Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
perell.com
perell.com
I understood the part about "secrets" differently. I read Thiel's book about entrepreneurial mindset, Zero to One, a few years ago and found it valuable. As a long-time serial entrepreneur myself (initially unsuccessful and eventually quite successful), Thiel clearly understands the complex dynamics deeply and offers actionable insights. One of the things Thiel touches on is how entrepreneurs are often contrarians trying to identify the occasional exceptions where mainstream thinking got something important wrong.
Paul Graham also talks about this, observing that entrepreneurs aren't just looking for "good ideas", they are looking for "good ideas most people are wrong about". This is necessary because if most people hadn't missed something then the "good idea" would already be a hotly contested mature market with deep-pocketed big players slugging it out for dominance. Pretty much by definition, a high-growth start-up must believe they've identified some aspect of the opportunity other smart people missed. The start-up might be wrong but when they are correct it can be both disruptive and transformative.
This is the context in which I read the discussion of "secrets"
--but still, scale matters. Once a guy in love with that kind of theory begins to be this rich and powerful, he becomes dangerous.
Quite wrong. The article mentions that Thiel is anti-consensus - to him, 100% agreement with no real space for debate (on an issue with any amount of inherent complexity) is inherently fishy. This means that trying to figure out why the fence might be there is an especially worthwhile "search for secrets". And once you've done that work, you might end up tearing that fence down after all - or perhaps not.
Problem is he strongly appears to be the type with the dumb ego that can't distinguish between genuine "dangerous 100%-ism" and merely "being disagreed with by a lot of people."
But taking that big ego for granted, a "search for hidden secrets" is still one of the most socially productive ways you might use it for. Jumping on the bandwagon of a dubious social consensus can be a lot worse.
His company Palantir also threw one of their employee's under the bus, when it was published that this employee helped Cambridge Analytica with database development work. The work was to sort and query there psychometric data (harvested from Facebook) for people who scored high on a personality trait for neuroticism. These people are often highly addictive, and easy to influence with basic memetic warfare. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are highly susceptible to influence operations of this type, and were the target of the Trump campaign. Christopher Wylie's book: Mindf%ck, is a great read on this.
After the election, Trump appointed Thiel to his presidential intelligence advisory board as quid pro quo for his campaign funding, furthering his access to secrets.
At a minimum, they got 3 originalist supreme court justices out of it.
He either funded Trump in which case one could just say so, or else he didn't.
"Literally" appears to be some sort of emphasis or "alarm" term?
"He's literally Hitler!" (no, he's literally not).
Also, he contributed to a politician you don't agree with. So what? Did someone else "Literally!" fund Joe Biden? Does that "Literally!" make them bad people?
You stop here as if to assume this is enough info to prove his productivity was undesirable, and that everyone will understand and degree, but that’s an incorrect assumption.
What specifically was undesirable? Most people remember spending $1.50/less per gallon, spending less on everything else thanks to low inflation, the lowest illegal border crossings in decades, lower taxes, finally fighting back against China after decades of politicians saying a lot but doing nothing, peace talks with NK, a well handled foreign policy, and Operation Warp Speed which brought the US a wonderful historic vaccine in record time, 3 Supreme Court justices that will help America weather the current progressive zeitgeist meme fad policies (and many others), and some mean tweets and a very deranged media that covered him.
Before you bring up his handling of COVID, do recall that there were far more deaths under Biden in the same time period compared to under Trump, and that Biden’s only true move was making sure everyone had access to Trump’s vax. (Joe certainly didn’t shut down COVID like he claimed he would.)
So sometimes productive is, in fact desirable.
Trump was beneficiary of long-term positive trends, his tax cuts helped set the stage for short-term economic growth and long-term financial ruin, and most of all his pathological narcissism has led him to do his best to destroy the rule of law.
Under his administration he tried to make the DoJ and DoD his political tools, he flagrantly flouted the law on a regular basis, he lied incessantly about anything that he felt made him look bad, and he surrounded himself with sycophants who would not rein in his destructive tendencies.
He spent the last year of his presidency sowing distrust in the upcoming election, so inevitably when the pandemic cost him his job, he then spent months trying to overturn it, leading to the January 6th insurrection, and has spent the time since then beating that drum and corrupting the GOP further into treating loyalty to him as the litmus test.
He took an oath to the Constitution but has no understanding of or loyalty to its fundamental precepts. He’s willing to destroy the country to vindicate himself.
Everyone seems to forget how problematic the Democrat’s nominees were in 2016 and 2020. Support for Trump is not necessary hard to understand for someone like Thiel when the alternatives were Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Both candidates were well saturated with scandal, both openly dabbled in pay to play, and both pretty openly hostile to libertarian ideas (although I think Trump was as well, albeit selectively).
