> The mentioning of his name sends shockwaves through Silicon Valley
> And there he is: Rather short for being an internet giant, Mr. Thiel has a strong, dynamic appearance and an extraordinary quickness in his thought.
This is cringeworthy stuff, as introductions go.
I don't hide that I'm not particularly fond of Peter Thiel, but I'd absolutely love to read an in-depth interview with him. This is... not that.
- Asks one shallow question about the "diversity myth" then immediately pivots to "so you like Star Wars?".
- Asks about his New Zealand citizenship... but in the context of him being a fan of Tolkien, not probing any of the widely-asked questions about how he obtained it.
- He throws out lines like "We live in a world where there is too much welfare and where work is undervalued" and it's entirely unquestioned.
>Because in a democracy, we believe that the average person should be able to make some judgements: Do you like the funny man with the strange hairdo or do you like the mean grandmother for president in the United States? These are some common sense things that people should be able to debate. And if you say that you are not allowed to think about that, then you probably should not be allowed to think about anything.
Who on Earth is this directed at?
This is the kind of rhetoric you expect from 3rd and 4th graders.
I feel secondary embarrassment as an adult just knowing that someone that should be a peer or higher thinks like this.
49something percent of voting Americans are the audience for that kind of rhetoric. And I think we fail ourselves when we fail to accept that a vast quantity of people live and vote with their emotional brain and not their logical brain.
I feel that one of the largest struggles, one of the largest causes of divide, is that to logical actors, the concept of an emotional actor is just so invalid that we believe them to be fundamentally wrong and broken and in need of fixing and education.
I'm not arguing that irrationality and emotion-driven voting is an equal alternative to rationalism. I think my point is that we can't just dismiss it as broken and in need of fixing. It's how our brains can work and it's a valid state of being.
I'm 31 and run upstairs in a panic when I switch the basement light off. Don't shake your head at how much of a fool I am, empathize with how I'm still sometimes driven by 3 million years of evolutionary practice of running away from predators.
Edit: Clarified in a child reply why my train of thought went in this direction as a response to parent.
I think his point was rather that people are expected not to think about who they vote for, even abstractly, but vote what they are socially coerced to. This is certainly true for the last US election more than any other I can remember.
Yeah. I think I'm trying to make that connection but might be failing with my words. Picking people you like, can have a beer with, look and feel like a winner, etc. is all, I think, driven by emotion, not patient, rational analysis. Being socially coerced is just an extension of that. You want to feel included, feel like a winner, so you'll make the choices that feel right, even if they're analytically wrong.
I assume you consider yourself a "logical actor" and the people you disagree with "emotional actors"? But I don't see how political leaning can be anything but emotional. Logic does not tell you what goals you aim for or what society you want.
I would classify myself as someone who endeavours to be a "logical actor" but is consciously aware that it's a constant battle against my emotional and fight-or-flight brain. I definitely don't make purely unbiased, Vulcan-like decisions. But I try my best to make sensible decisions.
Maybe there's no such thing as a "logical actor". Just people who endeavour to override that part of their brain and people who don't? I'm thinking first-hand about family members who make no effort to scrutinize their political leanings. They're completely emotionally driven in their opinions and actions. I would go so far as to call these family members racist, but I don't think they're trying to be. They just genuinely believe that their poor healthcare access is because of all the immigrants moving into their community and the fix is a politician who will protect them from immigrants. Even though that politician explicitly said they would cut healthcare budget by double digit percentages.
Do you happen to live in Europe? I live in Germany and while the Silicon Valley mentality doesn’t look healthy or sane, Germany is surprisingly “lame” for such a successful country. The German economy relies too much on old industries and the politics here are unwilling to change anything about it, be it policies, funding or infrastructure.
I live in Germany as well and I think it's less the politics and more the culture. He's absolutely right that there's this extreme envy here when someone is successful. The US has the opposite which is unquestioning adulation of success. Germans are extremely risk averse as well. Unicorn companies (whether you need them or not) are high risk-high reward companies which usually come with something entirely new. Thiel is spot on on these two.
