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Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation
- skmurphy 6y agoFrom first paragraph: this is a 56,000 word summary of Peter Thiel’s view on progress and stagnation in his own words, sourced from a number of his interviews and articles. This document consists only of direct quotes from Thiel, lightly edited for clarity (except for headings and where marked otherwise). Key quotes are in the summary. Compiled by Richard Ngo (@richardmcngo) and Jeremy Nixon (@jvnixon).
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoI can recommend listening to Thiels episode on Eric Weinsteins The Portal podcast if this sounds interesting to you.
- scop 6y agoI recommend that people listen to that episode even if it's not interesting to you. Very good food for thought. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Audio: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...
- seibelj 6y agoThiel is interesting to me because he is so different than others in the SV bubble. Whether you agree with him or think he is the devil, at least he has independent views. I find a lot of people don’t think for themselves anymore.
- joshuamorton 6y agoPeople can achieve mainstream views through independent thought though.
- bezmenov 6y agoIf all your views line up with the mainstream you’re most definitely not thinking for yourself though. Thiel in fact suggests a question framed in way to force people to think for themselves: > What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
- joshuamorton 6y ago> If all your views line up with the mainstream you’re most definitely not thinking for yourself though. This doesn't make sense. You don't have to hold atypical views to think for yourself. Someone who thinks critically and for themselves and arrives at mainstream views is not wrong. In fact, you'd expect that the majority of people who did so would arrive at mainstream views, unless you presuppose that mainstream views are wrong because they are mainstream. But that's a circular argument. > What important truth do very few people agree with you on? This doesn't force someone tho think for themselves. It forces someone to make a statement that they believe to be controversial. Nothing more. Thinking for yourself does not imply making controversial statements. Making controversial statements does not imply thinking for yourself.
- hihehohey 6y agoYou can almost surely assert that the set of mainstream opinions contains at least one "wrong" opinion given the precedence of history. That is, of course, dependent on you believing that there are "wrong" opinions, which for some now has not been mainstream in some circles.
- marcosdumay 6y ago> You don't have to hold atypical views to think for yourself. The causality goes the other way around. Most people really interested on not being different and will hold mainstream views without questioning. It's expected that not all those views are correct, and you won't make the same mistakes in an independent process.
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- czbond 6y agoI think it is his heavy introvert side, which focuses on reflection and strategy. (In the pseudo-personality type world, "INTJ"). Entrepreneurs are typically ENTP, or ESTP and are extroverted, jump out and figure it out types. They reflect a whole lot less - strategize less - and power through things more.
- peacefulhat 6y agoI don't think he's that different beyond partisanship. Especially in the YC ecosystem with peers like Balaji Srinivasan. A lot of SV people want to "disrupt" basic foundations of our government like the education system.
- baxtr 6y agoI wonder how many people realize that disrupt literally means to break something.
- edanm 6y agoThat's really not what people are talking about when they talk about disruption. Granted, most people don't really know the theories well, but the disruption thesis is an actual set of theories put forward by an actual business academic, which are concrete and measurable, to explain certain business processes.
- baddox 6y agoWhat strikes you as different about him? I can’t really articulate why exactly, but to me he’s right up there on the list of archetypical SV personalities.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoHe's not irrationally optimistic about the future.
- yks 6y agoA rather predictable position for a person owning a business that makes the future worse.
- alicemaz 6y agohonestly I think that's an artifact of how often he is imitated. having read more than my share of seed fund about pages in the past few months, there is particular flavor you encounter over and over again that can only be described like "ah yes, I see you also have read zero to one." heavy emphasis on the transformative over the incremental, hard tech, disinterest in pedigree and traction given a shamanistic insistance that they are uniquely capable of identifying the visionaries of tomorrow, constant reminders they go against the grain and buck consensus, punchy copy talking about bold iconoclasts making the future of tomorrow yadda yadda the three big aesthetic/intellectual strains of sv thought as I see them are truetype protagonist gleaming tech optimism a la early pmarca blog, folksy practicality a la pg, and dark horse contrarianism a la thiel. leonardo, donatello, raphael (turtles, not painters). but he did originate the kernel of it and can't really be faulted for the imitators what actually makes him interesting tho is he's a disciple of rene girard, who argued among other things that the basis of socialization and social conflict is mimesis, which goes a long way to explaining his fixation on avoidance of imitation (and makes the raft of imitators that much funnier imo)
- Balgair 6y agoWell, the blood thing comes to mind.
