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Peter Thiel AMA

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304 pointsjordanbrown88 comments

Interesting point on science funding practices:

I think there's been a Gresham's Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast.

Thinking about this, I wonder: has anyone tried to systematically measure "eccentricity" vs. scientific productivity?

Also, I wonder if there a risk that this characterization just perpetuates the pointy-egghead stereotype - that good scientists don't have social skills? The discussion of "holistic" evaluation in Steven Pinker's recent essay on Harvard admission comes to mind [1].

Perhaps the funding agencies need a separate, high-prestige "individual contributor" track similar to corporate Principal Engineer or fellowship tracks, to allow non-political but brilliant scientists to work hands-on and avoid the grant scramble?

HHMI tries to provide something like this already, giving longer grants to early-career faculty to reduce grant pressure, and I guess NSF and NIH have also been trying to do this with CAREER awards and New Innovator grants...

[1] Very interesting piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277941

There is a well documented trend in the sciences away from research performed by scientists on their own or in small collaborations towards research performed by very large collaborations [1]. My understanding is that this has been going on for a long time in biology and physics so that nowadays it's very difficult to make much of an impact without participating in a large collaboration. (This is more true with regards to experiment than theory.) This trend has also been noted in my field of astronomy, though there hasn't been nearly the same crowding out of individual astronomers as in physics.

I could imagine that this trend has made it more difficult for more eccentric scientists to succeed because they might be less able to "play nicely with others" in a big collaboration.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5827/1036.short

In physics at least, isn't that because most of the low-hanging (low-energy..) fruit is gone? CMS or Atlas at the Large Hadron Collider are feats of engineering, not to mention the physics, and doing all of that takes a large organization. In theoretical physics, people seem to still be doing reasonably well with the lone-genius thing (although I suppose Peter Woit disagrees).

Biology is interesting because small, high-impact groups become arguably more sustainable every year due to cheaper, smaller instruments and the rise of contract services (e.g. DNA sequencing). On the other hand, many of the human problems biology is attempting to address are hard to inferentially study on a small-sample level, again necessitating large organizations.

It's not always about productivity. It can be about finding superstars. These two ideas contrast: in productive organizations, you typically want people closer to the mean (i.e. reduce variance among the population) which yields constant improvement. In an organization that yields superstars you want people far from the mean (i.e. a lot of variance among the population) which yields big hits but not necessarily constant improvements.

Basically, the organization (scientific community) needs to decide which type of population to select for to fulfill their strategy.

By productivity, I certainly did not intend to imply volume! Perhaps impact would have been better. Although I'll leave aside the philosophical question of historical inevitability vs. singular genius :)

Do you think that there is a widespread failure by the scientific community to identify and support superstars?

You see a similar effect in business of course. In booms like the tech boom I think we saw a crop of people with actual merit get rich, but normally it's the wheelers and dealers.

We need a "save the eccentric professor" fund. But how would we distribute the money?

Edit: Actually, just increasing the science funding, say by 1% of the total government budget, would probably solve the problem.

No, the money would go to the guys who are best networked to publish in the highest-ranked journals every 2 months.

I'm not sure that's as big a problem in academia as in other circles. I would imagine that academic researchers (professors) are highly discerning among their friends based to a large extent on competence.

It's like how recruiting for engineers is best done through the networks of your engineers; they really only hang out with top people anyway (give or take).

These people are still human, they can and will be swayed by something really well presented. If they weren't it wouldn't be a problem now.

My friend (who completed a computational biology PhD but was dismayed by the small likelyhood of being able to do meaningful science and left to do a ML based startup) has taken the route of becoming independently wealthy himself and then privately fund researchers he personally knows with his own wealth.

One way to circumvent a broken system I guess.

I feel like that would only work if many thousands of people had that attitude because the likelihood of a single person becoming independently wealthy is very small. Even if your friend was successful he would only be limited to assisting in a small number of scientific advances.

Wouldn't it make sense for your friend to try and organize a group of people with similar goals so everyone can work together to achieve them?

