Confirm or Deny: Peter Thiel
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Peter Thiel: Confirm. I’d be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign."
I don't see how the world's ~sixth largest economy succeeding from the world's 1st/2nd largest is good for the latter.
"You like “Star Trek” more than “Star Wars.”
Deny. I like “Star Wars” way better. I’m a capitalist. “Star Wars” is the capitalist show. “Star Trek” is the communist one. There is no money in “Star Trek” because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of “Star Wars” starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in “Star Wars” is driven by money."
I hope he's just trolling here. Preferring a future of the same old debtors and creditors as today, to one where plentiful energy can be transformed into any kind of matter the human race needs, eliminating the need for money?
Edit: actually he didn't say anything preferring one future or the other, so maybe he just likes Star Wars b/c it's more relatable to present day.
I'm not necessarily a Thiel fan, but to be fair, preference is irrelevant when only the former of those choices is actually possible in our universe. And he's right, at least as far as Gene Roddenberry was concerned, the utopian future was a Communist one, albeit one where the laws of physics were apparently sent to the camps during the Eugenics Wars.
Although, also to be fair, Star Wars has space wizards instead of technobabble, and the more deeply it delved into its economic and political systems in the prequels, the more ridiculous it seemed. Neither franchise would seem able to serve as a credible platform for the exploration of any complex political or economic idea.
But the original Star Trek was pretty capitalist as well, what with Harry Mudd running around the galaxy selling off-brand pharmacueticals and alien technology, the Federation exploiting dilithium miners, the Orion Syndicate, etc.
And, of course, after TNG, we get the Ferengi, who are obvious parodies of American capitalism, but not the villains.
Seems clear to me. California, like Texas, has the largest concentration of Electoral College votes within a single state. While TX is reliably Republican, CA is reliably Democrat. Since Trump lost the popular vote by a large margin, a CA-exit would be highly beneficial to his re-election efforts.
CA is obviously an economically important state and a CA-exit would be enormously disruptive to the US economy. That said, the impacts might not be felt by the time the re-election campaign begins.
And even if they are felt by that time, the current state of American civic literacy, combined with the disproportionate size of older voter blocs is still enough to win elections by ignoring the reality of automation on jobs and blaming weak job markets on globalization, immigration and trade deals.
I'm not advocating for the separation of California, but...
I think we can only claim this for certain if our optimization target is size of the economy, in which case no separating from a larger economy would be bad for California.
Most entities would be very happy to be the 6th largest economy in the world, I'd guess there are only 5 countries that wouldn't be so keen on it. Quality of life is comparably very good in many countries with smaller economies than the United States. I'd speculate that this is due to the smaller geographic region occupied by the country, and the lower rate of dispersion across the political spectrum amongst citizens. California would achieve both of these in a succession.
California has a lot of issues both social and political that diverge from the opinion of most other states. Political correctness, immigration, etc...
Again I'm not saying California should divorce itself from the United States, only that I can see why someone might have such an opinion.
> I hope he's just trolling here. Preferring a future of the same old debtors and creditors as today, to one where plentiful energy can be transformed into any kind of matter the human race needs, eliminating the need for money?
Probably not, historically he's been pretty capitalist.
Not sure Star Wars is a great example of capitalism though.
To be fair to Thiel, though, there's not really the implication that he prefers Star Wars as a "possible kind of future", but just that he prefers it as media. It's also pretty clear that he hasn't seen either one in quite some time.
No, I don't know! I will add that perhaps the notion of a spacefaring earth with a functional, yet voluntary(?) participation economy, a peaceful one-world government, AND free/happy peoples seems like an impossible hippie-era fantasy to Thiel.
Perhaps we can take clues from world history and judge whether his skepticism is reasonable.
No, he's just not a nice person.
I say this because the only reason this article exists is due to Thiel's support of the Trump administration, and thus his association with it's controversial (the wall, deporting muslims, etc) policies and Trump's controversial public statements and persona.
I would have preferred to see substantive questions addressing this stuff posed. Maureen Dowd was interviewing one of the most powerful people in the country.
Instead, we get information, but the value of that information is questionable.
I read the interview as "normalizing" Thiel - like, "Hey, this guy likes stuff to!"
Nothing inherently wrong with that but the Fourth Estate needs to do more.