I'd personally add that there's a huge problem if you work in industry here and your CV doesn't have a simple path that always pointed in the same direction. Experimentation is almost culturally forbidden.
Back to my initial point, there might be something to be told about Germany (or my country France for that matter) and its unwillingness to "take risks" (whatever that means), but Germany has been successful as an economy for how long now? You guys are masters in engineering, long-term planning, leading Europe in terms of denuclearization, the green economy, you can build pretty much anything if you put your mind to it and some guy from across the ocean is going to come and call that lame?
Let's be serious a second, Europe has been around for a while now, I really don't like people who know very little of the context calling shots as to who's in and who's not like their opinion matters. It's like those articles with European "thinkers" condescending to the US because they don't have a proper social security safety net or affordable health care, it's ignorant.
Maybe. German wages have been stagnant for a long time - the economy is successful at exporting things but not so much at raising living standards of ordinary Germans.
Leading Europe in terms of denuclearization and the green economy, on the other hand, is just not an accurate read of the situation. Yes Merkel shut down the reactors and insisted on green energy. Now Germany emits more CO2 than before due to the need for lots of coal burning power stations to provide base load. From an environment perspective it was a disaster.
Germany does well, for sure, I'm not criticising it. But it gets a lot of uncritical press too, especially with respect to its economy.
What I read in such a statement is something along the lines of 'The people of the world do not act for my benefit and as I wish, therefore they are lame'.
The hubris is as disgusting as the person's end game is obvious.
I think you're succumbing to a distortion brought about by Thiel's wealth and status. Ordinary people make blanket oversimplified statements all the time but because these people don't have such elevated status those statements are not taken as seriously. As a result they don't sound quite so glib.
As a general rule the higher your perceived status the more criticism you get.
Another example would be Elon's Twitter spat. Some random dude on the Internet gets into it with another random dude on the Internet and calls him some bad names and nobody cares and nobody takes it seriously, but when it's two high-profile people it's an international story.
"Noblesse oblige". Or if you prefer the more modern version, "With great power comes great responsibility."
It isn't just a "distortion" or quirk. It's a social obligation that goes a long way back. The new American billionaire would do well to remember that their state of privilege comes with a whole new set of do's and don'ts that if they were smart they would pay a good deal more attention to.
The fact that many of the founding father's abhorred the idea of an aristocratic class developing is beside the point. If these magnates wish not to live under the microscope, them mayhaps they should look into actually doing something about the positive feedback loops they have exploited to get to the point they are at.
I'm sure the labor force would appreciate the wage growth, and an end to under the table non-compete clauses, and forced arbitration clauses.
Yes, that's what I mean, but here's the thing. Elon (for example) is nuevo riche. People who are brought up in elite families are usually taught noblesse oblige as part of their upbringing.
I think most people talk about politics most of the time in glib generalization, but the ego bit isn't just that he (reasonably) can expect people to take his dismissal of Europe seriously, but that he dismisses it by specifically lamenting its lack of opportunities for people like him and expressing contempt for its provision of opportunities for people that are not like him. Admittedly, he was responding to some pretty leading questions.
More than anything else though, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of someone dismissing the millions who do not share his politics as "establishment" in the middle of a discussion about his donations and advice to the President...
> The odd thing is that the main parts of the NATO alliance seem to be in Europe, not in America.
That was the point. Seen from the US, it is much better to defend NATO in Europe, then doing it in the US. That was also the reason why West Germany was rebuild after the war: better use Germany as a member of NATO and fight the war against the USSR in Germany. For example huge tank battles in Northern Germany... Germany was set up with all kinds of military installations as the battle ground for WWIII in Europe.
Yeah, this was kind of upsetting to me that he bought into that. NATO is saving the US money for all of what they're doing in the Middle East and Africa.
> Peter Thiel, six months back, you announced to move your company to Los Angeles, citing doubts about the future of Silicon Valley. And yet, here we are at the headquarters of Thiel Capital in San Francisco!
We are moving in August, keeping just one of the venture funds here in San Francisco. The judgement call that I am making is that in the next decade it will be less centralized where technology happens and that the incredible premium on this location will not be quite as big anymore.