This also describes David E. Shaw, who was denied tenure by Columbia University. He now spends most of his time at D.E. Shaw Research, where he basically does what he would have been doing as a tenured professor anyway.

I set out to try to do that... ah, 34 years ago. Still working on it :-)

By the time he's succeeded though, is he still likely to know people, and that they're doing good stuff?

That's one very nice and ambitious end-run around the system. I really hope that he succeeds.

I think the issue is that eccentric professors aren't as good at competing for grant money as people who treat academics like any other career.

Increasing the funding probably just creates more of the latter, not of the former.

How much money would that be precisely?

Intriguing.

Question: What did you think when you first met Elon Musk?

Peter: "Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven -- a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two. It was kind of scary to be competiting against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000."

right? B/c if there is one thing I wouldn't call Elon Musk, it would be "charismatic". Maybe in private he comes of differently

A few of his answers seem brief when I wished he had time to answer in full. Selling something aside, I've always wondered why people commit to an AMA and then don't dedicate the time to over-delivering with comprehensive answers? Is it just a matter of something being better than nothing?

When the sole reason you're doing an AMA is because you're promoting something - in this case Thiel's book that's about to out - you can do a brief appearance and get enough exposure. He doesn't care about doing an AMA otherwise, I bet.

Respectfully, I think you slightly misunderstand the relative economics of being an author and being Peter Thiel.

You are right in one respect - even if the book became a number one bestseller, Peter Thiel is unlikely to feel the impact financially. But since he wrote a book in the first place, he wants something out of it. Whether he did it for money, increased fame, admiration, or respect, the book must do well for any of those things to come.

So while his motivation may be different than most authors, the path he must follow to make the book do well is largely the same. We'll likely see more things you wouldn't expect to see him do. A billionaire's ego is on the line.

And the most likely one (at least imo) would be to spread his ideas as far as possible. A book is a great medium to reach people who wouldn't otherwise actively seek out information outside of their current scope, by making a stack of physical objects appear in their field of vision and inviting them to take notice.

Respectfully, I think you underestimate Peter Thiel's ability to leverage the prestige and airport bookstore placement that come from good sales numbers.

Little fish may not matter matter on their own, but if the big fish follow the little fish (even unconsciously) then feeding the little fish is a good strategy for subtly influencing the big fish.

This is cute and true. Years ago I managed authors for Barnes and Noble. The best ones, the richest ones, would stay hours talking to their fans. They would sign books, but talk for a long time to each reader, and sometimes these conversations would extend to drinks then dinner with a group of readers. Of course, the authors that put in the time with their fans were the most successful. I don't think it was an accident.

interesting - makes you think perhaps online book sellers should be hosting AMAs.

If you measure it solely on royalties, you are correct. But such a situation could never exist; otherwise, Thiel would never write a book. So it must be for other non-monetary reasons, and your point is not quite accurate.

It could very well be for monetary reasons. Many non-fiction books are written so as to give the author a possibility to go on a lecture tour, get hired as a consultant or what not.

His one and only AMA seems peculiarly timed with the book launch then.

Not everything is motivated by the movement of green pieces of paper.

As someone who struggles to distill his answers, I thought there was an eloquence and wisdom in his brevity.

Yeah, some seemed overly brief. But I think overall he got his points across pretty well and I suspect it might not be his preferred medium for such topics. Even his book was largely based on his Stanford lectures.

Just met him once or twice, but my impression is this is how he talks in real life as well.

I've spent a few hours talking with Peter, and he talks in well-formed thoughts in well-structured sentences. A lot of other people, probably me included, wander a bit verbally. Peter doesn't.

You can see a transcript of a conversation I had with him here: http://www.cnet.com/news/talking-tech-with-peter-thiel-inves...

Agreed. No one is doubting his ability to form sentences. Rather, he packs so much into each sentence that I question my ability to keep up.