- AlexandrB 6y agoDon't worry, I think for myself. Just like everybody else on HN.
- Animats 6y agoThis is old. What's the date?
- hckr_news 6y ago"...sourced from a number of his interviews and articles" Looks like it might vary
- apsec112 6y agoThe doc itself was only put together recently, but it's composed of quotes and interviews from over the last decade.
- Pokepokalypse 6y agoSeems like he's stagnated.
- InquilineKea 6y agoas an obsessive observer of his over the past decade, I've been concerned... It could be a product of his increased concern over public media coverage in general (he keeps his really interesting views just to himself, as Nick Cammarata mentions on Twitter), and this trend may have only intensified recently, as he has been strangely quiet
- Balgair 6y agoThe IPO has likely been taking up a lot of time. Also, there is a blackout period before most IPOs where those in the company are not allowed to talk about the company or 'sell' it. The SEC guidelines are pretty strict and jeopardizing XYZ% of the IPO can result in millions on the gambling table.
- dustingetz 6y ago> Google also has $50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively ... if we're living in an accelerating technological world, and you have zero percent interest rates, you should be able to invest all of your money in things that will return it many times over. The fact is you're out of ideas. Idea possibly bad: Free market progress is a force in balance with consolidation of power and interests. So some lack of progress can be explained by reaching a tipping point in the monopoly power where concentrated interests just kill anything disruptive. Michael Seibel has written about this.
- mrfusion 6y agoCan you recommend further reading?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jjoonathan 6y agoIn balance with? The free market is the mechanism for power consolidation, not its opponent. Companies merge and grow until they build a moat big enough to fend off their competitors and then the market enters nash equilibrium. Growth (or anything chaotic, really) shakes up the stable condition, changes the rules, and lets new entrants compete with Goliath. That's why we covet it so much.
- noetic_techy 6y agoI think Eric Weinstein would agree with you on this point. You should really listen to his podcast with Peter Thiel where they talk about similar interests disrupting advancement (The Portal - Episode 1). I don't buy the argument that the whole system is therefore useless and corrupt, but that it very much needs intervention to keep this sort of regulatory capture from occurring.
- dustingetz 6y agoFAAMG is like 20% of the GDP of the USA, the state can't intervene with itself
- AndrewGaspar 6y agoIt would be nice if there was an .epub format version of this.
- xwdv 6y agoI think the fundamental problem is that we have grown so used to the idea of advanced progress within our own lifetime that we now refuse to do anything where we cannot see the payoff within our own lifetimes, this means we will likely not have any more major multi-generational project timelines, which are necessary for things like mass human space travel, or even solving global warming.
- kennywinker 6y agoDon't worry - I think it's pretty clear we're at the point now where if we don't solve global warming within a single generation, it's too late.
- xwdv 6y agoWe’re the wrong generation to solve this problem, it’s already too late.
- Mangalor 6y agoSome of the links are from 10 years ago, and it shows. His views on solar being too expensive for practical use seem anachronistic now, and I'm sure his opinion has changed with the market.
- vondur 6y agoSome interesting insights. I never thought of "stagnation" of non computer tech as something due to overregulation. However, I'm a bit hesitant to allow unregulated biotech/medical research.
- kennywinker 6y agoI am super ok with "stagnation" of technologies that have the potential to cause the extinction of our species.
- jjoonathan 6y agoThe libertarian faith in deregulation offers an easy solution for all problems on only one condition: you must be too unimaginative to understand how it will go wrong. That's an easy condition for most people to meet. Deregulation also offers great opportunity in the form of resurrecting old hustles. Regulatory capture is real, but so is the lobby that knows exactly why Chesterton's fence was put in place and can't wait to trick us into removing it.
- Pokepokalypse 6y ago>“Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,” . . . oh the non-clean is cheap for you. Expensive for the rest of us.
- novok 6y agoSome of these quotes are 8-10 years old, referencing events older than that. Back then solar wasn't that good of an idea financially and you had scandals like Solyndra. Now it's finally beating the cheapest dirty energy sources.
