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Comment by extragood | Hacker News Reader

I went to a talk by PayPal founders - Peter Thiel and Max Levchin - more than a decade ago (before I had any opinions about the former), and they essentially said the same thing.

And from what I see in the comments here, a lot of people are misunderstanding the point.

If Jensen, Thiel, or Levchin fully understood the challenges they'd face to get their companies off the ground, they would never have pursued it. That's not to say they regret the results.

For better or worse, they all persevered, and so it's easy for us to say, well yeah, obviously that was the right move. Because PayPal and Nvidia are obvious slam dunks in retrospect. But none of us have been there, as pioneers of the unproven, and it's the height of arrogance to contradict that.

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> fully understood the challenges they'd face to get their companies off the ground, they would never have pursued it

What kind of challenges is that? I'm genuinely curious. I don't particularly see the job of an entrepreneur as difficult. Not in the sense that it's easy to be successful, but in the sense that it's laborious, painful, sufferable, miserable, relentless, etc.

For example, I'd consider medical surgeon a pretty difficult career. Years of study and practice. 24h+ shifts. Dealing with life and death on a consistent basis.

So I'm interested what are the kinds of hardships faced by entrepreneurs that get them to say that?

He explains in the interview. It's mostly the fear that if you fail you just let down and disrupted the lives of all your employees in a very public way. The fear of shame.

Aren't they just padding their own sholders? If the point was: "If i understood at the time what it would cost me, i would have refrained." OK. But it sounds more like "If I fully understood the challenges at the time i would have been scared." The latter is more or less drinking your own kool aid.

It's exactly this. It's a way to validate their money comes from facing lots of adversity and being very courageous. Tapping their own backs seems like an appropriate description.

ya, well, it didn’t rattle Thiel enough not to create the abomination he called palantir afterwards. Twat.

What's wrong with Palantir?

The same thing that’s wrong with any part of the military-industrial complex that weaponizes data against civilian populations.

Palantir helps the US defend its southern border from illegal aliens. I don't see anything wrong with that.

For one counter example out of many: It also helps the US spy on its own citizens.

Which was kinda the will of the people, right?

The PATRIOT act (and others) was passed by congress, who wasn't then voted out of office by the electorate. So I don't think Palantir is really any more complicit than "the American people".

I don’t remember having any say at all one way or another. I think most people feel completely apathetic and helpless when it comes to our government. They do what they want and there isn’t really anything the average person can do about it without an absurd amount of money backing you - so might as well do something different with your time.

Almost nothing done by congress that involves the military-industrial complex is “the will of the people” unless you redefine “the people” to be the thousand people who call the shots regarding the real allocation of tax money to industry.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

There is a reason we spend two billion dollars a day on the US military whilst not at war and it has nothing to do with “the people” who are mostly struggling to make rent and afford groceries whilst working constantly without healthcare.

Most Americans don’t vote (but are forced to pay taxes to fund these things) so assuming their will without data is spurious at best and actively misleading at worst.

Choosing not to vote also factors in to the "will of the people". If you don't vote, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you vote for candidates that enable/abide the military-industrial complex, the same applies.

If you vote, but not for those people, and those people win anyway, well... that's how democracy works.

> If you vote for candidates that enable/abide the military-industrial complex

That description covers all of the candidates.

> If you don't vote, you have no one to blame but yourself.

This is the central lie/blame assignment of democracy, and it is plainly false on its face. How can someone totally uninvolved in a process be in any way whatsoever responsible for the outcome of that process?

You also go on to refute it yourself in the next paragraph.

On that, we are in agreement: there is no fundamental problem with the state that can be fixed by voting. Voting legitimizes the fraudulent and coercive system; abstaining is a vote for its invalidity. More people consider the system invalid than participate in it.

I think political posts should be empty if more people abstain from voting than vote for any single candidate.

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