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Comment by vowelless | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016, when he started being open about his support for Trump. Perhaps he was operating with more knowledge than available to the general public and national pollsters? I wonder how involved he was with CA for the purpose of the election. His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting in light of all this.

I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.

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I've always thought of it in terms of asymmetric risk – something Thiel seems to have a preternatural intuition for. In other words, what he stood to gain with a Trump win far outweighed what he stood to lose with a Trump loss. Most business leaders were throwing in with Clinton. If Thiel had done the same, and Clinton won, he'd be one voice in a crowded field. By being one of the few to publicly back Trump, he all but guaranteed a prime seat at the table. This is exactly what played out post-election, with Thiel ushering in tech leaders in the lobby of Trump Tower.

Had Trump lost, Thiel would have probably diminished his standing with the Clinton administration significantly. But, due to the crowded field, it would have been a small standing to begin with.

And here's the crux: Thiel has held controversial opinions for a while. He probably figured his association with Trump wouldn't really move the dial on his likability much, and he seems to enjoy being contrarian anyway.

So, anyway, there's my theory. Risk asymmetry. A lot to gain in the event of a Trump win, little to lose in the event of a Trump loss.

An analogy to this is why "bad boys" tend to do well at the dating game....

A Biker/Gang Member may not be attractive to most people, but to the portion of the population that prefer someone like that, they have much fewer anti-social males to choose from, and those individuals can do well at the bar.

Or in Thiel's own(?) words: "Competition is for losers"

I don't think thiel and palantir would have lost that much if Clinton won. If the bulk of palantir revenue comes from DoD and intelligence community (IC) contracts, he cares about whoever will increase the DoD budget in general. No matter whether it is Bush or Trump or Reagan, a republican president almost always increases defense and IC spending and green lights new toys for them to play with. Defense contractors who don't care about Democrat or republican ideology simply care about their bottom line.

True that the Republicans usually increase defense/IC spending, but the Democrats support them just as much. Feinstein is almost always pro IC operations. Clinton pushed for US involvement in Libya and Syria, and in a speech before the Democratic Convention was sabre rattling at China. Clinton also, according to Seymour Hersh, was aware of CIA gun running operations out of the US consulate in Benghazi. Obama's support for DoD/IC activities should be common knowledge.

Not making a partisan argument, as I don't affiliate with either party, just stating that both sides exhibit support for DoD/IC activities and both were likely to support equal, if not increased, levels of spending on them

Probably the biggest recent example would be the size of the DoD budget shrink during 8 years of Clinton:

https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+presidency+dod+budge...

And then the massive DoD budget increases under Bush, post 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq related which kept a lot of large and medium sized defense contractors riding the gravy train for a very long time.

As best I can remember Obama did not significantly shrink the DoD budget as a whole, though it did drop a bit from the 2006-2007 peak under Bush, though some programs were cancelled.

Am I the only one who thinks Thiel was just being true to his Libertarian views and wanted to, in his words, make the US Govt more humble?

> Am I the only one who thinks Thiel was just being true to his Libertarian views and wanted to

Given Trump's blatant admiration for authoritarians and authoritarianism, I'm skeptical that Thiel's support had anything to do with libertarianism.

Indeed, given Thiel's founding and constant promotion of Palantir (which feeds at the trough of the military-industrial complex and government contracts), I'm skeptical that he makes many life decisions based on libertarian principles.

Thiel is not a true Libertarian. But he does like to disrupt the system. That is why he did PayPal and funded micronations.

But was he a true Scotsman?

Yes, he's very disruptive. What a compliment.

I'm going d

Yea this is spot on and the pattern of probing the opposite argument for possible pay off is a classic contrarian move.

I have a simpler thesis. Is it possible that Thiel isn't particularly brilliant about politics? I mean I realize that he's rich and therefore he has to be smart about everything, but... maybe this isn't his field?

It could be that, like many right-wingers or libertarians, he saw in Trump an opportunity to break with the status quo and had the vague impression he'd get the things he wanted, or could manipulate Trump in the right direction.

But has Thiel personally profited in any way from this? He's reviled in Silicon Valley, and the Trump association hasn't obviously brought him anything new.

Have Thiel's ideological priorities been satisfied? He's known for being a hard libertarian, and he supported a man who was openly nativist and who has implemented tariffs. Failure on that score.

Thiel seems like a fairly callous person when it comes to race (as a student, he backed apartheid[1]). Trump may be more aligned with him there.

[1] https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/my-conversation-with-pete...