- kennywinker 6y agoWhy should I think this man has special insight into the state of the world? He is quite rich, that is true. But if anything, by definition that means he is deeply out of touch with the needs, desires, and problems of the vast majority of the people on this planet.
- whatshisface 6y agoTaking your comment at absolute face value, this essay is about technological progress, not the needs desires or problems of anybody.
- sigmar 6y agoIt isn't an essay. It is a collection of quotes grouped by topic.
- kennywinker 6y ago"progress" has a few definitions. It can mean simply "forward motion", in which case you are right. Or it can mean what I usually take it to mean: "gradual betterment" - unless you're a shark, what's the point of moving forward if not to improve. How can you improve if you don't understand what "better" is?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SpaceRaccoon 6y agoTo play devil's advocate: for capitalists to remain capitalists, they must successfully allocate capital, which requires a knowledge of the "needs, desired, and problems" of the consumer class. And the stock market is a mechanism for transferring capital from inefficient allocators to efficient ones. That's the theory, anyway. In practice many capitalists accumulate capital in ways that are unfair and uncompetitive.
- kennywinker 6y ago> which requires a knowledge of the "needs, desired, and problems" of the consumer class > In practice many capitalists accumulate capital in ways that are unfair and uncompetitive. I don't think this is the right binary. It's not a choice between "better allocation" or "unfair". In my lifetime I've seen capitalism reward exploitation, cruelty, and abuse, without having some unfair/noncompetitive advantage. Walmart pays domestic employees a non-living wage, and exploits weak labor and environmental laws and "free trade" to produce goods at lower prices, and uses weaknesses in the political system ($$$) to avoid paying taxes. That's pure capitalism working as intended, not dirty trickery.
- peacefulhat 6y agoI've listened to some of these interviews and agree completely with the basic premise. However, I don't think it's correct that China's success is entirely explained from simply copying America. Of course copying is responsible for part of their success, but there are clear examples of the reverse. For example, integration of payments into WeChat, which has been duplicated by Facebook and others (but not as successfully as in China). They certainly disruptively innovate by making extremely cheap electric cars that poor Chinese can afford.
- istorical 6y agoThe language barrier is really making it difficult to see progress in China even for people interested in a particular space. For example, in just the VR space, if I follow the most popular VR related subreddits and podcasts I often miss important Chinese VR hardware and software. And sometimes the hardware is better than anything available in the US. I only found out about these cutting edge haptic gloves called Dexmo because I happened upon a review of an American product on an expert blog and the review compared them to a Chinese version. https://skarredghost.com/2020/04/07/senseglove-vr-haptics-gloves/ https://skarredghost.com/2020/04/07/senseglove-vr-haptics-gl...
- tehabe 6y agoChina did what Germany did in the 19th century and Japan did after World War II but differently. Germany and Japan copied and made own things until they were experts and made better things than the original. China did that differently, they invited western companies through cheap labour and made officially those things, copied it then and became experts and eventually made their own products, which at least as good or better than the originals. It is also helpful, that the Chinese government can just do things w/o any meaningful interference. In the 1960s and 70s, German cities wanted to build huge motorway like road through the city centres, which would have destroyed the cities, many of those project could be prevented from happening. Thiel would have critised those protests as a barrier for progress. Like he does, when he is mentioning zoning laws prevented a high-speed railway in San Francisco.
- novok 6y agoIt's interesting that many of his date coincide with the WTF happened in 1971 website: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- marcosdumay 6y agoWait, despite the perfect timing for a real cause that page is really trying to attribute it to monetary policy?
- novok 6y agoThat is their take, but you gotta admit, something happened in the early 1970s.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThey use the exact year of the oil crisis on their title. There was nothing financial about that one, it's entirely on the real part of the economy. Yes, something happened on the early 70's. But that article is a biased gathering of disconnected evidence surrounded by a story that was set independently of any of that evidence and doesn't even make sense. It is still useful to point people to the problem, but it would be incredibly more useful if there were an actually good source we could use.
