What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thi...
EDIT: (to explain why)
No other analysis I've seen anywhere of Thiel at the RNC takes into account this very, very important attempt at explaining Thiel's reasons:
""" Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy. """
Thiel doesn't want less government, but he does want less democracy, because he can achieve his aims more easily if this is the case (or so he believes).
Lest anyone read the above and somehow believe I'm a Trump or Thiel supporter/advocate/etc, I'm solidly NOT.
http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-tr...
From the man's own words, it seems to be a combination of:
• A shared feeling that America was once great, and it can be again, but currently is in decline. No other politician except Trump says this.
• Dislike of foreign wars, a feeling that only Trump says "end foreign wars" and really believes it.
And that's it. I'm not sure it really needs more analysis than that: Thiel feels America doesn't work as well as it used to, and like many libertarian types, is against foreign military intervention. If these two things are much more important to you than other things, it makes logical sense to support Trump.
You can't simply hear Thiel's speech and directly get what he wants, because saying it would cause too much backlash.
He wants to use the government's massive resources to carry out projects that he's aligned with -- perhaps even that he has control over.
Over time I have become weary of people trying to explain voters preferences by asking "why are you voting this way", listening to the answer and then saying, "no, you're wrong. you're actually voting for that because X, Y, Z". How rude is that? People say what they want, they have no incentive to lie, and then they aren't believed?
We saw this a lot with the Brexit vote. Leave voters were asked by pollsters "why will you vote leave" and were told either "because I am tired of competing with low-wage immigrants for jobs" or "because I think the EU is flawed and cannot reform". Then a whole bunch of pundits started saying that no, it's actually not like that at all, it's actually a backlash against the elite, or racism, or whatever alternative explanation they preferred. But there was no evidence of this.
...like every politician and lobbyist and capitalist, ever? How would that be a change of any sort? If this is how he thinks, why did he spend so much of his life dressing it up in "non-conformist" camouflage? He could have just said the same things that all "great leaders" do, and spared us the confusion.
Some things in there that might turn someone who is typically Republican or conservative off of the Libertarian Party (and therefore the Libertarian Party's candidate):
• No restriction on abortion.
• Gets rid of foreign foreign economic and military aid (which I'm assuming would include getting rid of aid to Israel, which is why I think it would be a problem for Republicans).
• Calls for close to an open borders policy (exceptions being for people who pose a creditable threat to security, health, or property).
• Full legalization of most drugs.
Some things in there that might turn off someone who is typically a Democrat or liberal off include:
• Government should not discriminate on the basis of sex, wealth, ethnicity, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference or sexual orientation, but private parties can. Those who disagree with a private party's choice to discriminate can respond with ostracism, boycotts, and other free-market solutions.
• No minimum wage.
• Implied elimination of public schools. (Education best provided by the free market, and government should not compete with private enterprise).
And they aren't being offered what that from liberals. Democrats promise lots of free stuff from the government, paid for by taxing the rich more. Many people don't want that. They want the dignity of meaningful reasonably-paying work, not income redistribution. That's why they vote Republican (to the chagrin of Democrats who don't understand why they would vote against "their interests"). They believe that if we got rid of all these regulations and lowered taxes, jobs would come back and they could afford to be contributors to society instead of receiving benefits paid for by other people.
Also see my sibling comment here [1].
I personally am skeptical, but it's a pitch many people are open to. In my opinion protectionism isn't going to revive the American middle class and bring back millions of 1970s-type well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs, because at this point it's difficult to create any kind of circumstances that will make that happen. Though I can believe a more historical version of the argument, that free-trade deals accelerated the decline of these jobs, which would've stuck around longer, rather than fleeing rapidly to Mexico and China, if we'd have had a more protectionist trade policy over the past few decades.
I can completely understand why people are willing to buy the argument though, in part because they're not being offered a particularly compelling alternative. Telling someone who used to have a good factory job and is now poor something like: "sorry buddy, these jobs are gone and not coming back, maybe go to university or sign up for welfare", isn't a big winner. But, I doubt this is what interests Thiel.
Seems like that is the kind of thing that gets you into trade wars. Not to mention that people would be Really Really Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price because of tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing.
But...I'm not an expert, so I don't know with any degree of confidence what the consequences would be. Problem is Trump's fans are so far down in the "not an expert" direction that Dunning-Kruger probably makes them think it really IS that easy...sigh...