Every sentence he said (as well as his responses in the AMA) was a a complete idea, full of insight and depth. Mere mortals, like yours truly, need to take a couple minutes to process examples and counterexamples, to define the assumptions made, to wonder at the implications. You want him to speak more on the subject.

Instead, it's so obvious to him that he continues speaking and you've just missed 3 more profound statements. Makes him fascinating to listen to.

Are you really not sure whether you met him once or twice? I would have thought he would be more memorable than that...

Setting aside 3 whole hours can produce a surprisingly small amount of answers on an AMA.

I don't think most famous people need the karma bad enough to even set aside that much time.

Most of his comments I can understand, but to be honest I can not glean a shred of understanding from the following answer to the question about his Christian faith and libertarianism:

> To think of Christ as a politician might be the easiest way to get him all wrong. The theological claim that Christ is the "son of God" is also the anti-political claim that Augustus Caesar (the son of the divine Julius Caesar) is not the "son of God." So I think that Christ should be thought of as the first "political atheist," who did not believe that the existing political order is divinely ordained. Now, I think that there is lot of resonance between political atheism and libertarianism, even if they are not strictly identical...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_tec...

Julius Caesar was the first historical Roman deified as a god, and Augustus promoted himself as a son of god, partly or mostly for political reasons.

Christ denied the prevailing notion of the day that Julius Caesar is a god (and Augustus is a son of god). Therefore, he is an anti-establishment, and an atheist or unbeliever in the political realm. Thiel refers to this as 'political atheism'.

In his last sentence, he mentioned that libertarianism is related to 'political atheism', which was Christ's view of the political order of the day.

The commonality I make out of his reasoning is that both Christianity in those days and current-day libertarianism are anti-establishment.

A very interesting shift in frame of reference. And you can point out that, politically, some Christian beliefs have in practice become part of the establishment today, which sort of contradicts his point. What do you think?

Please correct me if I'm wrong. My scant knowledge of the Roman era is mostly from Crash Course [1] (highly recommended for learning in an entertaining way, and I believe most of the contents are good too) and a bit from Wikipedia [2].

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/crash-course1/cr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar#Deification

tl;dr - Jesus was roughly apolitical, not "politically atheist"

Jesus wasn't anti-establishment: "give to Caesar what is Caesar's".

Political atheist is not a great term. But I guess the Jesus of the Bible is a "political atheist" to the extent that he doesn't think rulers necessarily have God's approval. Jesus started life as a refugee from a king that wanted to murder him. But that is not a new thought. After all, the pharoah (allegedly a god) refused to release the Israelites even after Moses told him God's will and performed miracles to prove it.

Interestingly, the contemporaries of Jesus were expecting him to reassert the political (and probably military) might of Israel in his role as Messiah. In the Bible, there is a lot of confusion around him and his teachings sprouting from the meme that he was a divine political savior, not a primarily spiritual one.

When Jesus rejected that notion (riding into Jerusalem on a donkey instead of a regal horse, submitting to execution, etc.), he took a particularly apolitical stance: that politics aren't as important as loving God, loving neighbors, and living in the spirit of God's laws.

Jesus was a fan of quoting the canon scriptures of his time. Something he surely read and agreed with is: "In the Lord's hand the king's heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him."

...which implies that politics and rulers aren't a particularly big deal compared to pleasing God.

I read it (after substantial rereading) as that Christ should be viewed as a "disruptor"; that he did not view the established authority as special (divine right of kings and all that). Political atheism as a term could be seen to make sense in this context, with the "theism" being the acceptance of the class hierarchy/strong ruler/whatever was oppressive about the State back in Christ's days. That would make political atheism seem (I assume in Theil's eyes) analogous to libertarianism, which calls for great freedom (in its most basic form; some would not call it true liberality, but eh, different argument).

So yeah, Christ can be seen to be against the controlling social order of his time, as can Libertarianism today.

Disclaimer: I'm so far left wing that most libertarians would call me a fascist, so assume some bias.

Hopefully Thiel clarifies what he means by "political atheism". All I could find on the net was an urban dictionary entry[0] and, well, this[1].