- fuzzfactor 6y agoAll the work done by wage earners when the US dollar was backed by gold alone was more valuable than the gold itself. Even after the federal gold confiscation of the 1930's, maybe more so eventually because of increased productivity. The vast majority of that wealth not only remained in the US, but was leveraged toward greater production in the US. This led to increasing prosperity, and back when the system was half a century closer to being of the people, by the people, and for the people, prosperity was truly felt by the vast majority of people more than what you get today. Half the charts on the site were fully predictable the day they turned the dollar into fiat currency. As the value of the dollar declined, the work done by the wage earners became worth less than the gold their dollars were worth, and far less than when still backed just a few years earlier. Even though they were doing the same jobs for the same pay in US dollars so it didn't seem so bad at the time. This was a serious reversal. US consumers were manipulated from participants in a producer economy, into targets of an extractive economy. At the maximum rate the _market_ could bear.
- Animats 6y agoThe future is coming. In China. Energy: - Million-volt DC power transmission over thousands of kilometers is routine. - Solar panels get cheaper every year. - 46 nuclear reactors in operation, 11 under construction. Transportation: - 35,000km of high speed rail. - Several major cities, including Shenzhen (16 million people), use all electric taxis and buses now. - 600km/hr maglev train in test. Medicine: - First coronavirus vaccine approved and being given to PLA soldiers. - Epidemic under control, most of country back at work. Electronics: - In-country manufacture of everything except largest CPUs. Finance: - Country runs financial system; financial system does not run country. Government: - Government is mildly oppressive but not incompetent.
- apsec112 6y agoTen years ago I'd agree, but I don't think outright genocide qualifies as "mildly oppressive". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide_of_Uyghurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide_of_Uyghurs
- booboolayla 6y agoStop calling everyone a nazi, racist, stop calling labor camps "genocide".
- Animats 6y agoThat's not genocide, it's forced assimilation. China is trying to break the stranglehold of Islam. That's tough, as two decades of wars in the Middle East have taught the US.
- novok 6y ago'mildly oppressive', while literally millions of Uyghurs are being led into nazi style concentration camp trains and hong kong is not free anymore. Or a few decades ago, they captured mothers, 'tied them up like pigs' and physically forced abortions and sterilizations on them.
- orwin 6y ago
- melling 6y agoThe author posted his Twitter announcement on HN a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990 Couldn’t edit the document so I added a few corrections there
- moralestapia 6y agoOn Page 92, under Biotech, >The problem that I remain the most passionate about is for us to make some real and continued progress in the fight against aging and death. But how does one help? Really. I've been in academia for more than 10 years. I've had done some really promising stuff and know people with pretty cool projects that are 1,000% worth pursuing. Yet I have found virtually zero support as I don't play well with the "the politics of science". The problem is that the "politics of science" are typically against "actually doing science" as there is no surplus of time, energy and willpower that allows one to pursue both ends. I would like people to consider that this is one of the biggest obstacles hindering human development (in science at least). This thing really needs to change, for the benefit of everybody involved.
- dgut 6y agoWould you please explain a bit further what you mean by politics of science and how it's agains't actually doing science?
- biomcgary 6y agoNot GP, but science is becoming increasingly hierarchical in it's funding mechanisms, placing bigger bets on bigger projects that reflect the perspective of older scientists and the status quo. This pulls funding away from up and coming scientists with new ideas they'd like to try out. Classic increase of risk aversion.
- tatrajim 6y agoAnd note, too, that the rule change made decades ago in the US, banning universities from imposing a mandatory retirement age on faculty members has had a devastating impact on the development of younger scholars and the funding of new ideas, including my own field. This is in stark contrast to places like South Korea, where mandatory retirement at 65 years for faculty at state universities has kept the pipeline of scholarship open and flowing.
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- alangibson 6y agoI think Thiel is worth listening to, but sometimes his contrarianism flips into derangement: > [Peter Robinson: In 2016, how many professors at the top five law schools endorsed Donald Trump?] [2] Zero. And the law school example's interesting because you would think it's one where if you took the, a lot of academic fields are more internal to academia, but law is one that cashes out in a governmental political context, and taking a contrarian position in theory is quite valuable. If you're a tenured law professor at Harvard, and you're the only law professor at a top law school to endorse Trump, I don't know, I think there would be like a 50% chance you would've gotten nominated to the Supreme Court or something like that. So it seems like it's the sort of thing where the contrarian thing would be quite valuable, and then if nobody takes that bet, I mean, wow, there must be some unbelievable enforcement mechanisms, and it's sort of like a gentle version of North Korea. What's more likely: Harvard law professors don't endorse Trump because he's unfit to lead a parade, or they are subject to (gentle) totalitarian barbarism?