Pretty sure I remember Apple saying it would cost a whopping $7 more per device to build an iPhone in the US. The real problem is that the US lacks a wealth of (low cost?) suppliers for the various parts in the phone itself, so it would be difficult to innovate at the pace Apple wants to move at.
(The example given IIRC was a change in the case or screws or something at the last moment demanded by S. Jobs that Apple believed couldn't be implemented quickly enough in the US.)
The core cause being that individual humans are much more productive now. We just don't need as many people working.
>They want the dignity of meaningful reasonably-paying work, not income redistribution.
About the only way to accomplish reasonably-paying work is to legislate it. WalMart employees make so little a substantial fraction (possibly 15% in one state) are on food stamps. [1] Minimum wage needs to be livable.
But as you push up minimum wage a lot of employers will cut back on how many people they hire. They certainly won't rehire the 5M+ people who have lost manufacturing jobs due to outsourcing and automation: Even the manufacturing jobs that are returning to the US are only hiring 1/10 or fewer the number of workers, and those need to be experts and managing robots. So if you have people who want jobs (and not, for instance, a guaranteed income), the government is going to need to be the employer of last resort. And I don't see Trump creating a New Deal.
The laughable situation is that Trump is known most for cheating companies and workers for his own benefit. He's in this for his ego and for selfish gains. Looking at the evidence, at best one can hope that Trump will break the country so badly that something better will rise from the ashes. And it's immoral to push for such a disaster for someone like Thiel who isn't likely to be one of the ones who suffer from the disaster. The ends don't justify the means.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/walm...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...
None of these things are coming back - I feel like they are yearning for a dream because they don't know why that dream existed.
Scott Sumner on steel jobs: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31847
It's not just Trump's wife who is stealing ideas.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Until just recently, I dismissed this crowd as libertarian fruitopians. To be treated no different than the flat earthers.
Then I learned about the rantings of Mencius Moldbug [1]. These jokers actually mean it.
The world's a big place. I guess there's room enough for every form of crazy.
[1] Using his pseudonym, so that this isn't entirely ad homenin.
Nikita Sergeyevich, is that you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"
The allegedly scientific basis is that there is an unstoppable march of historical progress, and you should cheer it on and actively lay waste to the obstacles that are going to be swept aside anyway. (Yes, it's a strange creed.)
Manifest destiny = forward looking. Wasn't good justification for expansion, though good justfications did exist.
American exceptionalism = backward looking
disruptive innovation = Neither, more just an adjective.
If there really is such a thing as history taking sides, Marx and his followers very clearly ended up on the wrong side. I imagine those co-opting the phrase now will suffer the same fate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to...
[1] As an aside, calling facially race-neutral comments about particular immigration statuses or religious beliefs "racist" is kind of offensive to people of that race who don't share that immigration status or those religious beliefs. I'm sure there are a lot of Hispanics in the US who came here legally who don't appreciate liberals saying that Trump wants to deport their families, as if all Hispanics are here illegally.
Land explains this better (mentioning Thiel, too) at http://www.xenosystems.net/nrx-and-liberalism/. His thinking there should apply broadly to all non-left (non-)politics.
I personally like that they are embracing "progressive" more. I think it's more accurate than "liberal" and uniquely theirs.
I'd add that implementing security "at the border" is the lightest touch option available and doesn't infringe on the rights of any citizens. But our leaders won't do it.
Instead they create the TSA to eliminate free travel and get access to our emails & phone calls to eliminate privacy.
Also, while I see both sides of the gun argument, it worries me that the government uses an obvious Islamic terrorist attack as an excuse to push gun control.
In fact, it's almost like our government doesn't mind terrorist attacks, because with every attack they have an excuse to infringe on more of our rights and expand their power.
I'm sympathetic to anti-Iraq war views.
Less sympathetic to those actually against the war. Most seemed like they didn't want any response to terrorism at all, which is unacceptable.
There's an ideology out there that wants to come to my country and kill me and my family. I'm perfectly fine killing those people first - or at least making sure they can't come here and commit the ultimate hate crime.
We went to fight extremists who happen to use terrorism. We also spent most of our time and money with our dicks in our hand instead of 'killing them before they killed us.'
They don't want you dead, anyway. they want you terrified.
By the way (if you don't mind me asking), did you have an Islamic upbringing? (as most Bengalis do I think). If you did, when did you decide to get away from it?
