Chamath @ 01:16:31Ambiguous
politics
If, leading up to the 2020 U.S. election, enough voters come to feel that cancel culture and political correctness have gone too far, those voters will respond by electing Donald Trump as president in November 2020.
mark my words, if people feel that the pendulum has swung too far, they will elect Donald Trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a shit about any of this stuff. So that would be the bellwether.View on YouTube
Explanation
Reasoning
- Chamath’s statement is explicitly conditional: if enough voters feel that the “pendulum has swung too far” on cancel culture / political correctness, then they will elect Donald Trump in November 2020. He is not clearly asserting that this condition will in fact be met, only what would happen if it is.
- In reality, Donald Trump lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election; Joe Biden won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232, and a clear popular-vote majority. (en.wikipedia.org) So the consequent of the conditional (“they will elect Donald Trump”) did not occur.
- However, the antecedent—“enough voters come to feel that cancel culture and political correctness have gone too far”—is not a directly measurable, binary event. Polling around mid‑2020 shows substantial concern about “cancel culture” and political correctness (e.g., a July 2020 Morning Consult/Politico poll found 46% of respondents thought cancel culture had gone too far), but also mixed views and no clear threshold at which we can say “enough” voters held this view in the precise sense he meant. (en.wikipedia.org)
- Because we can’t objectively determine whether his condition (“enough” voters feeling this way) was satisfied, we can’t rigorously score the truth of the conditional claim itself. If the condition was not met, the failed Trump re‑election tells us nothing about the correctness of his if–then linkage; if it was met, then the linkage would be falsified—but the available data don’t let us settle that question decisively.
Conclusion
Given that (1) the prediction is framed as a hypothetical conditional, and (2) the key antecedent (“enough voters” feeling cancel culture/PC has gone too far) is not operationalized in a way we can confirm or refute from public data, the accuracy of the prediction cannot be determined even though the election outcome is known.
Therefore, the appropriate classification is: ambiguous.