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Political%20A... > A person or persons who has a disbelief in the ruling of a dominating government with morals of any kind. Those who have belief that not everything produced by politics or the media hold truth of any kind. He/she whom holds their own belief in what is wrong or right not based on what is fed to them by what the general public allows themselves to be brainwashed with.

[1] http://politicalatheist.com/

Think of it this way.

Absolute rulers generally need to have some linkage or endorsement of their power. It's an important critical element of political legitimacy. So they tie themselves to some higher power -- god, "the people", the sun, ideology.

Christianity broke the mold (by acknowledging only one god, not caesar) and undermined the legitimacy of imperial Roman rule.

I noted this elsewhere, but when the story of Exodus very much undermines the notion that Jesus broke any molds by asserting that rulers can be spiritually illegitimate.

If anything, Jesus broke the mold by not being interested in running things, which would be the first thing many of us would reach for if we had a Bruce Almighty opportunity.

I guess he means that libertarianism is mainly anti-statism, with statism being the imposed/de-facto religion nowadays.

On the other hand, the blind faith in the 'forces of the market' is another politically deistic stance, so i don't know how 'politically atheist' it is.

> the blind faith in the 'forces of the market' is another politically deistic stance

It's really humanist. It's the idea that none of us is as smart as all of us. Markets are considered distorted when they aren't free or start to resemble other types of organizations like autocracies, aristocracies, plutocracies, kleptocracies, etc.

So there is faith, but it's in humanity as a group, not magic math per se.

It's the idea that none of us is as smart as all of us

That's the idea behind democracy. I believe the idea behind libertarianism is quite the opposite (that the few that are better should not be hindered by the hivemind).

Does he have a blind faith in the "forces of the market", or does he just think that as flawed as they are, they're the best we have?

"At 22, I didn't think it was important to meet people."

I thought that was interesting.

Guess he was hyper-focused on law at the time? It is still an interesting statement.

Very interesting. I wonder what he thinks now.

There was a similar follow up question on Reddit. Unfortunately he didn't answer that. It would have been interesting to hear his perspective.

Jesus, he's exactly like Peter Gregory from HBO's Silicon Valley.

Pretty sure that character was modelled after him...

Yea, haha. Reminds me of a time when I was a kid, and a friend of mine hadn't learned much about the four mountains surrounding Tucson. When I told them their names, he said, "Wow, they named them after the high schools."

Yep, he was. I was just surprised to see it wasn't much of an exaggeration.

He was also just on The Tim Ferriss Show:

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/

Q: Is Palantir a front for the CIA?

@peterthiel: No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.

  > many of the bad monopolies in our society involve the unholy
  > coalition of urban slumlords and pseudo-environmentalists.

Does anyone know who these "bad monopolists" are?

There is a whole shadowy world of property owners who own poorly maintained slum property that they buy cheap, fix up to a minimum standard, and basically farm for rent at premium rates. Typically in most cities there is a cartel of a few dozen people who own a large proportion of this type of property. It's difficult to identify them as they work through shell companies.

Much of this property is subsidized under the Federal Section 8 program, which pays a "prevailing rent" rate for low income property. Often these rents approach the rates paid for luxury apartment complexes in the suburbs.

These folks need to keep the areas around their property poor and ignorant. So they work with phony "progressive" mouthpieces/lobbyists that block good construction projects using the environmental impact review process. They'll blow up issues like traffic impact, greenspace, impact on storm sewers, etc to block things like medium-density housing. (Typically, they are silent when their sponsors drop a 200,000 square foot big-box + strip mall nearby)

Interesting, I'd like to read more about this, is there a term for this sort of practice?

This is a form of the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon described by Bruce Yandle.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

In San Francisco, the people that own the slum houses around 16th and Mission where rent is actually quite expensive - some of them probably connected with the mafia groups that do more in the city that many people are aware of, as the Leland Yee arrest showed...

awesome - "Bonus tip for philanthropists: Find a way to sue Intellectual Ventures. If we could get rid of these parasites, we'd all be better off."

