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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why.

It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.

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Or maybe its because Thiel is a useful person to associate with and enough money is on the line that pg's claim that he'd be the "first to bring about the resistance" doesn't apply because Thiel, like Andreessen, is too important to be stood up to.

I've lot so much respect for YC wrt Thiel. Trump is such an obvious villain that if you're not against him you're an enabler. I don't care that he's become normalized in the American and Russian press the rest of the world is laughing at the USA and crying inside. We're slowly finding out which people are actually committed to their ideals and which are just interested in being more powerful, even if it comes at the cost of allowing a total maniac to the nuclear throne.

Roughly half the country voted Trump so it's a bit excessive to shun all of them.

About 23%, actually. Roughly half the country didn't vote, or they did but their votes weren't counted because of voter suppression laws largely passed by Republicans.

I respect the 28% of voting age America that voted for HRC. I also have respect for the people that voted Stein or Johnson in non-battleground states. Call it 30%. But as a Canadian who's been to America dozens of times over the years I've slowly lost respect for the GOP and Trump was the final nail in the coffin. 90% of the GOP is evil or brainwashed. The other 10% that I still have a small modicum of respect for includes people like Kasich.

So I respect about a third of American electorate. The third that didn't vote I don't respect. The third that voted for Trump I don't respect.

As for America the country, I respect most of the intelligent people working at the State Department and the CIA that I truly believe are working towards a peaceful more prosperous world, though I admit that their history is much more checkered (waterboarding, etc) than their counterparts in Germany, but they've done good work basically everywhere outside of the Middle East. Tough area to play right though, lobbyists, Israel, Turkey, multiple religious factions, critical market for the economy / national security.

But all their work is jeopardized by this horrible demagogue and enough of America either stayed home or voted for him. A man that bragged about sexual assault and swindled the poor for their student loan money and chanted "lock her up" to crowds of tens of thousands. We're laughing at America in the morning, but we're crying at night.

He's a villain to you because you have different ideals. To many, he is a figurative Bruce Wayne in the Gotham City of corruption that is D.C. Any man who "is with her" either has a confused sense of allegiance to the USA or needs a shot of testosterone.

If what you say is true then pg's essay is deliberately deceptive, and pg is deliberately holding Thiel to a different standard. Although possible, I think it's much more likely that pg is sincere in his convictions. Regardless, I find Thiel's vision for America as reprehensible as you do.

By definition contrarian ideas are pretty harmless, since pursuing an idea in a society that disagrees with you is like pushing a boulder up a hill. The results are also very hard to predict - sometimes you think about the weird behaviour of light and set the stage for the atomic bomb, and other times you start out making explosives for Nazi Germany and end up feeding the third world. Finally, they can be the product of their environment as much as a single intellect, as with Newton/Leibniz. For those reasons, which make genuinely contrarian ideas unpredictable and unstoppable, I think trying to prevent them is a bit of a red herring.

Peter Thiel isn't like Haber or Einstein, because most of his potentially dangerous ideas are only contrarian in our little bubble. When he challenges democracy, he's on the side of millennia of kings and queens and emperors and chieftains, as well as everyone who has ever said "if I were king for a day..."; when he manages to be the highest profile Trump supporter in the tech world, he is backed by nearly half the voters in America; when he says that a monopoly is exactly what a company should aim for, a great many CEOs and HN readers privately nod. His genuinely contrarian ideas aren't frightening, they're considered laughable, which is why the media mocks him so much for seasteading and "vampirism".

Maybe they just believe in Thiel's free speech rights.

Peter Thiel isn't a regular guy with an imaginative twitter stream. He's an influential and highly connected billionaire. This has nothing to do with free speech.

Billionaires don't have rights to free speech?

Really, whatever you think about Thiel -- the decision of whether to maintain a high-profile business relationship with someone -- or chose not to, for whatever reason -- has nothing -- whatsoever -- do with "free speech" rights, in the usual sense.

> He's an influential and highly connected billionaire.

Which makes him totally different from the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, Master of the Mint, intellectual grandfather of the enlightenment, etc.

By the way, Isaac Newton MP did have a somewhat lasting influence on theology: he got to vote in 1688.

I have free speech rights too, but YC is under no more obligation to keep him around than it is to keep me around.

For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why.

For his "weird" behavior, yeah, probably.

For some of his "other" behavior -- his support for Trump, generally; and his (very recent, and very disturbing) attemps to soft-peddle, and normalize sexual violence -- more likely it's because they lack awareness of some basic political history.

You're getting downvotes. Could you explain some of the stuff you're describing? Maybe the thinking about normalizing sexual violence?

It mostly refers to a discussion -- now flagged, though there's no reason it should be, as it's perfectly within HN's community guidelines -- about an interview he had in the NYT recently ("Peter Thiel, Trump's Tech Pal, explains himself", or some variant thereof) in which he definitely soft-peddles, and attempts to district attention from the famous Billy Bush tape, in which the Grabber-in-Chief-Elect says, well, you know what:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378029

That's what I mean by "normalizing" -- "it's no big deal, what are all these people so uptight about?" -- that whole line.

As for "basic awareness of political history", I'm referring of course to events in the 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to which it is, in my view, really, really hard not to see close parallels (despite certain differences) with the current situation. Unless, that is, one spent one's formative intellectual years going out of one's way to not become aware of certain things.

Or maybe you should ask the downvoters to explain themselves.

Unless that's the only tool of "expression" they have.

There was a good discussion related to this yesterday on Dr. Michael Burry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374573 Interesting discussions about reasonable risks, even when we know in hindsight that the outcomes were good.

Interesting discussion, although I disagree with the conclusion.

I don't think betting the house on a single event is "insane". Businesses make these all-in bets all the time and we're fine with it. Every Hollywood blockbuster is also a billion dollar all-in bet, but nobody bats an eye at that either. Individuals bet a huge percentage of their net worth when they buy a house. Yet when a person invests a large amount of their net worth in a single stock it's suddenly irresponsible? Hogwash.

The way we perceive risk in society is extraordinarily polarized. Some moderately risky behavior is considered normal, and other moderately risky behavior is deemed "insane". I don't think there is any rhyme or reason to it; just a matter of arbitrary cultural norms.

It's not necessarily as arbitrary as you're making it out. For businesses, the cost of failure is low and the potential upside is enormous. As a result, risk-seeking behavior makes sense, and people generally respect that. For humans, the cost of failure is very high, and the upside is only the productivity of one 2 meter bag of flesh with a brain inside. Taking existential risks as a human is foolish for reasons that do not apply to businesses.

I'm not sure what to make of your response. Texting while driving, or simply driving inattentively, is an existential risk. Investing aggressively on the stock market is not. Yet one thing is considered normal, while the other thing is considered reckless. Businesses tend to take too many risks. After all, decisions are made with other people's money, and there are career benefits to taking a risk that works out but there is hardly a penalty for squandering the company's money. Individuals tend to to take the wrong kind of risks: too careless about getting seriously injured and too timid about financial and career risks.

I'm not claiming that all risks by society are judged incorrectly, just that it happens frequently enough that much is to be gained by being really skeptical towards the consensus views on risk.

pg has no reason to fear for the impact of "contrarian ideas" like fascism. His person is secure for life. Nobody has threatened his way of life, and he knows nobody can credibly threaten his way of life.

Lost lives may be merely wasted time if you take a maximally macro view of humanity. That detachment is likely comforting if you can pull it off. Me, personally though... I'm a social human being and I care about - even love - other human beings, and their lives represent far more to me than that.

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