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.