Maybe some of the worlds largest philanthropists could settle this matter during the next major boardmeeting of Microsoft.

They're already busy in the field of parasite extermination, it seems like it would be a small broadening of the scope to me.

The problem isn't deciding to want to do it, it's to actually find a way to do it.

> And more generally: the NSA has been hovering up all the data in the world, because it has no clue what it is doing. "Big data" really means "dumb data."

I think he nailed it. Working a bit with "big data" I 100% agree with him.

As a Girardian acolyte, I'm curious if there any private truths you can reveal to us?

I am not getting this. Anyone care to enlighten me?

http://www.quora.com/How-has-Rene-Girard-shaped-Peter-Thiels...

Interesting read.

This is the first time I've been introduced to Girard's theories. I don't agree with a lot of his claims but I think he (and others; his theories aren't entirely novel) definitely stumbled upon a real aspect of humanity.

I suspect the real "truth" is a greater superset theory that encompasses some of these theories and also unrelated theories and observations, though. Girard espouses a lot of absolute claims ("all human behavior is mimetic") while discounting other potential factors and certain counter-examples.

Soubds like rich person who wants to stay rich. Since I am not rich, I have vastly different values.

I can not relate to this man at all.

What gave you that impression? I did not get that vibe at all. What is best for the overall country seemed like his primary concern.

>What is the Straussian interpretation of Zero to One?

>Perhaps you should not become an entrepreneur...

eh?

Leo Strauss was an influential neoconservative philosopher who thought that a lot of key classical texts had an 'obvious' reading which was propaganda for the masses, and a 'secret' reading which only the adepts could decipher. He emphasized this especially to Greek texts from Plato.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss#Strauss_on_reading

Just asked Peter Thiel a question. I hope he responds.

> The restaurant industry in SF is very competitive and very non-capitalistic (e.g., very hard way to make money), whereas Google is very capitalistic and has had no serious competition since 2002.

Either situation could change very quickly. A meal delivery restaurant chain could take SF by storm and rake in billions. A startup could launch tomorrow that begins rapidly stealing Google's market share. Nothing prevents this but the lack of people willing and able to do it.

Private individuals are free to upend industries without fear of unreasonable government interference. This is what capitalism is and it's alive and well in most industries.

> Nothing prevents [disrupting google] but the lack of people willing and able to do it.

Nothing prevents people leaping over skyscrapers in a single bound except the lack of people able to do it.

Exactly right. We're just a few years and a new kind of exoskeleton product away from able to leap skyscrapers if we want to. Materials science, computing, and battery technology are getting there. Someone will just have to actually make it. Good example.

And the changes in biology necessary to resist the acceleration required to impart that much kinetic energy on the body in the amount of time that you're in contact with the ground?

Jumping from airplanes didn't require any changes to biology, even with much greater falls.

I believe ericd is talking about the ascent, not the descent.

If you want to jump over a building, you need to depart the ground at the same speed as you'll hit it on the way down (more, because of air resistance). The forces applied to your body are just as lethal in both directions.

(This specifically applies to jumping, where all your acceleration comes at the beginning of the journey. Jetpacks, planes, etc. get around the problem by letting you accelerate while in midair.)

If you want to jump over a building, you need to depart the ground at the same speed as you'll hit it on the way down

Well, the horizontal speed can be gained more slowly (running before the jump). Only the vertical speed needs immediate acceleration.

Yeah, it's just that the vertical is much more than enough to kill you (more than the energy from jumping off the top of the building), so the horizontal is kind of irrelevant.

Yep, thanks for clarifying, I was talking about the jumping portion.

Possibly relevant recent article:

"Are restaurants like State Bird Provisions, which seems to resist simple economic analysis, the exception or the norm? And if they are the norm, is that because it is somehow self-defeating to raise prices even at booming restaurants? Or are chef proprietors a unique breed in the business world, immune to supply and demand and content to leave money on the table?"

http://priceonomics.com/why-dont-restaurants-charge-for-rese...

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