I now try to have a friendly smile on wherever I go, and I try to talk to strangers. The great news is that this is doing wonders. E.g. yesterday I met a Catholic guy in the T who was all like "Oh, I am so sorry what my country is doing to your country... bombing it all, killing innocents" -- and I was all like "oh, no, I am sorry that some bastards from my country are doing shitty stuff to this country". Having conversations like this sort of help me get back in thinking that most Americans indeed actually do not hate me or want me out.
Apologies to Conor Lynch, author of that article you linked, but Trump is far from the only person opposing intolerance. Just one of a zillion examples: many liberals rationalized supporting Bush's Folly in Iraq and Afghanistan to better protect women.
One of the most interesting things about current politics.
I've always found it odd that republicans haven't picked up on this and tried to seize on the opportunity to create an incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies.
Seems like there would be a tremendous amount of opportunity there given the success of fox news, particularly for an apolitical twitter given recent censorship issues.
For one, "libertarian" (but explicitly not left-libertarian) would probably be a better first-order approximation of how to position such an incubator (or conference, or...). A Republican incubator could plausibly reject Curtis Yarvin on ideological grounds, which doesn't seem like the goal.
That's precisely what they did. Their focus has been media, think tanks, politics instead of tech. They've been fantastically successful.
I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(
> Very rare and extremely powerful combination: the ability to think both clearly and very non-linearly. Most people lucky to have one.
An example of nonlinear thinking by sama[1]:
> the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract.
As you might expect, Peter Thiel prefers to be a contrarian and use his own term for it: Zero to One[2].
0. https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
2. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...
http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon...
Like Vroom - no one talks about the used car market, but they are huge. Knewton and Schoology, two other big company no one treats as huge unless you are into ed-tech Kinnek just raised a huge round, they are trying to be an amazon of suppliers
All of these things are impactful, but, well, weird. There are a LOT of those types of things in NYC
Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain.
What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with anything.
Also, if you've followed the urbit guys from the start, then you know how cultlike they are. No thanks
Source:am tween
The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I hear "changing" or "rebuilding" the world my bullshit meter explodes. To me the NYC scene doesn't want to change the world in grand capitalistic gestures, they want to help out people and have information be free. I'm a big fan of 2600 and that whole ethos. Not to say SV is devoid of that, it's just so much more focused on the glitz and bullshit.
The ancestry / ethnicity of people in tech has to do with everything. Algorithms can be racist - whether it's insensitive snapchat filter (the Bob Marley one comes to mind) or facial detection algos that can't detect black people because the devs only tested it on lighter-skinned people. Diversity is a beautiful thing, especially in these polarizing times, and so its meaningful to me for there to be a large amount of different folk involved in our profession and interests. Only 1% of people working in Sv are black. That's just wrong.
Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?
I have absolutely no idea why you consider some specific demographic breakdown "just wrong". What's your underlying moral principle? The most I can come up with is some kind 1930's Italian style corporatism with certain specific ethnic groups as the corporates, but that seems uncharitable.
Actually, it is passively racist, since many of these algorithms have nothing to do with contrast and everything to do with improper tagging and insufficient and incorrect training data. It is how black people got labelled gorillas by google, and how I can name some names of how to get through a prominent AI/ML driven filter with Japanese woodblock shunga prints from the late Tokugawa period (go look it up yourself for examples)
Dark Skin Tamils can and should be part of developing tagging. I also tend to think that for things as complicated as porn or race, you may want to even do different training data in different places for different cultures. I don't honestly know how a Tamil would take an american's view on the imagery at the temple at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. To many Americans, the sculptures on the temple may be outside the pale for work, but for a Hindu Tamil, it may be a place of great religious significance and may not bother them in the slightest.
> But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you?
The better question is why? Even Hobbes hated monarchies, he just thought they were the best of bad options under the conditions of you magically get a benevolent ruler, and only because he lived through too many radical revolutions in england. Almost everyone else disagrees with him.
What happens when you are on the outs with your monarch/dictator. What is your counterweight in the state to have real rights? (bitcoins and the blockchain are not them, especially for a mass group)
How do you plan on dealing with that?
Denver and Austin. [2]
[1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-gro...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-plac...
The list could go on. If you want to expand outward a bit, the University of Waterloo in Canada is also quite good.
