an apocalyptic weapon and the theft of its plans by the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer took a risk on destroying the world – why was that his risk to take? – and his indifference towards securing this invention brought about the insanely dangerous nuclear arms race. Any member of the River will tell you that a world in which there’s a non-zero chance of a nuclear war every year is one in which the world is almost certainly destroyed over a long enough timeline. This is Oppenheimer’s (both the movie and the physicist’s) conclusion.
Ethics left behind
In early 2022, the economist Tyler Cowen interviewed the then crypto multimillionaire, now convicted and imprisoned fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was a central figure across many River domains: finance, cryptocurrency, tech and effective altruism. The interview began with Cowen asking Bankman-Fried what made him such a successful trader. He replied, “Quantum mechanics … The world is very messy. Math might look clean, but any time that you jump out into how things really work, there are always going to be factors that you can’t consider, but there’s a huge amount of power in being quantitative. There’s huge power in thinking about things, not just from a qualitative angle, but putting numbers on things, building statistical models.”
Later in the interview, Cowen asked, “Let’s say there’s a game: 51%, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49%, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?” Bankman-Fried said he would take the bet and keep taking it, because the bet was positive expected value.
Cowen points out this approach almost certainly dooms humanity to non-existence (he cites the St Petersburg paradox, a puzzle in probability theory) and Bankman-Fried replies there’s also a chance of creating enormous value, so the risk is worth taking.
The interview was widely referenced after he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Taking large positive EV risks with his customers’ money turned out to be Bankman-Fried’s trading strategy.
Silver thinks there’s a tendency for people in the River to oversimplify complex problems, overestimate their ability to accurately calculate risk and expected value, to “decouple” from normal ethical standards, and to take chances that can have dire consequences for the people around them. One way of characterising this behaviour is that while the Village is innately conservative, the River is “high variance”: it can win big, but it can also lose big. It could – viz Oppenheimer – destroy the world.
Titans of tech
At the flood tide of the River looms Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, his gaze set firmly on Mars and his life goal of making humans a multiplanetary species motivated partly by his concerns about the existential risk of nuclear war. Musk is the world spirit on a private jet tweeting memes. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat suggests we view Musk the same way the movie Amadeus portrays Mozart: he is a crass buffoon, but he is also Mozart, and if you can’t get past the buffoonery, you’re missing almost everything.
The premise of Musk’s career has been betting against incumbents: the banks with PayPal, the automotive industry with Tesla; Nasa, Lockheed and Boeing with SpaceX. He bet large on Donald Trump and won; now his admirers whisper excitedly about “shadow president Elon”, who will fix the US federal government in the next 18 months by closing most of it down.
Musk’s advice to his engineers is always “delete, delete, delete”. Remove everything you can from a system until it crashes, then restore the bare minimum. If you haven’t crashed it, you haven’t deleted enough.
Going back to the question of what happened to the world historical geniuses of the early-20th century, the tech sector has long considered itself as filling this role. Hasn’t it changed the world? Aren’t the Jobs, Musks and Zuckerbergs analogous to the titans of physics? The suggestion always seemed silly: Silicon Valley makes so much of its money from digital ads, video games, disposable gadgets. But recent advances, such as Musk’s gigafactories and reusable rockets, the development of transformers and the race to artificial general intelligence, alongside new biotech offerings like GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic) and Karikó's mRNA platform, are starting to feel epochal. Perhaps the Great Stagnation is over? Perhaps the River is prevailing?
As usual, the variance is high: there’s widespread concern in the research community that AI could kill us all; the likelihood of this is known among Riverians as p(doom). But, advocates of the technology argue it could create so much value the risk might be worth taking. Another existential gamble on behalf of our species.
Trump’s taste for risk
Is Trump a member of the River? He does not seem to thrive on analytical thinking, but he has an unusually high tolerance for risk. His triumph marks an alliance between right-wing populism and the River against their mutual enemies, the Village: the establishment and its institutions.
There is a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th-century political text Democracy in America that Musk and his fellow travellers like to cut and paste into their memes. It anticipates the endpoint of representative democracies that prioritise equality and security via centralised bureaucracy: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate … It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannise, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
It’s the Village, as prophesied in 1835, and they are poised to destroy it. The difference between the physicists in Oppenheimer’s day and the River of the mid-2020s is that even though it’s a counter elite, it enjoys extraordinary wealth and power. It cannot be brushed aside. Perhaps it can even buy the presidency, or at least rent it for a while. Trump’s first term in office was marked by inaction and frustration; he lacked the elite human capital to carry out his wishes. Now, he has access to some of the most capable individuals in the world, and it is very hard to predict the end result.
The Vibe Shift
In mid-July, Cowen wrote about “the changes in vibes”: the strong cultural signals that a shift towards a Trump victory was under way. One of his explanations was that, “the ‘Trumpian Right’, whether you agree with it or not, has been more intellectually alive and vital than the Progressive Left, at least during the last five years, maybe more. Being fully on the outs, those people were more free to be creative, noting that I am not equating creative with being correct”.
This feels right to me, at least if you replace the Trumpian Right with Silver’s River. Early last year, I went to a forum on free speech at a university. Listening to the majority of the academics was like having someone vomit a thin gruel of lukewarm tapioca directly into your ears. In a contest of ideas between the Village and the River, the latter wins easily.
How should we feel about this? Oppenheimer suggests we should feel profoundly unsure. Towards the end of the movie, Einstein observes, “Here we are, lost in your quantum world of probabilities and needing certainty.” The Village provides certainty, or at least the illusion of it, telling us there are serious people in charge making sensible decisions, that things will remain much as they are.
The illusion is dissolving before our eyes. Ever since the global financial crisis, there’s been an ideological instability in democratic politics, as if history itself is test-driving alternatives to the status quo. We had the socialist moment of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn; the national populism of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Trump 1.0. In New Zealand, we saw the rise and fall of Jacinda Ardern and her therapeutic state. All of them were found wanting.
Perhaps the real revolution is broader than politics, dovetailing with shifts in technology and culture.
Its beginning is behind us – some time between the Tesla IPO in 2010 and the first Pfizer vaccine; now, it’s rapidly building in power and (over) confidence. A river bursting a dam, threatening to sweep all before it, its chances of success and failure maximally uncertain.