Given the margin of Trump's victory was so small, and he lost the overall popular vote, I would be surprised that anyone can be confident of a victory looking at any data set.

If every one was betting on Clinton 10 to 1. But you know it closer to 2 to 1. That is a good bet.

Odds like that are meaningless (imo) for singular events. It's a good bet in repeatable scenarios, far less so in elections.

When you take a bet, you play the odds. You evaluate your expected return should you take many such bets, and if it's positive and you can afford to lose, the smart money is in taking the bet.

In fact this is true of most anything you do in life - when you drove to work this morning you played the odds and the wager was your life against your salary. I'm sure you didn't think about it that way, but you took the bet

Both insurance companies and bookmakers are comfortable aggregating over many unique events.

On election night, the odds were roughly 5 to 1 on PredictIt

On Huffington Post, the odds were 98% Clinton, iirc. I suspect this led some people to not vote.

Here it is: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/high-probability-clinto...

In 538 the odds were 70% for Clinton. I think the result was spot on.

There's no logical conflict between saying Clinton had a 10 to 1 chance of winning and Trump actually winning. 10 to 1 still means Trump wins 10% of the time.

I don't know why you were down voted. It should be obvious, but people still interpret odds like that as it was a sure thing.

Part of the problem is a confusion between raw poll results—where 59-41 means almost certain victory to one side—and statistical likelihood.

On election night, Fivethirtyeight gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the electoral college. Not a 71-29 poll result, a nearly three-in-ten chance of winning. Let that sink in for a second, and reevaluate the media narrative that the pollsters got it wrong.

Fun fact, Trump carried more states in 2016 (30) than Obama carried in 2008 (28). Our country is so polarized that pretty much all elections are close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

Polarization and margin of victory are orthogonal concepts, and certainly not linked by causation.

States aren't a particularly meaningful counting unit: California encompasses more than 68 Wyomings by population. And the meaning of "carrying" a state by a 44.1% to 44.0% plurality is questionable.

The current division in the US is urban vs rural, with turnout differences and suburbs deciding elections.

Number of states is indeed misleading. If each party gets half the states, it's a Democrat victory.

E.g. Carter carries 24 states and Ford carries 27; Carter wins 297-240.

I'm really confused by the downvotes. This is the material evidence of

> The current division in the US is urban vs rural

I.e. you have to look at populations of states, not just state counts themselves.

Maybe you got down voted because 24 + 27 != 50?

Likely 'paulddraper is using 24 to mean 23 states + DC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

(The election even included a faithless elector, something you don't see every day.)

Indeed. It was a vote by a Republican for the Libertarian nomination.

It was also notable for being the first electoral vote for a ticket with a woman.

D.C. is usually counted as a state in discussion of Presidential elections since it was alotted electors under the 23rd Amendment. (This actually comports with a common practice in federal statute law where any of the federal territories that are treated equal to a state in the particular law are simply lumped into the law’s particular definition of “state”, which is then used to refer to actual stated plus the equivalent-to-state territories in the context of that law.)

It doesn't matter, the US presidential election isn't very representative, it values some groups' votes more than others.

Just as relevant as the popular vote in determining the outcome of an election based on the electoral college.

> Our country is so polarized that pretty much all elections are close

Which is to be expected in a two party system.

The national party apparatuses should be able to find a way to have moderating voices. Most large cities in the U.S. are a one party system dominated by Democrats. Yet if you look at the politicians who are mayors and council members, there's a lot of diversity in ideas and bitter policy disputes.

Surely that is because cities are diverse and multicultural, something that the GOP has been trying to cast as a negative since at least Reagan.

Citation needed.

Let's not turn this in to a pointless political debate. But stories such as the Republican appointee to the DoI saying "diversity isn't important" [0] lead some people to conclude that there's effort to cast other goals as more important than diversity. There are enough threads on HN debating the relative merits of diversity and meritocracy that there's no need to add them here, but this is just an answer to the citation request.

0: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/ryan-zinke-diversity...

Is he really wrong though? What purpose does artificially created diversity serve? Shouldn't we always be looking for the best qualified individuals?

The goal should always be equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

We should be looking for the individuals that will most improve the organization. That may mean hiring someone adequate today instead of someone spectacular who can start in 3 months. That could also mean choosing someone with a different background to most people in the organization. People with different backgrounds will have different biases and think about things differently. Having multiple perspectives is valuable in many organizations.