Gone are the middle-class rebels (jobs/clark) that don't care what anybody thinks, in are the ivy-league-ish conformers that want wall street funding and friendly government regulation (basically everybody.
And hey, if wall street and friendly government regulators is what you want and if you have a few hundred grand (maybe a few million) to throw at her foundation or her friends, then Hillary is your gal.
It's not for want of trying.
And my own humble efforts in this regard:
Even technical people can't be technical about everything. We need useable and ubiquitous.
I could come up with a few pretty obvious reasons why a gay libertarian like Thiel would support trump.
1) Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays. Currently in 11 Muslim countries acting out homosexuality is punishable by death. In most others they imprisons gays and extra judicial killings of gays by mobs are not persecuted.
It is not unreasonable for a gay man to fear Muslims and Muslim culture.
2) Democrats engage in political correctness and in vilification of their political opponents (You don't agree with me? You are like Hitler!) to a degree that people who say the wrong things or support the wrong candidate must fear for their financial and in some cases even physical security.
Even a billionaire like Thiel will face repercussions for this as was mentioned in the article:
> In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly selected start-up founders from the database CrunchBase, only nine people supported Trump. Fifteen of them opposed Thiel’s speech for Trump, and 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result.
In many areas it is basically open season on anyone that openly supports Trump, people will attack you, people will key your car and strangers will insult you.
It says a lot when people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams endorse Clinton because they fear for their personal safety: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for...
This vilification pushed by the Democrats is the exact opposite of freedom and democracy. I totally get why a libertarian would support Trump even if he doesn't like him to at least restore the most basic personal freedoms.
3) Trump is very much anti big government. He wants to reduce its size and remove regulations that inhibit the growth of the private sector. Few libertarians would have a problem with that.
Also it isn't sustainable to permanently have a large portion of society completely dependant on government as we can obviously witness by the insane growth of government debt everywhere in the West.
This system almost guarantees that poor people will always stay poor and that their children will be poor too as all they know is dependance and submission to the social system.
Social systems do not help the poor, they never did. Over the last decades it has gotten bigger and bigger and yet poverty never went down, instead the opposite happened.
The same is true for public education which was basically run by liberals since the 80ties. It has gotten so bad that today it can't even guarantee that a child going through this system will not end up as a functional illiterates.
2. This isn't a democrat thing, every political ideology has some extremists that are intolerant of everyone that doesn't support their view. The only reason for saying this is to create an us vs them dichotomy. Saying this will never ever lead to positive political discussions.
3. Is he really? I see it like this: The reason manufacturing and unskilled labor jobs are disappearing is because the free market favors things being produced in China. When given the choice of buying Chinese made for cheaper vs paying more for local goods people chose the Chinese products.
The less government involvement, the better markets work, and the truth is the markets favor cheaper products made overseas, that's why this is happening. The only way that these jobs can be brought back to America is by government force, which means more government involvement in trade and business. In a world where anyone can do unskilled labor there's no reason for companies to take more expensive American unskilled labor over anyone else, and without government intervention that's always going to be the case.
I don't see any possible way that "better trade deals" are going to both help these workers and boost the economy. You can either choose free markets, which favor capital and a persons value to society and are the best for the overall economy. Or you can choose protected markets which involve more government and help some people to the detriment of others. There's no way you can have both less government and a more equal economic system.
Trump is promising a solution he almost certainly knows he can't deliver to take advantage of the economically illiterate. This is why the so many elites in the republican party hate him. He's running as a republican on a democratic economic platform (more equality) but still saying he's going to have less government, which they know is impossible to do. Unfortunately so many republicans are brainwashed into thinking the democrats are incompetent and only want to increase government because they can. While in truth the increased size of the government is the side effect of trying to make society more equal.
The saddest thing is if Trump gets in if he goes for free markets and less government (which as he is a business man I think he will, but we'll see) he's going to devastate these people (the unskilled blue collar workers, his biggest fan base) lives even more than they currently are and that's the real tragedy of the rise of Trump.
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
Only in 3 out of 36 Muslim countries surveyed 1 in 10 Muslims believes that homosexuality is morally acceptable. This means that even in those 3 most tolerant Muslim countries 90% view homosexuality as unacceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_terr...
In the Muslim areas of Northern Africa and the Middle East you'll find that homosexuality is almost universally criminalised.
