On bad leadership and bad followership no question is more important and constant than who knew what when. Here is an extreme example. One of Adolf Hitler’s closest associates, a top Nazi official by the name of Albert Speer, claimed to the end of his long life that he knew nothing about the Holocaust. Did not know that the regime of which he was an integral, indispensable part was guilty of having murdered millions of Jews.
No way for me to know what Speer knew. No way of getting into anyone’s head while they’re alive not to speak of when they’re dead. Nevertheless, it beggars belief that Speer had no inkling of the mass killing which, after all, continued for years.
Same syndrome with Jensen Huang. No way we can know for certain what he knew and did not know about the woman, Alice Huang, with whom he had, by his own admission, an extramarital relationship. Did he, for example, even conceive of the possibility that Ms. Huang was an agent of the Chinese government?
No idea. We are reduced then to extrapolating what we believe to be true from what we know about how the mind works.
About Alice Huang Jensen Huang would have known some things for certain. For example, that she was a citizen and lifelong resident of China. And that she was affiliated with, maybe even in control of Megaspeed, a Singaporean shell company which, while the two were a couple of sorts, bought billions of dollars’ worth of intelligence chips from his company, Nvidia.
Which raises the question of whether during the time they together Jensen Huang knew, or suspected, or even dreamt that Alice Huang was or might be spying for China. Notes on knowing:
- Knowing something is being aware of a fact, of reality, of an objective truth.
- Not wanting to know something is avoiding or denying a fact, a reality, an objective truth.
- Not wanting to know something is sometimes referred to as “willful ignorance” or denial. It means avoiding knowing something that is or at least could be true. It happens when the truth is something that we do not want to know, so we deliberately look away, or change the subject, or refuse to take seriously.
But here’s the rub. The term “willful ignorance” implies a deliberate, a conscious act. But sometimes not wanting to know, avoiding what objectively is true, is an unconscious or maybe subconscious act. Sometimes we might on some level suspect that something is true, but consciously we prefer to pretend. To pretend that it is not true by ignoring it entirely or simply dismissing it.
Again, we cannot know what Jensen Huang was thinking or not thinking about Alice Huang. But the idea that in his case neither knowing, nor not wanting to know applies seems to me to be far-fetched.