This is the bailey in the motte-and-bailey defense of diversity. Of course people from different backgrounds will contribute differing perspectives. But in practice, it always ends up being race, gender, and sexual orientation. No talk about getting representatives from groups that actually think in ways that are different. Where are the quotas for libertarians, green party members, immigrants, aspies, former attorneys, artists, competitive athletes, scoutmasters, stamp collectors, gearheads, all shades of personality types?

Spot on. While the idea behind can be interesting, it is implemented by accepting people who have the same "social status" background (same schools, same opinions), but are of different gender/race.

I think that a white factory worker could add way more insight into how other communities views things, than hiring a black/female attorney does...

Having said that, I'm really afraid what the backlash against this type of diversity-thinking will be. The system will surely corrects itself in the future (it's already starting), but I'm not certain going back to another extreme would be very wise...

> diverse and multicultural, something that the GOP has been trying to cast as a negative since at least Reagan. reply

> stories such as the Republican appointee to the DoI saying "diversity isn't important" [0] lead some people to conclude that there's effort to cast other goals as more important than diversity.

Diversity being negative, and diversity being unimportant are two different statements.

Single-winner voting systems such as FPTP are what causes a party to dominate at a local level, and also what creates a century-old two party system.

> Our country is so polarized that pretty much all elections are close.

I assume you mean pretty much all Presidential elections (because otherwise it's not true; lots of elections aren't close, and some electoral districts are so structurally guaranteed to be not close that elections are usually uncontested), but even then polarization does nothing to explain that, but the incentive to seek a winning coalition with minimal compromise on issues in a two-party system does.

Duverger's Law is why FPTP elections are close.

Imagine you train an algorithm to influence the voters to win the election. What would be the objective ? Maximize the probability that your candidate wins. This does not imply winning the popular vote, nor maximizing the margin of the electoral vote.

Thiel went with Trump for standard VC reasons: because it was a low-cost, low-odds, high-reward play on an unpopular undervalued asset. Also because Trump fits his "maverick" style of operating independently outside of the big establishment machines.

If Trump lost Thiel would move along to doing the best he could with the winners, who wouldn't have a reason to shun him for irrelevant past actions.

Trump had ~50% odds of winning but general betting odds were <30%

But what did Thiel get by betting on the winner though?

Lucrative military/government contracts.

> high-reward

What was the reward?

Parent comment probably means access to the administration and administration supporters for Thiel and related companies. Much easier to be a voice in a room of 10 people than a voice in a room of 1000. Trump and his picks were more likely to support large defence projects and big business operations that Palantir could profit from.

I just want to point out that what you're talking about here is corruption. To restate: For someone in Thiel's position, the upside to supporting a particular political candidate is the expectation that he will benefit from corruption while that candidate is in office. Everyone knows this but I believe it is worth being explicit about it from time to time. (I don't mean this as a dig against the party or even the person currently occupying the Presidency; this cuts both ways.)

Republican president = higher DoD and intelligence budgets. Reliably predictable since the days of Nixon.

Argh, enough. Cambridge Analytica and friends didn't have secret knowledge. People need to stop lifting up these big data woo casters and weigh their impact on the election beyond their actual ability.

Machine learning/machine vision just killed a person on a well lit street. You people need to calm down on the thinking that Silicon Valley data scientists have figured out everything others haven't other than how to boost ad dollars (and even that is in dispute as recent articles on Hacker News have pointed out.)

Too many acronyms, couldn’t follow your train of thought.

No need to downvote him! I cleaned up my acronyms after I saw his reply.

> I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016

Well how many other companies are there with the capabilities of Palantir? If the answer was "none" then he knew for sure the Clinton campaign couldn't match Trump on social media manipulation. Which means he must have been pretty confident

If all it takes is being a "better" psychopath along with an organization lead by psychopaths that only care about popularity and not truth, then with initial testing for calculations - they likely had a very good idea what would happen once they added fuel to the fire.

Eric Schmidt was a big Clinton supporter and I believe helped with her tech campaign. If the chain of events from Nix->Sophie Schmidt->Eric Schmidt->Thiel/Palantir is true then I don't know how the concern wouldn't have been raised to Clinton. I think the real question is what did FB know and when did they know it. Thiel being on the FB board and all. It's also weird that the What's App guy is on the board and just called for everyone to #deletefacebook.

He literally made a company for the sole purpose of getting her elected.

https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...

We should be careful assigning skill to a decision that was borne out by luck.

IMHO this is gross overstimation of Palantir future prediction capabilities.

It is much easier to change the future than it is to predict it.