- lgessler 6y agoYeah, came here to say this too. There are much more convincing ways of making this point.
- briefcomment 6y agoI would say the second. Trump supporters in tech companies are certainly subject to (gentle) totalitarian barbarism. I know some people who support Trump privately who would never defend Trump in a work setting. It's simply not worth losing your job over. I would assume it's worse in academia.
- rsynnott 6y ago> Harvard law professors don't endorse Trump because he's unfit to lead a parade Even if you take a more cynical view, and assume that some of them will be selfish, the sort of person who's a tenured law professor at a top university probably values the opinions of their colleagues and peers. And if one of them were to do this, and they got nominated to the supreme court, their peers would see them (correctly) as sellouts, as would, likely, history. There's nothing sinister here; law professors didn't do it because either (a) they were responsible or (b) they have too much self-respect/self-regard (depending on level of cynicism). Thiel's thesis would only really work if becoming a Supreme Court justice was some sort of all-overriding imperative for lawyers, like Sauron looking for rings.
- viburnum 6y agoJust take all the money and build loads of solar and wind power.
- a-morphous 6y agoThiel is an enabler of fascism; I don't really understand why his opinion matters or why he isn't shunned in civilized society. Well, I do understand, it is because the tech world has very little sense of social responsibility, especially when money is concerned, and Thiel has money to throw around.
- bem94 6y ago> There are people who say that death is natural to which I think the response always has to be that there is nothing more natural for us than to fight death. I think this is an excellent quote, but it doesn't convince me. Death is one of the only things we humans all have in common. It is the only great equalizer. Unless every human is able to live forever, I will remain skeptical about a death cure being a good thing for humanity. Sure, you can argue about defeating death by degrees (e.g. extending a lifespan to 150, 200 years) but again, if it isn't available for everyone, I can't see that going well.
- riazrizvi 6y agoThe premise of Libertarianism in this doc is flawed. The idea that fewer laws gives rise to freedom is a Conservative distortion. Fewer laws gives freedom to the most powerful few to do what they like to the rest. The freedom we need for social progress and innovation, is the freedom and rights of the productive class, ie workers, to help society through creative destruction. Their freedom and rights can only be provided through robustly defended and well-crafted economic opportunity laws, including a permissive patent & copyright culture. Since certain Conservative interests will always be opposed to certain creative destructions, when they are too powerful it doesn't happen. That's why autocratic empires don't develop at anywhere near their potential rate, except in the narrow channel they point themselves in (war for Nazi Germany, manufacturing for modern China). That's why the printing press languished in the Han Empire, but lead to the Scientific Revolution in less autocratic/fragmented Europe, where people were able to say heretical anti-establishment stuff by hopping between legal jurisdictions. In jurisdictions where/when those laws have been well crafted, spectacular social progress has followed: - in Athens, the crafting of the Solonian Constitution created broader property rights which lead to the renaissance that was Ancient Greece; which was later destroyed by the absolute rule of Alexander's heirs - in Rome, the crafting of the Law of Twelve Tables lead to the Roman Empire; it was destroyed by Marcus Aurelius when he eliminated the last voting rights, handing hereditary power to his son - in England, the crafting of Parliament led to the Industrial Revolution because it undid domestic Royal Monopolies; it has been continually eroded by Conservative interests over the centuries, today the UK is not epicenter of economic opportunity - in the USA, the crafting of the Constitution designed a classless, more equal opportunity society, far from perfect, it nevertheless resulted in unprecedented economic growth resulting in the USA's dominance during the 20th Century; it almost died at the end of the 1800's as the robber barons sought to create monopolies that would define a new Conservative class system based on the wealthy people of that day; today it is under attack again by large companies who are eating/disappearing upstart competitors; Republican policies, and activist Republican judges are eroding antitrust. Libertarians want to disassemble what made America great, whether they know it or not.
