My Dinner with Peter Thiel | Hacker News Reader

My Dinner with Peter Thiel

vanityfair.com

36 pointsdjrobstep30 comments

What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?

I'm guessing the fact that his own hunger was the most memorable part of the evening is an indicator of the quality of conversation available at the dinner party. Billionaires are people, too, and I'd bet they just shot the shit for three hours and dipped.

Personally, listening to "tech visionaries" and their vision for the future is about as interesting as hearing about some random dude's hunger.

It happened a while ago. You don't think it was reported on at the time?

This is about par for the course for a Nick Bilton piece

I hate this style of lazy tech journalism where the interviewer inserts themselves into the story. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson a lot better than this writer.

That's because Hunter S. Thompson was interesting in and of himself.

This article was a denial of service attack on our brains. The writer must be a dumpster fire. I want my 5 minutes back.

I'd not take the article that literally. The author probably remembers most of what occurred. The setting and the story about the dinner party act as a vehicle for commentary on the mindset of the winners in tech and how it'll impact our future as they use their influence.

The author says Peter Thiel is buddies with Elon Musk. From what I've read, they're not really that close. They kind of had a falling out at Paypal if I'm not mistaken.

The article also said that "Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college because it’s a waste of time" and then threw in a misquote of Ayn Rand for good measure.

What all these things have in common is that they're false but truth-adjacent: they sound similar enough to something true that the guy who wrote them can't be fired for journalistic misconduct. It's a very common type of falsehood for reporters looking to make reality fit the story.

> 'truth-adjacent'

I'll have to remember that one.

There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes them especially prone to such semi-deliberate lies.

My hunch is that being overly socialized, hyper-socialized, causes people to do this. Suppose you have to interact with a large number of people, at least some of which could affect your future deleteriously. You can't plausibly remember the specific details for each person to know what will or won't cause offense, especially when you must also gauge people telling their friends about something you said. As a rule people remember a negative feeling e.g. an irritating remark much more so than a positive one e.g. caused by a compliment.

The heuristic here is to gauge the general atmosphere in a room or discussion and then play to the crowd. The act of this averaging results in satisficing* which could also be described by this truth adjacent quality. I wouldn't even be sure it's intentional. They probably don't even realize that in most domains outside of social interaction this is maladaptive. There's an expression to the effect of "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If you reverse autism you don't get normality, you get people barely able to cognite outside of the social realm.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Don't get the point why people who made their money from tech (like Thiel) should be worse (regarding what they do with their money) than people who didn't make their money from tech. It's imo. positive that they have strong opinions and take actions vs. laying on the beach and drinking cocktails (quoting the article).

Depends on the strong opinions held and the actions taken. For some individuals, the world might be better off if they just sat on the beach and enjoyed their wealth. With great power comes great responsibility, but if someone doesn't care enough to agonize over the responsibility part then I would prefer that they didn't exercise the power.

Oth. If the alternative to people who actually had to build something and make it work is people who graduated from Harvard with journalist degrees....

...both groups will contain sociopaths, abut at least one of them will have learnt to do something useful.

Yes, that will always be the case. I think, though, if the majority of ppl take action, we will do well and the net effect on our society will be a positive one.

There's another story of a dinner with Thiel in George Packer's The Unwinding (https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/d...). The vignettes about Thiel are a small but interesting part of a great book.

tl;dr: People with power and money do their own thing.

People do their own thing.

If the author had gotten a big lavish dinner he'd use it to talk about the .1% and how out of touch they are. Instead he got an eccentric geek circle with probably a lot of boring SV inside baseball chatter and no food and uses it to drag out the spectre of the rich weirdo.

We've survived two centuries of mega rich people with strange agendas and we can survive this. Honestly this crowd is far, far less scary than the Ahmanson family and other supporters of things like "theonomy." Google the "Chalcedon foundation." Or Henry Ford and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, or countless other examples. The SV crowd and their rather tame gentrified version of transhumanism and Ayn Rand is fluffy bunny of light stuff compared to those things.

Is Thiel actually a Trump supporter or is he just contractually bound to cast a vote for him due to being a delegate?

I'm getting bored with the SV bashing genre. You can criticize SV for many things, but SV did not cause the decline of the middle class. That trend was firmly in place by the mid-late 70s and began a full 30 years before SV rose as a power. It's largely due to outsourcing, the decline of unions, and the siphoning of trillions out of the American economy to support our pointless waffling quasi-empire. Blame Nixon.

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