That Peter Thiel is really good at picking winners and disruption.
There was a recent interview of Jeff Bezos where he was asked to comment about Peter Thiel. He said Peter Thiel is a Contrarian. He then said that Conventional Wisdom is generally right and Contrarians are generally wrong, but when Contrarians are right they are right in a massive massive way !
The only way he'll help anyone else is if their interests happened to be aligned with his.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the guy (barring recent endorsements) but you have to understand where his philosophical basis is.
The primary focus of libertarianism is the promotion of individual liberty and non-aggression, leaving the individual to become as big (or small) of a philanthropist as she/he wishes, and never being viewed as a lesser libertarian because of their altruism, or lack thereof (in fact, many libertarians I know are very generous people).
Objectivism, on the other hand, specifically condemns altruism and philanthropy, and deems those who engage in altruism to be "bad" people. This is consistent with how Ayn Rand lived her life.
I don't know whether your phrase describing Thiel, "do good for myself and the world will be better", is accurate or not as a description of his personal philosophy (it does make some sense he would follow Rand instead of libertarian philosophy, given his recent activities both political and entreprenerial). But I am quite sure that the phrase is characteristic of Objectivism and not libertarianism (l | L).
Please don't confuse Ayn Rand with libertarianism. Many libertarians despise her writings, back then as in now (and she despised libertarians/Libertarians).
That book changed my thinking in ways I find difficult to describe. It was as if the world suddenly developed richer textures. I don't know if he would agree, but I felt it was a very 'Thielian' book. A lot of his ideas and statements came into focus for me when I read it. Together with the recordings I mention it became quite an experience.
If you meant the 'Wolfian World', I came up with that 2 days ago, so no.
I did clean up the essay, added some material, made it a bit more accessible to non-HN readers and put it here:
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.
I don't think it is a coincidence that Wolfe was an engineer during the same period that Thiel has been scrutinizing. There are many intriguing connections. The energy crisis in oil, the rejection of nuclear energy (the New Sun). I fancy I see allegory. Maybe I'm mad but I am fascinated by both sets of ideas and cannot help seeing a wonderful marriage. ;-)
I found myself I couldn't finish it in one sitting. It was just too deep. I did it in a series of short sprints, accompanied by my weird music suggestion :)
Keep a notepad and pen handy, I found that useful to jot down various hypotheses that came to mind while I was reading it. Was useful for figuring out what certain words meant. Stay away from Google at all costs, the risk of spoilers is too great, don't even read the blurbs.
Sometimes I would think: is this thing I think I'm seeing really there, or is this the linguistic version of the Voynich manuscript? Then I'd read on and it was like being in a dark room and having a door open from a well lit hallway.
On a related note, do you read / have you read, any other works that fall into the "Dying Earth" sub-genre? A friend of mine recommended the Jack Vance works, and I'm think I'm going to add those to my list as well.
One major change to my thinking by Wolfe was that I used to assume history and progress were linear. I don't believe that anymore. There are too many glaring inconsistencies. More important than a chronological clock is the tick of the 'cultural clock'.
There are works that give me a, let's call it a dying earth vibe, but they are works of non-fiction such as Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, 1177 by Eric Cline (both are interesting but the first of which I strongly recommend to you), or texts originally written in dead languages like Aramaic or Latin of which I have a few in English. It is a very strange feeling to read a text thousands of years old and realize the author is more, not less comprehensible than a similar text from several centuries ago written in your mother tongue. It is stranger still when you find more examples of this happening. It is as if the newer authors had their thoughts clouded or confused, the way they form their thoughts on the page is less joined up. I have come to believe that society undergoes change in such as way that it is perfectly possible for one to have much more in common with the thoughts of an ancient group of people than a much newer one.
To my eyes, it is clearly the case that different periods in history are recorded at different rates of lucidity or joined-up thinking. That is a hamfisted description but it'll have to do. My suspicion is that when we become altogether non-lucid the writing disappears also. At other times it appears to me that the thinking of some authors is more sophisticated than our own. I cannot account for this, only to suggest that culture controls people's range of reasoning powers and that there are deep cycles we are utterly oblivious to.
On a related note I feel strongly that many books and film media created before the 1980s were more sophisticated than today's interpretations. I wrote something about this recently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12941619
Peter Thiel thinks about this in a technological sense but it may also be true culturally with music, art etc.
People will state this is subjective, but I don't think it is. Just because you can point to works of excellence in any age doesn't mean there is no moving average. Perhaps we're hamstrung by access to easy answers that slot into place in our heads in place of difficult, but more original thinking that is our own.