I'm shocked that everyone here is focused on his politics when he's making one of the biggest moves SV has seen.
Peter Thiel seems to be persona non grata in HN circles because he supported candidate Trump (in 2016) and later joined some sort of inner circle when Trump became president (is what I can make out from half a world away).
This kind of flagging is borderline insanity imo. (I have no stake in US or SF politics / social phenomena)
This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn't do it justice.
I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually agree with him.
The block for me is admittedly his politics. It's not that his political views may be different from mine. That's fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don't fit into it.
I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet-style communists, and there is at least one case where I've backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I've also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.
To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.
So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.
So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn't believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.
I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas.
To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.
I think the defeat of Germany in WW2 has proved that's true.
So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists.
explicit advocacy of genocide
Since this article's off the front page, it probably won't hurt to delve into politics for a bit here. So I have to ask: What specifically are you talking about?
I'm referring to his association with a certain milieu of people who are important figures in the development and promotion of what is today termed the alt-right.
Association with movements like that (or the others I mentioned) is sort of special. Movements like the alt-right are different from (for example) mainstream Christian conservatism or Randian Objectivism or democratic socialism.
Totalitarian movements whose goals would be considered insane or evil by a large number of people adopt the structure of a manipulative cult. When you encounter the Scientology guy on campus he offers to give you a weird kind of personality test. You have to be pretty deep in before you find out about galactic emperor Xenu.
The outermost surface of the alt-right (termed the alt-light in its own terminology) are people who superficially advocate nationalism, question political correctness, and so on. A layer below that you have a more hard-core layer that introduces racism, explicit anti-democratic strong-man politics, and misogyny. A layer below that you have the hard core of the movement where you find explicit advocacy of absolute totalitarianism, terrorism, and genocide.
Maybe I'm wrong but what I see is an onion that looks like:
Peter Thiel -> Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolis -> Richard Spencer -> Andrew Auernheimer, 4chan /pol
The people on the right hand side represent the true beliefs and goals of the entire onion. You see it revealed in things like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where the layers mix.
Compare this to for example Randian objectivism or democratic socialism. Everyone in those movements more or less espouses the same ideas. There's no onion because there's not much to hide.
In general when I see a movement with this kind of structure where the innermost people seem to espouse different ideas than the outermost I see it as a huge red flag. What are they hiding? The other thing about movements like these is that if you associate seriously and persistently with the outer layers of the onion I assume you probably know about and accept the inner layers too.
I was deeply saddened and frustrated when I saw evidence of Thiel's backing of that movement. Zero to One is still by far the best book about business I've ever read, and I found myself agreeing with I'd say about 90% of it. Thiel is also one of the few people who has seen what I've seen for years, namely that core technological development (what I call fundamental innovation) has slowed since the early 1970s. I rationalize it by acknowledging the human capacity for compartmentalization. It's possible for someone to have very rational views in one area and be completely nuts in others.
I'm curious about why you accept the idea that the smallest, most extreme versions of certain ideologies are the true beliefs, while the more widespread and moderate versions are just nascent extremists. The extremists definitely advocate this kind of idea, but why accept it?
If you accept this kind of layered idea of right-wing ideas, you could just as easily accept the same construction for the left-wing, saying that democratic socialists are just nascent Stalinists, and that totalitarian socialists represent their true beliefs.
In a way, this has been playing out since at least the French Revolution. There's a very clear connection between the modern left and the left wing at the Estate General. Of course, the name has remained the same, but also the core idea of remaking society as rational and egalitarian has persisted. The idea that we can be wiser than traditional culture with modern insignts also drives the technology industry. But it has undeoubtably led to unimaginable suffering and raised up many totalitarians.
I'd offer that the extremists do not in fact represent the true versions of either left or right-wing ideologis. They are idealogues caught in the mental trap of pursuing the purity of their ideas without the ability to accept that ideas are only abstract expressions. They may even believe that their ideas are beyond abstractions, as you will see with may people who advocate for racial purity. They want to find something real, beyond ideas, although in reality they just found one more idea that won't offer the satisfaction they're looking for.
