What does it mean to be an SV conservative?

One of the questions I cannot quite shake is this: Why is Silicon Valley so gosh-darned liberal? I grew up there and became a conservative of sorts. I grew up reading the San Francisco Chronicle and wondered at the insane decisions of so-called liberal adults whose politics and policies were ever so easy to criticize. But increasingly, instead of merely criticizing liberals, I increasingly wonder what it means to be a conservative?

There are a couple of insights that illuminate for me what being a conservative is. The first comes from the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke in which Jesus says that, "a tree is known by its fruits." My interpretation, in the "here" and "now", that names and reputations are based on the long-term consequences of a person, policy, or population. Note that this is very different from our modern-day media-driven democratic world of reputation based on short-term group opinion.

Second, Tom Wolfe's "The Great Relearning," provides multiple examples of the progressive ideas of intellectuals being implemented only to end in disaster. Wolfe's primary example is the sexual revolution, which was implemented with such fanfare but generated a of unanticipated, and sometimes anticipated, consequences.

Third, this focus on consequences leads, in turn, to a focus on complexity generally and causal complexity specifically. That is, what makes consequences "unintended" is that human cognition is not very good at anticipating the consequences of large policy changes because of the complexity of the social systems involved. However, power computers, the kinds created and used by Silicon Valley engineers, can be used to address and account for that complexity.

However, there is a division in Silicon Valley between analysis used for accurate prediction, such as that used for engineering design and corporate operations, and that used for sales and marketing. That is, sales and marketing rely more on affect and emotion rather than cognition and accurate analysis. And here is the key division between standard liberal and much rarer conservative beliefs in Silicon Valley: the former generates sales and votes based on affect, while the latter generates more accurate analysis based on accurate cognition and accounting for complexity.

As the costs of affect and profit-driven policy analysis mount and become ever more apparent, the need to engage in accurate, engineering design-like policy analysis will increase, but given the tenor of America's 2016 presidential election, that time is still some ways off.