Gasp! They are replicators, no transporters. :-)
I feel like even talking to Trump validates his lies and just disgusting moral integrity of what it means to be American.
Peter Thiel like everyone else is supporting views which also happens to be very popular views in this country. I not only have respect for Peter for supporting Trump but I think tech industry should be thankful to him for supporting Trump and ensuring Trump gets a good insider view of what role Trump should play or stay out of for tech industry to grow. By any stretch of imagination Thiel has helped tech industry, all the people employed in tech industry and as a result America too. When Trump's immigration team meets to discuss H1B, Thiel is going to argue on our behalf.
Trump literally pissed on NYT and other media businesses while was much more positive in in Tech meetings.
But then again, you'd have to overlook his incorrect views on things like macroeconomics (Clarium was quite the hedge fund!).
I like the Bezos quote, frankly. I think it sums up Thiel well. As a startup investor, you only have to be right a few times, and being wrong doesn't hurt that much.
Sadly, governing -- and choosing our represented leaders -- comes with higher stakes and worse outcomes.
[1]: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
I suppose there are different ways to read that, but Thiel doesn't believe democracy with universal suffrage leads to the best outcomes. I disagree.
Yeah, "rural" America has had it tough -- that's basically true of every "western"[1] nation -- but here's what I personally don't understand[2]... How are they supporting someone who is the elite? I mean, he may not be part of the "intellectual elite" or "academic elite", but he's clearly part of the "economic elite"... and, as such, will continue to bolster his own (+cronies) position.
Much as it pains me to say it, I think what we're facing is a cognitive disconnect fueled by a (socio-)economic disparity in education/critical thinking. (A tiny bit of sort-of-reasoning to support this: The majority of people don't have reading skills above n'th grade... where n <= 8ish?)
EDIT: I should say for disclosure that I'm not USian, but I do fear what consequences this will have for the rest of the world. I can only hope that most sane leaders won't take his pronouncements seriously. Yesterday he tweeted in ALL CAPS, for $DEITY's sake.
[1] AFAICT it's just because China (and most of the rest of Asia) can afford to just "throw people at the problem" at very low cost. (No health/environment regaulations, the situation for workers is so dire, etc. etc.).
[2] I mean, I hope I don't understand. Maybe all information exchange has just been subverted permanently by just shouting "FAKE NEWS", but I really nope not. I sense that the situation in the US is almost that dire (wrt. red/blue team), but if this spreads it could be disastrous for civilization itself.
His entire branding schtick (gold-plated everything, slapping his name on steaks, for God's sake??) is what a poor person imagines a rich person's life is like. He's aspirational, both in the low-quality but glitzy products he peddles, and in how he talks trash about educated people and technocrats. It's true that he's taken advantage of the system, like with outsourcing and all that, but he's in no way smart enough to have developed any of that. He's more of a remora than an actual treaty-crafting shark. So he gets a pass on the economic elitism.
The other part of it is that Hillary Clinton, imperfect as she might actually be (and it's nowhere near as bad as her detractors would claim, of course), has also endured a decades-long right-wing slur campaign against her. Literally as long as I've been alive the right has attacked Clinton for one thing or another, occasionally legit, usually not. Enough of a sustained attack just made her easy to hate in a way that, say, Elizabeth Warren just wouldn't be hated.
EDIT: I don't know if I just came up with this, or if it's something I heard: Essentially Trump won a popularity contest even though he wasn't the most popular. (Point being the Electoral College, obviously.)
Trump's superb speaking, performing, and persuasion skills.
>Yesterday he tweeted in ALL CAPS, for $DEITY's sake.
I don't support Trump, but I think all caps was probably warranted for that. It was his first response to extremely serious allegations (that Russia had footage of him telling prostitutes to urinate on each other; his inner circle was clandestinely meeting with Russian intelligence operatives and diplomats; etc.).
EDIT:
> Trump's superb speaking, performing, and persuasion skills.
Is he genuinely persuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree or support his recently-found party? I watched a bit of the coverage of both sides in the debates and they were incredibly partisan in their perceptions of how each candidate had performed. I suspect that most voters just watched the summaries (which is sad, because they're stuck inside their bubble).
... then again, I'm a filthy Socialist Scandiwegian, so...