So don't believe the extremists when they tell you that everyone remotely like them will eventually be just like them. That's just elevating their power. If people like you cut off ties with anyone conservative because you think they might be proto-fascists, the diversity of thought within their social group will shrink until eventually maybe the extremists will win after all.
I haven't stated my own personal views. I think I'd call myself a kind of disaffected libertarian. I don't use the L-word much anymore because it's been twisted and debased just like every other word in political discourse that used to mean something. I'd say I'm disaffected because I've sat here for a few years with my mouth hanging open watching a large number of libertarians put on Nazi brown shirts without blinking. That's a little weird given that libertarianism is supposed to enshrine ideas like voluntarism and equal rights. It makes me doubt the basic functional integrity of the human brain.
I also kind of consider myself a liberal, but like the other L word I don't use that much anymore either. It's also been debased to the point that it basically doesn't mean anything.
Put those words together and pretend they mean something and you could say I'm a voluntarist who is skeptical of authority, believes in minimal government and decentralization, but also believes our goal should be to improve the condition of the world for conscious beings.
That means I'm willing to entertain the possibility that consistency on libertarianism might at times merit compromise in favor of a higher consistency on topics like basic human dignity and well-being. I think health care might be one such case. Extreme environmental problems might be another.
The inverse is also true from time to time. There are times when we must tolerate awful things (child porn on encrypted networks, money laundering with cryptocurrency, gun violence if we are free to own guns) because the only other practical options on the table involve too great an intrusion into liberty and personal autonomy or tend to lead to a slippery slope where further intrusions are inevitable.
As such I can find plenty to dislike on both the left and the right and there are definitely "onions" on the left.
But the alt-right is something else entirely. I have never in all my years on this planet seen a more repulsive and vile political movement. I consider the movement evil, and I think this is the first time in my life I have ever actually used the E-word to describe anything in the political realm. I have a tough time thinking of any left-wing movement that's quite as bad and that has more than a tiny handful of followers. I guess totalitarian communism might work but when I scan across the Internet I am not met with countless totalitarian communists sporting anime avatars spewing memes adorned with Lenin and Stalin quotes praising gulags.
I really think you just have to disown people like that, especially if you have associations and positions that might label you as a supporter. It's the political ideology equivalent of having a best friend who turns out to be a serial murderer. People are going to ask questions.
I'm not an alt-right supporter, but if you look at something as deep as the Richard Spencer level of extremism in your diagram, I'd say it's not so different from the kinds of ideas that would be mainstream in China or Japan. It's close to an American version of European identitarianism, which advocates for the continuation of a specific cultural and racial identity. I honestly struggle to see how this is very different from the ideas of the mainstream Chinese Communist Party except for a demographic shift. Of course, Chinese encompases several ethnic identities, but they're related in the same way as a pan-European identitarianism. I'm not saying that I agree with this or that it's the right way forward for society, just that it's not in any way new or uncommon.
It's also clearly a reaction to the extremism of center-left rationalism and cosmopolitanism. While I actually like those things, I have to admit that any push to change society will invevitably result in a reaction against it from people who prefer traditionalism. I think it's very important for those of us who might like to change society to understand those who prefer traditional ways, and not just in an abstract sense but to have personal relationships with mutual respect.
That's the exception though. I pay almost 700€ a month in Germany and my employer pays a part, too.
It's actually quite expensive, except if you're poor.
EDIT: Not sure why I got downvoted for stating facts. European health care is not free. And the defense budget is separate. They have nothing to do with each other.
Public health insurance premiums in Germany are capped at slightly above 700€, including the part the employer pays (Beitragsbemessungsgrenze is the relevant keyword here).
> The mentioning of his name sends shockwaves through Silicon Valley
> And there he is: Rather short for being an internet giant, Mr. Thiel has a strong, dynamic appearance and an extraordinary quickness in his thought.
This is cringeworthy stuff, as introductions go.
I don't hide that I'm not particularly fond of Peter Thiel, but I'd absolutely love to read an in-depth interview with him. This is... not that.
