Today is as good a day as any to remember William Shockley.
If you are reading this, thank William Shockley. He invented the silicon transistor. He and two colleagues won the Nobel Prize for their work in 1956. He is known as the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley.
He was also a prick. Shockley’s management style was characterized as "domineering and increasingly paranoid." His children couldn’t stand him and found out he was dead from reading the newspaper. He ran off several of his genius employees at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. These employees went on to start companies like Intel. The computer you are using, the internets you are browsing and the blogs you reading are all direct offshoots of the work of William Shockley.
He later got into teaching at Stanford. Though his specialty was to be electric engineering, he got in neck deep over his views on race and the origins of human intelligence. In 1963 he gave a speech at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota suggesting that the people least competent to survive in the world were the ones reproducing the fastest, while the best of the human population was using birth control and having fewer children. He may not have been wrong.
He noted that intelligence research showed a genetic factor in intelligence and that tests for IQ indicate that African Americans have an average IQ 15 points lower than the population average. The question should have been what do the IQ tests really measure and does it really matter?
Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among African Americans was having a "dysgenic" effect, and expressed an interest in eugenics. He thought this work was important to the genetic future of the population, and came to describe it as the most important work of his career, even though it ruined his reputation. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. Try to keep in mind, eugenics attained a scientific consensus comprable to global warming at one point in our history.
Shockley soon found out that Godwin’s Law came into being long before his grandchild, the Internet. Any mention of eugenics, and then within the next sentence somebody would mention the Nazis, and that ended any intelligent conversation.
So, in memory of a guy whose genius was outstripped by his madness, I’ll pour a wee dram and put Braveheart on the machine that plays movies, thanks to William Shockey. After maybe two or three drams, I’ll start to wonder if people will boycott Shockey’s work, too.
Watching The Defectives 
