Your tweet nailed it 'The Golden State is cooking its golden geese' The high pay, high innovation tech layer is leaving California, but there’s a huge risk the underlying problem simply follows the industry to places like Texas. Have you considered putting things in place to prevent the next cooked goose. I gave it some thought to a practical company fix to counter tech workforce capture.
The tech guys that headed to Texas early are likely to be the pragmatic escapees who are already fed up with the taxes, regs & cultural monoculture. They put the operations on their feet. But as operations scale up, the using the office photocopier for activism flyers crowd will arrives, plus companies will commence hiring from the same university pipeline that has been churning out strident, low curiosity graduates for decades. The lag is real, the hard core activists don’t show up for the uncertainty period, they arrive once the heat is on and the political resource chain is running.
As you've no doubt seen the university skew is now extreme Heterodox Academy 2026 review. Yale’s 2025 Buckley Institute report: left leaning faculty ratios from 5:1 to 82:1 in many fields, with entire departments having few even moderately centre & zero Republicans. We've now all seen some of the countless videos of graduates repeating baseless claims with total confidence because their education was in fact training, not education & that training rewarded narrative over evidence. That’s lethal to productivity, invention & the long term health of any project, the company & eventually the town, city & state.
Tech companies aren't just the cooked goose, they employ the people writing the goose recipes. If any of this is right, tech can't wait for society or government to fix academia. You, they need to run your own inoculation program right now.
Things like Monthly Reality Calibration Sessions. Mandatory 2 hour 'This Month’s News Autopsy' or 'I Can’t Believe They Wrote/Said This' sessions. Pull real viral claims, media stories & social media posts & videos from the previous 30 days that turned out false, baseless, both plus arrogant & abusive. Rotate presenters, philosophers of science, statisticians, journalists who’ve been publicly corrected, walk through primary sources, data gaps & over the mountain of logical failures. At least one upper manager participating each time to model engagement. Record sessions for new hires.
Introduce epistemologist vetted hiring questions. Maybe hire a small panel of actual epistemologists (absolutely no camouflaged activists) to design a few scenario based questions.
With the focus strictly on process, not conclusions. For example, Present candidates with a now debunked viral claim & ask them to walk through how you would have evaluated the evidence at the time.
Or ask the candidates, What questions would you ask about a study before trusting the company’s decision based on it?
Assess for curiosity, base rate thinking & the necessary intellectual humility that allows for fact based education & real learning potential.
Recruitment slogans almost write themselves.
Real earning potential requires real learning potential.
It signals that top compensation comes with the demand for genuine curiosity and epistemic honesty, the exact filter that will keeps companies from importing California’s capture problem. The pragmatists may love it, as it's too high a hurdle for the strident repeaters of baseless claims.
Frame the whole thing as evidence based decision making & intellectual rigor, viewpoint neutral, legal & cheap. It filters for the exact people that will help growth & public trust, it keeps the new workforce grounded before the activist layer takes root. (And they will try) If you do this early in Texas or any new hub, you might head off the next cooked goose cycle. The companies that implement something like it can be more productive, more innovative & far less likely to repeat the California mistakes.
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