How do you know you've changed the future if you don't know what would be the future?

Is it possible you have the causality reversed here? What if Thiel's confidence was born of a conviction, backed by research, that he could help swing the election for Trump?

Not "our data suggest he may win" but "our data suggest we can help him win".

It's possible that Thiel knew something deeper about the state of the nation through Palantir. However, I seriously doubt that Palantir secretly worked on the data that Kogan sold to CA years after he collected it, as this Wylie guy alleges. He has presented no evidence, and Palantir flatly denies it. I think he has seen the media run with his previous claims, and thinks that nobody will call BS on him now.

I have started wondering what could be driving this guy to make what at first seemed like believable allegations, that now seem more and more wild. I have been unable to find any current employer for him. My suspicion is that he is out of work and thought the attention from this would get him hired somewhere, not realizing that nobody - even the most liberal of firms - will hire him because he has proven, in the most public of ways, that he can't be trusted to not disclose confidential information.

According to [1], he is a dyslexic high school dropout with ADHD who sued his elementary school because he was bullied and "...he describes himself as the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating "Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf--k tool." That is certainly a grandiose claim, but there seems to be no evidence that this tool even worked, and in fact there is some evidence to the contrary [2]. It appears that campaigns hired CA not because its data analysis techniques were helpful, but because doing so was a prerequisite for obtaining campaign contributions from the Mercer family [3].

So, we have an out of work programmer with social issues who has no degree and can't be trusted, whose most famous work apparently didn't work at all (according to its customers), and whose biggest asset is that the media will take everything he says as fact. My guess is that Wylie's claims will get even more bizarre as he and his stories quickly disappear from the headlines with no work forthcoming.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christopher-w...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...

[3] https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/975756418128187393

I suggest you watch his testimony before UK lawmakers this morning. He appears to know what he's talking about and bases his claims on evidence supplied to the Parliamentary committee.

https://www.pscp.tv/w/1mnxeXjraDNJX

This is a 3.5 hour video. Did he present actual evidence about the Palantir claim?

First of all, a significant part your comment is ad hominem. For example, bringing up his dyslexia and sexuality in the context of his credibility does no credit to your argument.

More importantly, some very big players have decided that Wylie is very credible. Channel 4's investigation, which featured Cambridge Analytica's CEO bragging about conducting campaign bribery and blackmail on camera, was based primarily upon his whistleblowing to The Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr. Britain's libel laws are quite strict, so Wylie was extensively vetted before Guardian was confident enough to publish without fear of being sued. And Channel 4 approved the undercover investigation of CA on the basis of Wylie's information. Also, with these kinds of blockbuster investigative reports, the legal department gets involved in vetting whistleblowers.

Based on all this, along with Wylie's testimony to parliament today, as well as his willingness to testify under oath to the US Congress, I'd say his credibility is quite high unless specifically proven otherwise.

Bringing up his dyslexia and sexuality in the context of his credibility does no credit to your argument.

I pasted his own quote. That is how he describes himself in the media. That is the only reason I found it relevant - because he found it relevant. In the quote I copied, he also said that he is both Canadian and a vegan, but somehow you didn’t take issue with that. Is it now not PC to copy and paste exact quotes from people? The rules change so often...I can’t keep up.

With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?

> Is it now not PC to copy and paste exact quotes from people? The rules change so often...I can’t keep up.

You brought it up in the context of questioning his motives and credibility. By the way, I'm a big admirer of folks like Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson, just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I hate PC. But I also can't stand ad hominem attacks, and a very significant part of your comment discussed things that have no bearing on your argument.

> With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?

There's turned out to be a ton of evidence to back up his Cambridge Analytica claims. And his Palantir claims just came out today. On the basis of those two facts alone, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he's lying, I'm sure it will come out. But I'm skeptical he's making this all up.

It doesn't look like he was jobless the whole time.

At 3:01 in the hearing, they get into a discussion regarding Wylie pitching the company he was at in January, 2016, to the VoteLeave people (but not being accepted). Wylie was doing something in Canada at the time though.

I was referring to right now. If he is employed, I can’t find any information as to where.

You made a bet on outcome, based on an proven assertion. This is a bet on top of a bet, and not a long term winning strategy.

You should not feel bad. You earned your money.

What were the odds when you made the bet?

i had one such bet, it was 6:1 IIRC

If true i cant think of better PR for Palantir.

I think Thiel supported Trump because Thiel thought Trump was a better candidate, and Thiel wanted Trump to beat Clinton.

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