I'm not sure, honestly. But he's definitely very persuasive to that group, and also at least somewhat persuasive to many rural and lower class ex-Obama voters.
Also, content aside, he undeniably has a captivating speaking style and cadence.
Debates have never meant anything.
I sense echoes of Godwin here... but may that's what you were going for? ;)
In the end, it seems Peter Thiel was, as a good investor, much better at predicting the future than everyone else.
Thielf's owning Palantir only God knows what kind of real information of state of voters pre-election he was able to grasp.
Proven fake how? Bad at predicting the end result? Sure. Misinterpreted? In a lot of cases, yes. Stats and predictions are not intuitive and widely misunderstood, and I certainly think that news outlets should do a better job using and explaining them.
Using the 80% figure, that's a 1 in 5 chance of being wrong, which is what happened. This isn't to defend CNN by any stretch. I find the information density poor and not particularly subtle in its interpretation, and its website is annoying. But unless you have evidence of the numbers being made up out of whole cloth, throwing around "the polls were fake" is a gross misrepresentation. If you do have evidence that the numbers were made up, I'd love to see it.
By all means, take CNN off of your list of trusted news sources. But please don't use fake polls as a reason for it.
Almost all of the mainstream polls were about national popular vote, and predicted that Clinton would win it (she did) and within their margin of error (about 2 points lower than they predicted).
The problem is that they construed winning the national popular vote as winning the election, and while they're correlated, one doesn't entail the other.
So while their prediction about popular vote turned out to be correct, their misestimation was localized mostly in a few key regions, which narrowly flipped to Trump.
And thus we find ourselves in the case where CNN pollsters were right and CNN analysts were bad at explaining it (and made lots of untrue inferences).
Respect is an odd animal. It's an interesting trend that conservatives & libertarians will respect people who hold different opinions, but if a liberal meets someone who holds a differing opinion, they vilify them for it.
Oh, come on! Seriously? Is this the level of discourse we're reduced to?
(EDIT: Just as a counter-example, Senator McCain.)
So here's the problem in it's essence. 1. Person A strongly believes that a policy will help the nation/world 2. Person B disagrees with the policy. 3. Person A calls Person B repugnant for not wanting to help the world!
But we're lost something here. Person B doesn't hate the world, they don't want to burn it down. They have a different model of the world. So either they think that we have different priorities, they think that the policy uninformed and will have unintended side-effects.
Like, in the 1970s, when we had gas shortages? The US initiated price controls. Because they said: "hey, you shouldn't have to pay a lot of gas!". But I would've been against that. Do I want people to pay high prices for gas? No! But I think that the side-effects of price control (namely, that you're going to cause long lines, and possibly start a dangerous black market) is worse than having high gas prices. Futhermore, having high gas prices will incentivize prospecting, or it will incentivize oil companies to increase supply in other ways.
Unfortunately, we people have an unfortunate tendency to attribute disagreements to "we're just not like them" and agreements to "we're exactly like them". (Tribalism rules IOW, but just on the basis of having the same opinion rather than Geography.). Even if most of the people on the Internets don't literally hate the people who have opposing opinions, they'll usually say that they do (again, on the Internets), leading to further fueling of the emotions/hatred of the "other".
(second paragraph of link from article, direct link here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...)
Since when do we have to tolerate this kind of thing? Extremism in the defense of liberty never used to be a vice.
But government can also diminish our freedom. We get spied on. We can't do harmless recreational drugs. For a long time we couldn't have sex in certain ways or with certain people. We can't choose how our child's school money gets spent (it by default goes to public schools-- I'd prefer a voucher system.) There are thousands of stupid laws! We incarcerate people at the 2nd-highest rate! And since we're the 3rd most populous country, it means that our government is one of the biggest instruments of tyranny in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/fashion/confirm-or-deny-a...
Hi, my name is gold-pressed latinum.
When I read in the media that people call Peter a "Fascist", what I'm really reading is that these people saying horrible things about a perfectly good man is because they're intolerant of other peoples choices or views to the point of being Maoistic and Libelous. Even if Peter said No to me, by no means do I feel he would do me harm. He probably could because I don't exactly have patents issued, but I don't think he will because it's not why he got into business. Look at Thiel term sheets vs the competition. Night and day.
