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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Thiel is also on a jingoist bend against Google, so I would take whatever he says with a grain of salt.

I saw him on CNBC claiming that Google was unpatriotic for dropping the government project Maven (machine vision for millitary drones) and that Google was also a Chinese sympathizer - despite there being no evidence and also the fact that you can't even use Google in China. The same Google employees that revolted against and killed Maven also did so against project Dragonfly. Thiel is on the board at Facebook so this could be part of his strategy for stirring the pot.

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He went way beyond "Chinese sympathy", accusing Google of treason and claiming they're infiltrated by the Chinese.

https://www.axios.com/peter-thiel-says-fbi-cia-should-probe-...

I think most people would agree he has an agenda, but your post is just an ad hominem attack against Thiel and doesn't address the original poster's question at all.

It is true that my comment is an ad hom attack, but as it speaks to the motive (and potential hypocrisy) of the speaker, it is not fallacious. It also speaks to the question as to whether or not Thiel has a point, hence the idiom "take with a grain of salt".

The fact that it speaks to his motive is exactly what makes it fallacious.

People’s motive’s have nothing to do with whether or not what they are saying is true or false. They are either speaking truth or not. Motives can explain WHY they are saying something untrue. But not IF what they are saying is untrue.

You are saying that Thiel has a reason to lie. But you aren’t addressing whether or not he is actually lying. Instead of attacking what he said, you are attacking him.

> They are either speaking truth or not.

I don't understand. Supposedly Thiel "claimed that Google was unpatriotic for dropping the government project Maven" - why are we talking about truthiness? How is this a provable statement?

His motive is fair game when we're discussing his credibility as a source or information.

Nor should people be awarded karma for being right for the wrong reasons.

Of course you can discuss his motive. But it is a logical fallacy to use his motive to disprove his statement. The person I responded to said that since he showed motive, his ad hom attack wasn’t fallacious.

If someone without his proposed motives had made the same statement, the statement wouldn’t be more or less true.

They're using the fact that he said it as a point in favor of it being true.

However Thiel has a vested interest in making Google look worse. They're a competitor.

He wants to say that Google is no longer innovating and then uses a thin excuse to validate his claim. And we're supposed to trust his reasoning. But all he's really done is back-fitted a reason to his conclusion. He wants to believe that Google is no longer innovating, so he picked something Google is already doing and claims that that is evidence.

The first step would be to define "innovation" in a way all relevant parties can agree upon. Then we need to agree on the things Google has done that would qualify as innovation. Then we can plot how much innovation they've done then compared to now.

No, it's used to encourage skepticism of his factual claims.

Also motive isn't a global immutable state. One person saying something one time, doesn't make everything that person does in every situation fall into the same context. Maybe its because I hang out in programming nerd circles, but I've seen otherwise intelligent people fall into this trap of using some kind of propositional logic to "prove" things.

You are certainly welcome to attack someone if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that your post doesn't speak to the argument at all. Thiel can both have an agenda AND be correct, they aren't mutually exclusive.

The debate mentioned above was in 2012. That's many years ago, long before any recent "jingoistic bend", so I don't think it's relevant. Actually I don't see how it would be relevant anyway, since it has nothing to do with his actual argument in this case.

Thiel has been on Facebook's board since 2004, so his motive is still the same. In fact, it's more evident with his more recent behavior.

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