- Asks one shallow question about the "diversity myth" then immediately pivots to "so you like Star Wars?".
- Asks about his New Zealand citizenship... but in the context of him being a fan of Tolkien, not probing any of the widely-asked questions about how he obtained it.
- He throws out lines like "We live in a world where there is too much welfare and where work is undervalued" and it's entirely unquestioned.
- "What’s your IQ?"
>Because in a democracy, we believe that the average person should be able to make some judgements: Do you like the funny man with the strange hairdo or do you like the mean grandmother for president in the United States? These are some common sense things that people should be able to debate. And if you say that you are not allowed to think about that, then you probably should not be allowed to think about anything.
Who on Earth is this directed at?
This is the kind of rhetoric you expect from 3rd and 4th graders.
I feel secondary embarrassment as an adult just knowing that someone that should be a peer or higher thinks like this.
49something percent of voting Americans are the audience for that kind of rhetoric. And I think we fail ourselves when we fail to accept that a vast quantity of people live and vote with their emotional brain and not their logical brain.
I feel that one of the largest struggles, one of the largest causes of divide, is that to logical actors, the concept of an emotional actor is just so invalid that we believe them to be fundamentally wrong and broken and in need of fixing and education.
I'm not arguing that irrationality and emotion-driven voting is an equal alternative to rationalism. I think my point is that we can't just dismiss it as broken and in need of fixing. It's how our brains can work and it's a valid state of being.
I'm 31 and run upstairs in a panic when I switch the basement light off. Don't shake your head at how much of a fool I am, empathize with how I'm still sometimes driven by 3 million years of evolutionary practice of running away from predators.
Edit: Clarified in a child reply why my train of thought went in this direction as a response to parent.
I think his point was rather that people are expected not to think about who they vote for, even abstractly, but vote what they are socially coerced to. This is certainly true for the last US election more than any other I can remember.
Yeah. I think I'm trying to make that connection but might be failing with my words. Picking people you like, can have a beer with, look and feel like a winner, etc. is all, I think, driven by emotion, not patient, rational analysis. Being socially coerced is just an extension of that. You want to feel included, feel like a winner, so you'll make the choices that feel right, even if they're analytically wrong.
I assume you consider yourself a "logical actor" and the people you disagree with "emotional actors"? But I don't see how political leaning can be anything but emotional. Logic does not tell you what goals you aim for or what society you want.
I would classify myself as someone who endeavours to be a "logical actor" but is consciously aware that it's a constant battle against my emotional and fight-or-flight brain. I definitely don't make purely unbiased, Vulcan-like decisions. But I try my best to make sensible decisions.
Maybe there's no such thing as a "logical actor". Just people who endeavour to override that part of their brain and people who don't? I'm thinking first-hand about family members who make no effort to scrutinize their political leanings. They're completely emotionally driven in their opinions and actions. I would go so far as to call these family members racist, but I don't think they're trying to be. They just genuinely believe that their poor healthcare access is because of all the immigrants moving into their community and the fix is a politician who will protect them from immigrants. Even though that politician explicitly said they would cut healthcare budget by double digit percentages.
The ego on those people, it never fails to amaze me, condescendingly judging entire continents with thousands of years of history.
Do you happen to live in Europe? I live in Germany and while the Silicon Valley mentality doesn’t look healthy or sane, Germany is surprisingly “lame” for such a successful country. The German economy relies too much on old industries and the politics here are unwilling to change anything about it, be it policies, funding or infrastructure.
I live in Germany as well and I think it's less the politics and more the culture. He's absolutely right that there's this extreme envy here when someone is successful. The US has the opposite which is unquestioning adulation of success. Germans are extremely risk averse as well. Unicorn companies (whether you need them or not) are high risk-high reward companies which usually come with something entirely new. Thiel is spot on on these two.
I'd personally add that there's a huge problem if you work in industry here and your CV doesn't have a simple path that always pointed in the same direction. Experimentation is almost culturally forbidden.