Also, think about it like this, Mr. Thiel is in a powerful position in politics, and could literally destroy me (and I know this), but his VC firm that it looks like he put all (or most) of the money into, felt it was important to meet with me as soon as possible and made me feel like a somebody, even though I felt like nobody for years. If they say Yes, that was the best way to start what could be a lifelong (forever?) relationship, and won my intense loyalty.
People should create the innovations, and come forth to Peter and his network. They really should.
This isn't hypothetical; my cofounder and I agree that we won't take money from Thiel or any Thiel-affiliated fund.
Let the flaming commence, I guess.
> This isn't hypothetical; my cofounder and I agree that we won't take money from Thiel or any Thiel-affiliated fund.
Have any such offered funding? Would your convictions hold true if they were the only ones offering funding?
We (people) have a tendency to make statements like this when it's safe to do so - such as when there is no such offer on the table - but it's not as easy to do when the distasteful choice is the only one available.
Funds live and die on dealflow. There's a limited amount of time to talk to investors, so you have to prioritize. Funds that are de-prioritized don't get the opportunity.
In other words, I won't ever have to decide whether my convictions are that strong, because that scenario wouldn't happen. Ask an investor for their perspective, though. I'm sure it will corroborate my experience.
He also has suggested he'll trample on civil rights, including the freedom of press, speech, and the civil liberties of many Americans.
Just out of curiosity, were you paying attention during the election, and if so, where did you get your information?
IDK! I'm just so tired of the emotional crybabying from the left. I agree (with Trump) that the media is extremely biased-- if you watched Trump's press conference today you'll see it. And the left tended to just piss on the way that Trump talked. They don't even see that he's a master of words in his own way. He looks like a fool, but he's _wailing_ on the left.
Here's how the next 4 years are going to go down. The left is going to continue crying wolf/fascist/racist/sexist/whatever. Moderates and independents are going to see a mediocre presidency, but _not_ the authoritarianism you think we're in for. And then he's going to get re-elected, because of the low expectations.
In the real world, he secured less votes of actual people than the opponent to the left, and now is polling worse than recent past Presidents-elect, of either party (overall, among his own party, and among the opposing party and independents.)
Trump certainly leveraged anti-democratic factors in the electoral system for electoral success, but the idea that he is having unusual (or even usual) levels of rhetorical success against his ideological opponents (much less "wailing on" them) is at odds with the facts.
Whether or not being anti-GMO is anti-science depends on why one is anti-GMO. All science tells is that there is nothing inherently unsafe about GMO. Science does not tell us that all ways one might choose to use GMO is safe.
Anti-GMO sentiment among people I know is due to mistrust of the companies that will be using GMO, rather than a belief that GMO itself is unsafe. With strong, enforced, labeling requirements and strong, enforced, FDA or DoA regulations that require showing new foods are not misleadingly unhealthy before they can be sold, and they would be fine with GMO. With the big food companies given a free hand to use GMO however they want, and without labeling, then they are against GMO.
I find anyone that most people who posit a monolithic "left" are typically consuming a strange brew. Anyone who cares about truth -- not just in science, but in economics, policy, etc, should be horrified by what Trump represents.
And I'd take even money against him being re-elected. There are betting sites that are offering even money that he won't even finish four years, and based on how he's handling the transition, that seems correct.
I think being president is harder than you think, by the way. And I'm extremely pessimistic that Trump's up for it. He certainly hasn't done anything to demonstrate that he's capable.
s/left/right. Is there any difference in how each perceives the other?
Is the assumption that any member of "the right" voted for Trump and believe what he espouses any more fair than the assumption that "the left" is anti-science, based only on the beliefs of a subset?
People and their beliefs are complex. We do each other a disservice when we make assumptions based on our own lack of understanding and willingness to actually learn about each other.
I think you're looking for a "badMedia -> uninformedCitizen" trend, but you're not going to find it. My values are just libertarian--- so I've been on the sidelines every presidential race ever. I wasn't excited about either candidate. I just want to hear some good honest arguments. But I see so much emotional manipulation from the left.
And I ask about media because you've got to start from an agreed upon set of facts. That didn't used to be so difficult. (Not sure we disagree on facts here, but it's the easiest explanation for wildly different opinions on this subject. Might as well dispense with the big issues first, eh?)
