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My Dinner with Peter Thiel
- nullptr888 10y agotl;dr: People with power and money do their own thing.
- api 10y agoPeople do their own thing. If the author had gotten a big lavish dinner he'd use it to talk about the .1% and how out of touch they are. Instead he got an eccentric geek circle with probably a lot of boring SV inside baseball chatter and no food and uses it to drag out the spectre of the rich weirdo. We've survived two centuries of mega rich people with strange agendas and we can survive this. Honestly this crowd is far, far less scary than the Ahmanson family and other supporters of things like "theonomy." Google the "Chalcedon foundation." Or Henry Ford and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, or countless other examples. The SV crowd and their rather tame gentrified version of transhumanism and Ayn Rand is fluffy bunny of light stuff compared to those things. Is Thiel actually a Trump supporter or is he just contractually bound to cast a vote for him due to being a delegate? I'm getting bored with the SV bashing genre. You can criticize SV for many things, but SV did not cause the decline of the middle class. That trend was firmly in place by the mid-late 70s and began a full 30 years before SV rose as a power. It's largely due to outsourcing, the decline of unions, and the siphoning of trillions out of the American economy to support our pointless waffling quasi-empire. Blame Nixon.
- falsestprophet 10y agoHe is a Trump supporter
- api 10y agoYeah that's very strange. I've heard other libertarians support Trump too and I can't imagine why. He's definitely not a libertarian. What Trump has done well is to tap into a wellspring of hate for the status quo that stretches across the political and wealth spectrum.
- nolepointer 10y agoElecting Trump is about disrupting the system.
- mwfunk 10y agoIf true, that's an even worse reason to vote for Trump.
- nolepointer 10y agoWell, I disagree. I already voted for him in the primary and I'll be voting for him in the general.
- api 10y agoWhy would a power lusting narcissist disrupt the source of his power? If he lands in that chair he will grow the power and size of government more than anyone since maybe Johnson or LBJ. It will be his vehicle. Finally the world will have to recognize Trump for the genius he is. He will have the whole Fed and all its money and power to write his name on history. He's not a conservative. He's not a liberal. He's a Trumpist.
- mwfunk 10y agoYou could say that about the GOP in general these days- lots of publicly expressed libertarian sentiment coupled with decidedly non-libertarian values like social conservatism, rah rah militarism, religion, and white nationalism. I don't understand how anyone can live with that level of cognitive dissonance and not go insane.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 10y agoPeople are hoping that Trump will be the political equivalent of the forest fire. If he burns everything down, something different might spring up in place.
- wingcommander 10y agoThat lady to his left was cute.
- eknight15 10y agoWas? What happened to her?
- sixQuarks 10y agoThe author says Peter Thiel is buddies with Elon Musk. From what I've read, they're not really that close. They kind of had a falling out at Paypal if I'm not mistaken.
- pjscott 10y agoThe article also said that "Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college because it’s a waste of time" and then threw in a misquote of Ayn Rand for good measure. What all these things have in common is that they're false but truth-adjacent: they sound similar enough to something true that the guy who wrote them can't be fired for journalistic misconduct. It's a very common type of falsehood for reporters looking to make reality fit the story.
- internaut 10y ago> 'truth-adjacent' I'll have to remember that one. There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes them especially prone to such semi-deliberate lies. My hunch is that being overly socialized, hyper-socialized, causes people to do this. Suppose you have to interact with a large number of people, at least some of which could affect your future deleteriously. You can't plausibly remember the specific details for each person to know what will or won't cause offense, especially when you must also gauge people telling their friends about something you said. As a rule people remember a negative feeling e.g. an irritating remark much more so than a positive one e.g. caused by a compliment. The heuristic here is to gauge the general atmosphere in a room or discussion and then play to the crowd. The act of this averaging results in satisficing* which could also be described by this truth adjacent quality. I wouldn't even be sure it's intentional. They probably don't even realize that in most domains outside of social interaction this is maladaptive. There's an expression to the effect of "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If you reverse autism you don't get normality, you get people barely able to cognite outside of the social realm. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
- mlyang 10y agoWhat a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?
- consz 10y agoI'm guessing the fact that his own hunger was the most memorable part of the evening is an indicator of the quality of conversation available at the dinner party. Billionaires are people, too, and I'd bet they just shot the shit for three hours and dipped.
- saosebastiao 10y agoPersonally, listening to "tech visionaries" and their vision for the future is about as interesting as hearing about some random dude's hunger.
- plandis 10y agoIt happened a while ago. You don't think it was reported on at the time?
- thomasjudge 10y agoThis is about par for the course for a Nick Bilton piece
- mathattack 10y agoI hate this style of lazy tech journalism where the interviewer inserts themselves into the story. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson a lot better than this writer.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y agoThat's because Hunter S. Thompson was interesting in and of himself.
- droopybuns 10y ago
- moritzplassnig 10y agoDon't get the point why people who made their money from tech (like Thiel) should be worse (regarding what they do with their money) than people who didn't make their money from tech. It's imo. positive that they have strong opinions and take actions vs. laying on the beach and drinking cocktails (quoting the article).
- mwfunk 10y agoDepends on the strong opinions held and the actions taken. For some individuals, the world might be better off if they just sat on the beach and enjoyed their wealth. With great power comes great responsibility, but if someone doesn't care enough to agonize over the responsibility part then I would prefer that they didn't exercise the power.
- neffy 10y agoOth. If the alternative to people who actually had to build something and make it work is people who graduated from Harvard with journalist degrees.... ...both groups will contain sociopaths, abut at least one of them will have learnt to do something useful.
- moritzplassnig 10y agoYes, that will always be the case. I think, though, if the majority of ppl take action, we will do well and the net effect on our society will be a positive one.
- 100k 10y agoThere's another story of a dinner with Thiel in George Packer's The Unwinding (https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/dp/0374534608 https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/d...). The vignettes about Thiel are a small but interesting part of a great book.