Back to my initial point, there might be something to be told about Germany (or my country France for that matter) and its unwillingness to "take risks" (whatever that means), but Germany has been successful as an economy for how long now? You guys are masters in engineering, long-term planning, leading Europe in terms of denuclearization, the green economy, you can build pretty much anything if you put your mind to it and some guy from across the ocean is going to come and call that lame?
Let's be serious a second, Europe has been around for a while now, I really don't like people who know very little of the context calling shots as to who's in and who's not like their opinion matters. It's like those articles with European "thinkers" condescending to the US because they don't have a proper social security safety net or affordable health care, it's ignorant.
Maybe. German wages have been stagnant for a long time - the economy is successful at exporting things but not so much at raising living standards of ordinary Germans.
Leading Europe in terms of denuclearization and the green economy, on the other hand, is just not an accurate read of the situation. Yes Merkel shut down the reactors and insisted on green energy. Now Germany emits more CO2 than before due to the need for lots of coal burning power stations to provide base load. From an environment perspective it was a disaster.
Germany does well, for sure, I'm not criticising it. But it gets a lot of uncritical press too, especially with respect to its economy.
What I read in such a statement is something along the lines of 'The people of the world do not act for my benefit and as I wish, therefore they are lame'.
The hubris is as disgusting as the person's end game is obvious.
This narrative actually reminds of https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/19/despot...
I think you're succumbing to a distortion brought about by Thiel's wealth and status. Ordinary people make blanket oversimplified statements all the time but because these people don't have such elevated status those statements are not taken as seriously. As a result they don't sound quite so glib.
As a general rule the higher your perceived status the more criticism you get.
Another example would be Elon's Twitter spat. Some random dude on the Internet gets into it with another random dude on the Internet and calls him some bad names and nobody cares and nobody takes it seriously, but when it's two high-profile people it's an international story.
"Noblesse oblige". Or if you prefer the more modern version, "With great power comes great responsibility."
It isn't just a "distortion" or quirk. It's a social obligation that goes a long way back. The new American billionaire would do well to remember that their state of privilege comes with a whole new set of do's and don'ts that if they were smart they would pay a good deal more attention to.
The fact that many of the founding father's abhorred the idea of an aristocratic class developing is beside the point. If these magnates wish not to live under the microscope, them mayhaps they should look into actually doing something about the positive feedback loops they have exploited to get to the point they are at.
I'm sure the labor force would appreciate the wage growth, and an end to under the table non-compete clauses, and forced arbitration clauses.
Yes, that's what I mean, but here's the thing. Elon (for example) is nuevo riche. People who are brought up in elite families are usually taught noblesse oblige as part of their upbringing.
I think most people talk about politics most of the time in glib generalization, but the ego bit isn't just that he (reasonably) can expect people to take his dismissal of Europe seriously, but that he dismisses it by specifically lamenting its lack of opportunities for people like him and expressing contempt for its provision of opportunities for people that are not like him. Admittedly, he was responding to some pretty leading questions.
More than anything else though, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of someone dismissing the millions who do not share his politics as "establishment" in the middle of a discussion about his donations and advice to the President...
> The odd thing is that the main parts of the NATO alliance seem to be in Europe, not in America.
That was the point. Seen from the US, it is much better to defend NATO in Europe, then doing it in the US. That was also the reason why West Germany was rebuild after the war: better use Germany as a member of NATO and fight the war against the USSR in Germany. For example huge tank battles in Northern Germany... Germany was set up with all kinds of military installations as the battle ground for WWIII in Europe.
Seen from the US, there was nothing odd about it.
Yeah, this was kind of upsetting to me that he bought into that. NATO is saving the US money for all of what they're doing in the Middle East and Africa.
> Peter Thiel, six months back, you announced to move your company to Los Angeles, citing doubts about the future of Silicon Valley. And yet, here we are at the headquarters of Thiel Capital in San Francisco!
We are moving in August, keeping just one of the venture funds here in San Francisco. The judgement call that I am making is that in the next decade it will be less centralized where technology happens and that the incredible premium on this location will not be quite as big anymore.
I'm shocked that everyone here is focused on his politics when he's making one of the biggest moves SV has seen.