- vngzs 6y ago> If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. My eye-opening realization of American stagnation came in history class during high school. The teacher told us the narrative of progress through the 1800s, how industrialization brought more wealth and electricity improved quality of life. He spoke of an increase in wages that came with it: each decade, Americans were wealthier than before. People assume the lives of their children would be better than their own. But in the 1960s, an American man could support a family of five: himself, his wife, and three kids was the norm. Sure, part of that can be explained by sexism and gender issues of the time, but the point was that women didn't have to work because a single income was sufficient to support a family. Today, most families are dual-income[0] as a matter of necessity, not necessarily desire. It's no longer obvious that progress will continue, and certainly not obvious that the progress we are making is a good thing for most people. My grandparents, separately, once remarked that they had seen "perhaps the last real changes in quality of life any generation would have." Running water in homes, indoor toilets, microwaves, refrigerators, and the development of computer networks all happened in the 20th century. They predicted continued stagnation in human innovation, that most of the universe's great ideas had already been discovered. Where are the big, boundary-pushing changes to life that the relentless pursuit of technology had promised? Where do we go from here? My father once speculated it would come from far-field wireless power transmission. That would kick off the next space race, pushing humanity farther into space than we could ever imagine by fuel. And certainly it would push a new generation of innovation forward, enabling ideas that would not have been possible before. What are the next transformative technologies waiting just around the corner, capable of changing and improving life for everyone on the planet? [0]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm
- sharadov 6y agoI agree that the hard problems are not being worked on, that's what happens when VCs descend on the market and are looking to 100X their investments. It's incredibly hard to work hard on difficult problems when you have to grow for growth's sake and pump out numbers that satisfy the market/VCs every quarter.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- philipkglass 6y agoIt's harder than ever to escape local optimums. Invent a better drug for high blood pressure? It needs to compete with several older, cheaper "OK" drugs for the same condition. Invent a better electricity source? It needs to compete with fully depreciated power plants that were built 25 years ago. Invent a better large scale search algorithm -- an innovation on the order of PageRank? Googlebot is welcome on billions of pages that will aggressively try to prevent you from crawling them. Google's "good enough" search plus stronger position in content acquisition will prevent people from escaping the local optimum.
- tehabe 6y agoI disagree with Thiel on almost every page on this document. And I don't know which topic to really critise. Like his view on regulation, which he calls a burden. I don't want to live in a world w/o regulations, I want to know what is in my food, I want to know that the devices I use are safe. We could see what happens, when regulation fails, when two 737MAX crashed due to the fact that Boeing was able to hide MCAS from the FAA and the FAA let Boeing go forward with the plane. At one point Thiel is quoted with "The public transportation systems don’t work." Which is a bold and false statement, because public transportation can work extremely well. And in the source they don't even talk about public transportation but about Uber, which I think is a failure and pointless and not really innovative at all. Services like Uber existed long before Uber, Uber just put an app on it instead of a phone call. Also Thiel complaints about parking. That he can't think of any other modes of mobility than a car, it rather telling. His definition of progress and innovation is not technical or defined by quality of life but merely what he as an investor can earn money from it. This is very visible when Thiel dismisses incremental progress with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.
- whb07 6y agoI’m saddened that you think it’s okay to make it a federal crime to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits (seriously). What you’re doing now is imposing the current day to the past, like looking at the current Airbnb and pretending that’s how it was when it first started. What if perhaps today wouldn’t be achieved if there had been so many rules and regulations? So picture the same government from now and place it in say 1870. What would you say the odds are we DONT end up anywhere as advanced as we are today?
- mjlawson 6y agoThat's a really unfair comparison. Suggesting that all regulation is akin to your marmalade example is akin to suggesting that we shouldn't enforce any laws because adultery laws are still on the books. There are good laws, and there are bad laws. There is good regulation, and there is bad regulation. The solution is to curate from the good set, and weed out from the bad set - not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- bitwize 6y agoNext up on Hackernews: Satan, Literally the Devil, on Ethics and Morality.
- newbie789 6y agoI'm kind of confused. What is the purpose of this document? Did Peter Thiel put this together? Is the target audience people that like him? Or is the target audience people that are critical of him? Or just plainly, is there a particular reason why I should care what a tech billionaire thinks about culture? I'm not a fan of Peter Thiel in the slightest so maybe this isn't for me. I think it is a bit weird that at least one person finds his lofty opinions about stuff to be so important that they painstakingly collected them for... some purpose. Again, did Peter Thiel put this together??
