Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaldengeki | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain which quotes are taken out of context, and in what context they are best interpreted? I'd love to understand.

View on HN

Those quotes were preceded by, and intended to emphasize this statement: -- "Mr. Thiel shows, again and again, how he likes to “flip around” issues to see if conventional wisdom is wrong, a technique he calls Pyrrhonian skepticism.

“Maybe I do always have this background program running where I’m trying to think of, ‘O.K., what’s the opposite of what you’re saying?’ and then I’ll try that,” he says. “It works surprisingly often.” " -- That clearly provides more context in that Theil was trying to demonstrate his contrarian mindset.

Ah, yeah -- I debated putting these two paragraphs into the quote, but figured my post was getting a bit long in the tooth :)

How does this mindset influence your interpretation of his statement that a nonzero amount of corruption is good because otherwise things are "too boring"? To me, the preceding paragraphs seem to only confuse his intent -- it makes it sound like he could either be not taking the conversation seriously, or saying that he really does think that some corruption is a good thing.

I can't read Thiel's mind, but his point reminded me of Mancur Olson's description of roving bandits vs stationary bandits [1].

a "roving bandit" only has the incentive to steal and destroy, whilst a "stationary bandit"—a tyrant—has an incentive to encourage some degree of economic success

The same point could be made for having no interest vs having a conflict of interest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson

This is a stretch. The more likely explanation is that either he misspoke or has very strange priorities. Peter Thiel is someone who has done some pretty impressive stuff. But all his recent moves in politics have been pretty zany. After enough zany behaviors, it might be time to start wondering whether the impressive stuff was the fluke, or whether his skill in that pursuit doesn't translate to other domains.

You're right, it is a stretch. I think Thiel was saying something a bit less strong: that in the pursuit of a boring administration with no conflict-of-interest scandals, you can be too conservative. You risk having no-one who actually knows what they are doing.

By the way, if you think becoming a close advisor to a new president is unimpressive then I'd like to know what would impress you!

“But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

No journalist would just change topic after hearing this. It's a very controversial and ambiguous statement, and Thiel must have elaborated a great deal on it. But there is no further mention of any of that in the article.

Definitely an amen to wanting the full transcript of the interview. It does appear that they did a brief rapid-fire response segment and published it in a separate article, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378168

So I think it's contextually possible that they just moved on after Thiel's response.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com