Sama seems to partially agree: http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
Why was this flagged? I think it was a rather interesting read.
Peter Thiel seems to be persona non grata in HN circles because he supported candidate Trump (in 2016) and later joined some sort of inner circle when Trump became president (is what I can make out from half a world away).
This kind of flagging is borderline insanity imo. (I have no stake in US or SF politics / social phenomena)
This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn't do it justice.
I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually agree with him.
The block for me is admittedly his politics. It's not that his political views may be different from mine. That's fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don't fit into it.
I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet-style communists, and there is at least one case where I've backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I've also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.
To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.
So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.
So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn't believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.
I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas.
To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.
I think the defeat of Germany in WW2 has proved that's true.
So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists.
explicit advocacy of genocide
Since this article's off the front page, it probably won't hurt to delve into politics for a bit here. So I have to ask: What specifically are you talking about?
I'm referring to his association with a certain milieu of people who are important figures in the development and promotion of what is today termed the alt-right.
Association with movements like that (or the others I mentioned) is sort of special. Movements like the alt-right are different from (for example) mainstream Christian conservatism or Randian Objectivism or democratic socialism.
Totalitarian movements whose goals would be considered insane or evil by a large number of people adopt the structure of a manipulative cult. When you encounter the Scientology guy on campus he offers to give you a weird kind of personality test. You have to be pretty deep in before you find out about galactic emperor Xenu.
The outermost surface of the alt-right (termed the alt-light in its own terminology) are people who superficially advocate nationalism, question political correctness, and so on. A layer below that you have a more hard-core layer that introduces racism, explicit anti-democratic strong-man politics, and misogyny. A layer below that you have the hard core of the movement where you find explicit advocacy of absolute totalitarianism, terrorism, and genocide.
Maybe I'm wrong but what I see is an onion that looks like:
Peter Thiel -> Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolis -> Richard Spencer -> Andrew Auernheimer, 4chan /pol
The people on the right hand side represent the true beliefs and goals of the entire onion. You see it revealed in things like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where the layers mix.
Compare this to for example Randian objectivism or democratic socialism. Everyone in those movements more or less espouses the same ideas. There's no onion because there's not much to hide.
In general when I see a movement with this kind of structure where the innermost people seem to espouse different ideas than the outermost I see it as a huge red flag. What are they hiding? The other thing about movements like these is that if you associate seriously and persistently with the outer layers of the onion I assume you probably know about and accept the inner layers too.
I was deeply saddened and frustrated when I saw evidence of Thiel's backing of that movement. Zero to One is still by far the best book about business I've ever read, and I found myself agreeing with I'd say about 90% of it. Thiel is also one of the few people who has seen what I've seen for years, namely that core technological development (what I call fundamental innovation) has slowed since the early 1970s. I rationalize it by acknowledging the human capacity for compartmentalization. It's possible for someone to have very rational views in one area and be completely nuts in others.
I'm curious about why you accept the idea that the smallest, most extreme versions of certain ideologies are the true beliefs, while the more widespread and moderate versions are just nascent extremists. The extremists definitely advocate this kind of idea, but why accept it?
If you accept this kind of layered idea of right-wing ideas, you could just as easily accept the same construction for the left-wing, saying that democratic socialists are just nascent Stalinists, and that totalitarian socialists represent their true beliefs.
In a way, this has been playing out since at least the French Revolution. There's a very clear connection between the modern left and the left wing at the Estate General. Of course, the name has remained the same, but also the core idea of remaking society as rational and egalitarian has persisted. The idea that we can be wiser than traditional culture with modern insignts also drives the technology industry. But it has undeoubtably led to unimaginable suffering and raised up many totalitarians.
I'd offer that the extremists do not in fact represent the true versions of either left or right-wing ideologis. They are idealogues caught in the mental trap of pursuing the purity of their ideas without the ability to accept that ideas are only abstract expressions. They may even believe that their ideas are beyond abstractions, as you will see with may people who advocate for racial purity. They want to find something real, beyond ideas, although in reality they just found one more idea that won't offer the satisfaction they're looking for.