People living in Muslim countries overwhelmingly disapprove and many even hate homosexuals and that's why this orientation is criminalised in their countries. Yet when they come to Europe or the US they magically turn into gay tolerant citizens?
> 2. This isn't a democrat thing, every political ideology has some extremists that are intolerant of everyone that doesn't support their view. The only reason for saying this is to create an us vs them dichotomy. Saying this will never ever lead to positive political discussions.
You don't actually believe that anyone has to fear for his job, family and life if he supports Liberals in the West like Hillary.
I've never seen even one example of someone getting fired for supporting Liberals in the West, yet I've seen many reports of people who were fired because someone made a screenshot of an anti Hillary or pro Trump comment and sent it to their bosses.
> 3. Is he really? I see it like this: The reason manufacturing and unskilled labor jobs are disappearing is because the free market favors things being produced in China....
What I said is that regulations and increased taxes inhibit private sector growth at the cost of government growth, I didn't say anything about China or low skilled labor. We in the West could increase our competitiveness with lower taxes, less regulations and more freedoms, because this also directly effects the cost of production. No trade wars needed.
Instead all we do is increase taxes, create more debt and over regulate everything. And why do we need this? Because we have a social system in place since the 60ties that is supposedly fighting poverty and is constantly growing, yet poverty gets worse and worse.
And then there's public schools that are run by Liberals for decades now, which have gotten so bad that I honestly consider the possibility that they are actually trying hard to produce as many poor, illiterate and government dependant people/voters as possible.
Full stop. What? I stopped reading right there.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never even heard such a stupid idea before.
Oh. "The West", not the USA's West Coast. You're channeling David Rubin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Rubin
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553708
The "regressive left" and endorsing terrorism and other fever dreams. He's just making shit up.
I'm living in the EU which is run by liberals/lefts and I can clearly see that they are pushing hard against the peoples will to allow millions of Muslims to resettle here. (And Obama/Hillary never fail to support this policy)
I did not say that these liberals endorse terrorism, I just say that they are doing it against the will of the people and that there are a lot of legitimate concerns that we have (terrorism, violence, sexual harassment) which are being ignored or often shut down by creating an atmosphere where everyone who disagrees has to fear being labeled a racist or Nazi.
These people don't even know what Nazis were. Nazis themselves were Socialists! Their party name was "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" - in English: "Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party"
Calling my grandmother a trolley car doesn't make her one.
1) ageism -- once you hit 40-45yo, you're done. Take a survey of the ages of the people at your company for evidence. Most engineers in their 20s; some in their 30s; almost none in their 40s and beyond
2) sexism -- females are about 50% of the population. But in Silicon Valley? Hiring favors males. Again, look at the companies you have worked at in Silicon Valley over your career. Mostly all male.
3) racial stereotyping -- take a look again at the companies you have worked for over your career. How many blacks there? How many Hispanics? VERY FEW.
So the idea that the Left is playing an effective role in the Valley is BOGUS in several dimensions:
- AGEISM
- SEXISM
- BLACK AND LATINO HIRING
A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google.
These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire skews the figures. So it's fair to say something is going on here - one of those companies might have a biased hiring process.
And it looks like it is Google that is biased against black people, since 9% of CS graduates are black [3], far closer to Apple's 7% than Google's 1%.
[1] http://www.apple.com/diversity/
[2] https://www.google.com/diversity/
[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...
I believe that there are just fewer black graduates in STEM fields from top universities and that's why Google can't hire more of them.
But they do have a bias similar to the one you just mentioned - they tend to only hire from "top schools". It's true that the top schools tend to produce good people, but it's elitist to think that only they do. Perhaps Apple recruiters look at a broader range of universities, including historically black ones, for example.
Regarding what you said about stores and factories at Apple, those figures were for tech roles, not retail, so that isn't why Apple has 7x more. Although, what "tech" precisely is is not defined by either company, so it's possible there is a significant difference there that we can't see.
If you want to prove that companies discriminate, look up percent of engineering PhDs (like CS) who are black that graduate per year. If that number is above what companies hire - you will have a reasonable claim.
Otherwise it's nothing.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
https://www.apple.com/diversity/pdf/2015-EEO-1-Consolidated-...
Within the "professionals" category, which is the one with engineers in it, both have pretty similar percentages of black employees: about 1.7% at Google, compared to... about 1.7% at Apple.