Stephen Hawking on the Harmful Election of Donald Trump

Stephen Hawking, like many physicists before him, has made the leap from physics to current events. Hawking has become a pundit, and like many other pundits, he offers opinions without evidence, which is exactly the opposite of what physicists do, which is to offer evidence without opinions.

Yesterday, Hawking, who has warned the world about the dangers posed to humanity by artificial intelligence, is now using his podium to warn that the election of Donald Trump comes at “the most dangerous time for our planet,” according to a copyrighted article by Cristina Silva in the International Business Times, suggesting that somehow the election of Donald Trump has made the “most dangerous time” even more dangerous. While we may (and do) agree with Mr. Hawking, we still have to ask, “Where’s the data? Where’s the evidence?”

In an op-ed piece published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, Hawking linked, “Brexit,” the recent British referendum favoring Britain’s withdrawal from the European Community, with the narrow technical victory that Mr. Trump achieved at the polls on November 8 by collecting more Electoral votes than his opponent.

Why Brexit and Trump are Not Symptoms of the Same Malaise

The two events were, however, actually quite different. In point of fact, Donald Trump won the election but lost the vote, with runner-up Hillary Clinton receiving 2.5 million votes MORE than Trump did, while the Brexit referendum racked up 17,410,742 votes to leave the EU against 16,141,243 votes to remain part of Europe, at least politically. (They can’t actually move the British Isles, can they?)

That’s a 1.2 million edge among the “leavers” over the “keepers,” or a 4.5 percent margin of victory for those who wanted to leave the EU. Clinton’s current vote total of 65,152,112 represents a 4 percent margin of victory over Trump, of “keepers” compared to “changers.”

While there is no doubt that the Brexit vote resulted from deep-seated fears among the British electorate about the impact of the EU’s sometimes obtuse regulations on British life, a clear majority of American voters who actually voted indicated that they favored the continuation of President Barack Obama’s eight years of economic stability to Donald Trump wild promises.

So, then, it appears that the famous British astrophysicist was wrong on the facts. He’s right to the extent that the election of Donald Trump, who was never favored to win by any pundits other than the Democratic documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and the cast of characters on the right-wing Fox News network, was evidence that there is a deep seated unhappiness in much of the American middle class who live in the Old Confederacy, the Midwest and Mountain states and three renegade Eastern Rust Belt states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – where Trump’s simplistic economic messages found traction. It is equally clear that a four percent majority of the American people did not buy that rhetoric one little bit.

28 Percent Is Neither a Landslide nor a Plebiscite

Hawking was wrong, however, when he wrote that, “Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.”

Well, he wasn’t actually all wrong about that either. American pundits and their cohorts around the world are saying those things, but they are wrong about the attitude of the American people in general, since a clear majority of them did not buy Trump’s rhetoric, and didn’t vote for him. Pesky things, those facts.

In fact, let’s get this straight. Trump picked up 62,625,928 votes. There were 218,959,000 people in the United States who were eligible to vote, which means that, if Donald Trump’s vote total is indicative of the number of people who feel bummed out over the way things are going in this country, then only 28.6 percent of the American electorate feels that way….and 71.4 percent of the American people DON’T.

The Electoral College Did It – Not Us

Hawking, like many other people around the world, including many Americans, just do not get how a candidate can win an election but lose the office. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Well, that’s because it doesn’t but that is the way things are, and it is the way things are going to stay, because the party in power never has any incentive toward changing those rules, and the party that is not in power can’t.

Hawking went on to suggest that, “It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.”

That’s the Trump party line, but it isn’t necessarily the truth. In fact, if the election were held again today, it is quite likely that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, would be inviting people to join the cabinet. In a poll by the Pew Research Center, reported on November 21 by CBS News, Hillary Clinton received an A or B grade from 43 percent of those polled, while Donald Trump received an A or B grade from just 30 percent of those polled, all of whom voted in the election. The people at Pew noted that this was the first time that loser outpolled the winner in their post-election poll, suggesting that if the election were held again today, the results would be reversed.

There’s an implicit danger to astrophysicists – or other scientists – becoming pundits. While we, as civilians, might not be able to poke holes in Hawking’s theories about the universe, he puts those theories into question when he opines on political matters and gets them wrong. Leads us to wonder what else he might actually be wrong about, which could undo decades of astrophysical speculation.

Hawking doesn’t like Trump. He has called Trump a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator, as he said on a British talk show earlier this year. Well, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to tell us that. Americans have already figured that one out. Or at least 65 million of us got the memo but 62 million didn’t.

Still, Hawking is right about Trump being the wrong person at the wrong time to lead the world’s richest nation, pointing out that, “we face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans,” none of which the Trump family appears to believe or care about. (They are, it appears, a package deal. We voted for Donald but we got the whole family as a bonus.)

Nevertheless, Hawking closed his TV interview on a positive note: “We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.”

Here, finally, we have two problems: we have just elected the world’s least humble person president of the United States, and it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to tell us that artificial intelligence is dangerous. It was artificial intelligence, computerized polling, that came up with the wrong data and the wrong answers about which way the election was going.

We knew that already, Stephen. We’ve all seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999.) Astrophysicists are supposed to predict future events. They are the soothsayers of science. Why didn’t you warn us about Donald, Stephen, before it was too late to do anything about him?

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