As for Trump being a master of words, no, not if you posit that words have meaning. Here's a quote from a speech he gave in 2015 (source: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/11/14238274/tr...):
"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us."
That is not a masterful use of words, unless you intend a nonstandard definition of "masterful".
You may consider that there is "emotional crybabying" from the left, but from where I sit, people across a wide swath of mainstream thinking are concerned about a lot of the baggage Trump is bringing to the table.
You're free to disagree, but I'm also free to think that you haven't thought things through very deeply when you say the things you said up there.
I think that most people are about as bad with listening comprehension as they are in reading comprehension. It's why in ToastMasters you're told to structure your speech in the format of "Tell the audience what you're about to tell them. Tell them it. And then tell them what you just told them." The amount of _time_ he spends on a topic just shows that he's thinking about and that it's important to him. He's conveying that he cares and he takes it seriously. He's not trying to explain tactics or be especially witty.
And this is a style that we're not used it! Which is why it took everyone off-guard, and made people who are "classically" good-with-words underestimate him. But who knows, maybe this is just 20/20 hindsight.
But I think there's false equivalence at work, here. Maybe there are no good guys in politics, but there are definitely bad guys. I think Obama was a thoughtful, careful centrist on most issues. He tried to be bipartisan early in his first term. The Republicans were categorically obstructionist.
Trump is a populist demagogue. Downvote away if you must, but look up the definition of those words too. It's true. And saying "eh, they're all the same anyway" misses the point. It's easy and convenient to say that, and maybe it makes you seem cool. But it's really not true. Obama is nothing like Trump.
They're both complicated men. But they're not equivalent, not even close. I mean, let's be real, here: one's the child of a single mother and an immigrant, who experienced the world as an immigrant, and growing up in the US as a black man. The other inherited a fortune from his father, and made his reputation play-acting as a boss on reality television. (The first one is Obama, the second one is Trump.) Their biographies are wildly divergent, as are their reasons for public service, and what they're trying to do while in office.
With regards to false equivalency, I'm sympathetic to your point and even agree that Obama and Trump are not equal on my sliding scale of bad, but from my personal point of view, when both are already so far down that scale it can become difficult for me to parse the differences.
As to any downvotes you have received, none of them came from me. We might disagree here but I think we've both been respectful of each other's views. As a side note, I generally really dislike the downvote mechanism as a way to voice disagreement. If I disagree with a comment enough to consider downvoting it, I find it much more constructive to instead post a rebuttal.
Though I share your dissatisfaction with US foreign policy. It's probably one of those "no good answer" situations, though. Lots of people have died in Syria, for example, and I'm at a loss for what the 'best' policy response would have been, even with the benefit of hindsight. All I know is I'm glad I don't have to make those decisions.
And I'm not so dissatisfied with the downvote mechanism, partly because I generally don't think these discussions belong on HN. Normally I show more restraint...!
It's not intended as hard-hitting journalism.
Yeah, I get that part. But even considering that, she's letting him off way too easy.
She should have given him a few softballs to get his guard down... then sunk her claws into him.
Why don't you share with us some of the hardballs you would throw at Thiel, given the chance?
The more basic point is -- if I were running a major newspaper, I wouldn't invite fascist collaborators to do innocent puff pieces in the Fashion & Style section, or any other section of my paper to begin with. Other than as a ruse to lure them into a well-deserved public grilling, that is.
Feel free to post some good questions, even if they lack savagery and gusto. I'm curious what you think about Thiel.
I prefer not to think too much about Thiel, actually. But if you're terribly interested, the HN search engine will turn up various things I've posted about him, already.
"If the public fully understood your reasons for supporting Donald Trump, they would be shocked and despise you."
"Your successful persecution of Gawker provided meaningful catharsis related to personal traumas around your sexual orientation."
"Given the chance, you would trade the lives of one hundred thousand poor people for the ability to live indefinitely."
"Donald Trump has the upper hand in your relationship."
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/31/peter-thiel-on-trump-a...
(ps downvoted you for homophobic nonsense)
And anyway, I'm not confirming or denying. I want him to.
If you really care so much about what Peter thinks, what exactly are you accusing him of with the first question? How are you so sure of his motivations? That seems offensive coming from anyone. Happy to discuss in email.