Some mix of history and whimsy and a proposal for rebranding Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley got its name because of employee law that California inherited from Spain. In states back east, if you worked for a shoe cobbler and then left to start your own shoe cobbler business, your former employer could sue you for illegally taking knowledge he'd given you to use in competition against him. In California, he could not.

William Shockley worked for Bell Labs and managed John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, the two guys who did the research on semiconductors that led to the transistor. Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared in a Nobel Prize. (Bardeen went on to share in a second Nobel Prize involving the theory of superconductivity.)
Shockley left Bell Labs, moving close to his aging mother in Palo Alto. He started Shockley Labs and hired some uber-bright people. Turns out that Shockley - who was a crackpot whose theories included an embrace of eugenics - was a terrible manager and one day, eight of his best employees left Shockley Semiconductor Labs to form Fairchild. Curiously, given you could easily leave an employer who you felt you could outperform, people left Fairchild as well, and the companies that sprouted up from those exits were referred to as the Fairchild(ren). The most famous of those was easily Intel, founded by Gordon Moore (of Moore's law fame) and Robert Noyce who proved much better managers than Shockley, who died a bitter and committed conspiracy theorist.

The string of silicon companies led to the nickname Silicon Valley, a description of a new, transformative technology that twice democratized information. Once by its unprecedented processing power and its effect on information technology evolution, an exponential rise in computing power that we've still not fully realized the consequences of. And secondly by creating cultures responsive to the fact that great employees could leave to become competitors so better to give them leadership influence and even equity rather than leave them with incentive to leave your employ to become competitors. This, too, is a consequence we have yet to see the culmination of, a democratization of management and leadership within the corporation.

Silicon Valley is a description that now applies to companies in Seattle. Microsoft, Amazon, Redfin, and Zillow are companies that are casually lumped under the label of Silicon Valley. They - of course - are software companies and rely on, rather than make, silicon. It seems as though Silicon Valley is the wrong label for King County, home to two successive, "richest man in the world" entrepreneurs, Gates and then Bezos.

Perhaps the new label should be Algorithm Alley, a nod to the early 21st century rise of the software that so exploits the potential of the silicon of the late 1900s. Silicon Valley gives way to Algorithm Alley.

My (and your) Belief in an Afterlife

 I post all the time about politics, policy and stats that seem to describe our world because I have to live with the consequence of your vote and you with mine. There is nothing private about the consequences of politics so I love the notion that we can at least better understand what thinking (or instincts) lie behind particular models of the world. Shared stats and perspectives can make those worldviews - and thus our votes - better.

Religion, though, is a private matter and so I stay away from that. Unlike your choice to vote for someone, your choice to be Catholic or atheist or Scientologist doesn't impact me and is none of my business. But I do want to talk about the afterlife.

I have developed this theory that morality is enhanced by a belief in an afterlife.

"A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands of years of non-existence; he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true."

- Arthur Schopenhauer

By afterlife, I don't even mean that if you live a good life you'll be playing harp on a cloud or be reincarnated as someone's spoiled dog. By afterlife I mean something more simple: after your life, the world will go on and the lives in it will be just as important as those of you and the ones around you that you love. Perhaps even more important because there will be so many more lives.

Years ago I read a fascinating thought experiment. Imagine that you knew with great certainty that at the moment you died, life for all humanity would end. Giant meteor, terrible pandemic ... whatever. Everyone gone. How does that change your own life?

I think for a lot us, honestly believing such a thing would tend to gut you. It would make so much of what animates you suddenly seem laughable. "What does anything matter?" you might ask. And that thought experiment seems to me proof that our lives are generally animated by a belief in an afterlife and a sense that it's important.

Morality is certainly about now, about caring how we harm or help others. I think it's also about later, making provision for the future we'll eventually be excluded from. Believing that an afterlife matters allows us to take actions on what has the highest impact: things that take years, decades, or even lifetimes to play out.

I don't even think that a belief in an afterlife is a religious matter; it seems to me a demonstrably moral one based on a simple premise: what matters most in the world is so much bigger than me or my lifetime.