Trump is divisive and an atypical republican, so I can certainly see how someone supporting him could raise an eyebrow to folks with conventional political wisdom, even if I understand why someone like Thiel would support him.
Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.
The video player is very nice. Instead of mbps bit rate we use in video encoding which most users dont have a clue. They are showing MB / Min. So the user know how much data the could be using when switching quality. I wish more player do they same. ( But leave an advance mode to show mbps for us nerds )
Because like many ultra-rich has translated his "smarts+upbringing+luck+connections+right-place-right-time" success into just his capability alone, or just to his following some "success formula", and thinks such formulas can be canned and re-applied at will...
Meanwhile the "reality-bending secrets" didn't prevent e.g. average to bad performace from his fund.
That alone means it can't work as well as it would, if people not just had skin in the game, but also got to keep the proceeds: a betting market with a selection bias and no profit incentive is a poor imitation of an information market
It also creates a bias towards favoring the ideas of people who happen to be motivated by profit. Someone on HN mentioned the HIPPO effect: "Highest Paid Person's Opinion".
The first half of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" int the 3rd sentence doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. (Edited; the first version referred incorrectly to the "2nd" sentence instead of the 3rd.
Also:
> I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel (...) the contents of our conversation will remain private
The whole purpose of the article seems to be to brag about having dinner with Mr Thiel.
It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently.
Wait, what Chinese refugee camp? Where? From what war? China hasn't had a mass displacement event since well before the iPhone came out.
The reason I'm harping on this is because the author is committing the exact same sin they're accusing the McKinsey consultants of, a lack of cultural competence and curiosity that would rather have them substitute their stereotyped and prejudiced image of people rather than actual lived experience.
The original iPhone was released in June 2007. The 2008 Sichuan Earthquake matches up.
Girard was never ridiculed in France (at least, not any more than any other who became a target at this or that point). He remains a very respected figure, and his theories are very deep. That said, they're not suitable for consumption by analytical philosophy types.
Thiel, however, has only ever said trivialities regarding Girard and his theories, that reveal a very shallow understanding (if that), something analogous to "As Einstein said, everything is relative".
https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/rene-girard-un-allu...
His fixation is that all of human history can be explained by the fact that people like to copy one another. One of the (many) problems with that theory is that it's turtles all the way down. I don't think Girard can be said to be deep.
Well, in the same sense that "Einstein's fixation is that everything in physics can be explained by the speed of light and frames of reference". Or "War and Peace talks about Russia at the time of the Napoleonic wars".
E.g. that "people like to copy one another", is a very crude approximation of "humans being social animals, learning from one another, copying one another, getting entangled in mob behavior, valuing things for social reasons, enforcing laws, rituals, and counter-measures to stop regression to anarchy, mob violence, and social conflict, and so on" -- which in turn is a very crude approximation of the far more detailed, argued, and nuanced treatment of those ideas by Girard as he examines the development of various institutions (religion, morals, governance, etc.
>I don't think Girard can be said to be deep.
The "turtles all the way down" strawman is rather not deep.
Nokia failed at smartphones because they were forced to abandon Maemo and Symbian in favor of Microsoft's under-baked smartphone OS and the generally disastrous "leadership" of Stephen Elop, and subsequently being bought by Microsoft to continue to try to make Windows Phone happen at the expense of everything that succeeded at Nokia.
I was confused by what you meant until I realized you were referring to the third sentence, not the second sentence. [Insert sentence here warding off replies about irony.]
Just goes to show what all those fancy consultancies are worth. Same applies to Gartner and their "predictions".
When are people finally going to stop for the scam of the big five brands?
Not sure why Microsoft always gets left out...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk
I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.
That puts a lot of color into his decisions, validates his decisions to me
I like this take a lot. Similar to the difference between hearing about homelessness second hand and walking through an encampment in Seattle or DC.
What has stuck out to you the most while observing your kid’s remote classes?
Yes? Thiel is one of the major pusher / backer of “dark enlightenment” type theories and efforts. Neo-feudalism is his goal, or at least one if his goals.
His views on women having equal rights to men are bothersome too.
His stated views on individual rights do not mesh with the company he started to spy on everyone then sell the information to governments.
"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."
I think you are adding a statement to the quote that isn't there. He didn't say that women shouldn't be able to vote. He said the chance of a libertarian government died when they got the vote.
>He funds anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay politicians regularly.
Seems like you think that anyone who has other political priorities is actively against these things. I don't think that Theil is anti-gay ect, he is just willing to compromise on those values.
I'm willing to agree that by the nature of his power and position, he is insulated from the negative externalities of those he politically funds. The jump that I make, is that he ultimately wants the government out of those areas too.