So don't believe the extremists when they tell you that everyone remotely like them will eventually be just like them. That's just elevating their power. If people like you cut off ties with anyone conservative because you think they might be proto-fascists, the diversity of thought within their social group will shrink until eventually maybe the extremists will win after all.
Those are very good points.
I haven't stated my own personal views. I think I'd call myself a kind of disaffected libertarian. I don't use the L-word much anymore because it's been twisted and debased just like every other word in political discourse that used to mean something. I'd say I'm disaffected because I've sat here for a few years with my mouth hanging open watching a large number of libertarians put on Nazi brown shirts without blinking. That's a little weird given that libertarianism is supposed to enshrine ideas like voluntarism and equal rights. It makes me doubt the basic functional integrity of the human brain.
I also kind of consider myself a liberal, but like the other L word I don't use that much anymore either. It's also been debased to the point that it basically doesn't mean anything.
Put those words together and pretend they mean something and you could say I'm a voluntarist who is skeptical of authority, believes in minimal government and decentralization, but also believes our goal should be to improve the condition of the world for conscious beings.
That means I'm willing to entertain the possibility that consistency on libertarianism might at times merit compromise in favor of a higher consistency on topics like basic human dignity and well-being. I think health care might be one such case. Extreme environmental problems might be another.
The inverse is also true from time to time. There are times when we must tolerate awful things (child porn on encrypted networks, money laundering with cryptocurrency, gun violence if we are free to own guns) because the only other practical options on the table involve too great an intrusion into liberty and personal autonomy or tend to lead to a slippery slope where further intrusions are inevitable.
As such I can find plenty to dislike on both the left and the right and there are definitely "onions" on the left.
But the alt-right is something else entirely. I have never in all my years on this planet seen a more repulsive and vile political movement. I consider the movement evil, and I think this is the first time in my life I have ever actually used the E-word to describe anything in the political realm. I have a tough time thinking of any left-wing movement that's quite as bad and that has more than a tiny handful of followers. I guess totalitarian communism might work but when I scan across the Internet I am not met with countless totalitarian communists sporting anime avatars spewing memes adorned with Lenin and Stalin quotes praising gulags.
I really think you just have to disown people like that, especially if you have associations and positions that might label you as a supporter. It's the political ideology equivalent of having a best friend who turns out to be a serial murderer. People are going to ask questions.
I'm not an alt-right supporter, but if you look at something as deep as the Richard Spencer level of extremism in your diagram, I'd say it's not so different from the kinds of ideas that would be mainstream in China or Japan. It's close to an American version of European identitarianism, which advocates for the continuation of a specific cultural and racial identity. I honestly struggle to see how this is very different from the ideas of the mainstream Chinese Communist Party except for a demographic shift. Of course, Chinese encompases several ethnic identities, but they're related in the same way as a pan-European identitarianism. I'm not saying that I agree with this or that it's the right way forward for society, just that it's not in any way new or uncommon.
It's also clearly a reaction to the extremism of center-left rationalism and cosmopolitanism. While I actually like those things, I have to admit that any push to change society will invevitably result in a reaction against it from people who prefer traditionalism. I think it's very important for those of us who might like to change society to understand those who prefer traditional ways, and not just in an abstract sense but to have personal relationships with mutual respect.
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Yep. Free healthcare and 2000 euros / year university tuition really suck.
US Health care costs are wildly expensive but describing healthcare in Europe as "free" seems terribly misleading.
well it is in the UK :) (yes everyone knows tax pays for it, spreading the burdon etc.)
That's the exception though. I pay almost 700€ a month in Germany and my employer pays a part, too.
It's actually quite expensive, except if you're poor.
EDIT: Not sure why I got downvoted for stating facts. European health care is not free. And the defense budget is separate. They have nothing to do with each other.
Public health insurance premiums in Germany are capped at slightly above 700€, including the part the employer pays (Beitragsbemessungsgrenze is the relevant keyword here).
Interesting how he thinks that science, religion and tech is more important than politics.
I don't know how he squares that view with his support for Trump