- ramraj07 6y agoWhether he put it together or not, an argument can be made (I make it as well) that it's worth reading it. Any one can have valid arguments, even (or especially) if you don't agree with the conclusions. The only question you can ask is if they're being logically consistent. If they are then they deserve to be listened to, if you truly want to understand how to join them or fight them. I despise this guy but will listen to everything he has to say. He correctly predicted and bet like ford bet on Nazis that Trump will win, and is reaping the benefits. Given that we have a nincompoop at the top, I'm scrounging to get whatever meaningful literature I can find from the other side to see how they convince themselves of their deeds. This guy is probably up there as the best bets you have on this regard.
- GoodJokes 6y agoThe question is who are you not listening to because you are paying attention to this overrated blowhard?
- newbie789 6y agoI don't think anybody had to be a super genius to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. I'd bet a good chunk of road comedians could've told you that in 2016. Also, I don't think backing a candidate and using their victory to enrich yourself is a particularly brilliant or unique move, at least not one that warrants "listen[ing] to everything he says." Beyond that, backing a candidate that's (at least arguably) detrimental to a country simply for profit or to prove a point about how smart you are doesn't really engender a lot of respect from me. Leveraging your existing billions to make even more billions might be somewhat impressive but this brings me back to my original question: Why should I (or anybody) care what Peter Thiel thinks about The Enlightenment or whatever? This whole thing reads as "here's a grand study of one of our greatest thinkers" despite his main qualification is being rich and litigious. It's like if I painted a self portrait where I've got angel wings and Dwayne Johnson's physique. It might be fun and pleasing for me, but why would anyone else want to look at it? And why would it end up on the front page of HN? Sorry I don't mean to be rude but I am still genuinely stuck on What is the purpose of this document? and Why would anyone necessarily care about its content?
- buzzert 6y agoAs a PDF: https://6761deed1591e2a2-buzzertdotnet.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/junk/Thiel+on+Progress+and+Stagnation.pdf https://6761deed1591e2a2-buzzertdotnet.s3-us-west-2.amazonaw...
- lordnacho 6y agoHe's right about process vs substance. There are so many people involved in box-checking in this world, it's amazing. People whose job is substantially to ensure some process is followed, rather than think up better processes. Even when we are talking about ostensibly innovating orgs, there are people there to make sure everything follows a plan that cannot possibly contribute to the discovery of knowledge. I sound bitter about this, but actually a lot of friends of mine are in that type of position. Heck, I myself have to do process-box-ticking type things in my day-to-day as well. This ends up being a sort of glue that's poured over all of society. Each checklist on its own seems reasonable, but put together we make change quite hard. We also end up creating a class of people who are incentivized to make sure there are rules and procedures to follow. I don't just mean lawyers, there's a whole slew of pseudo-lawyers handling things such as GDPR policies and IT Security policies, compliance officers, and so on. All these process people depend on our continued desire to seem reasonable ("Make sure schools check for child molesters before hiring anyone"), but also abdicate responsibility for those decisions to the new policy expert class. GDPR has been around for not very long, but already you'd better hire someone who is an expert in it if you're going to do serious business (this in fact happened at my day-to-day, there's no way to do business without).
- cromwellian 6y agoAlmost every time I see an SV libertarian try to discuss social issues from an apparently disinterested, logical standpoint, they always seem trapped inside of libertarian bubble and unable to expand this viewpoint to consider other possible causes. 1) What's the evidence that technological progress has slowed? Is this nostalgia? Thiel is weighting more heavily "big" engineering projects like military hardware or aerospace above "soft" engineering projects. The Moon landing was a $150 billion project by the government BTW. Is LHC and LIGO not huge achievements? All three were science experiments, not consumer technological progress. 2)"only 3.5% unemployment". Quantitative vs Qualitative fallacy. Majority of new jobs created since 2005 are temp or gig economy jobs. 3) Is it regulation, or is it just diminishing returns in a cycle that is a punctuated equilibrium. Thiel expects steady progress, but between big cycles you have iteration and incrementally. Most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and reaching the next local maxima will require time. But SV libertarians always start out with the premise that government is the problem, and then try to tie their thesis at the end back to that. 4) Thiel criticizes Steven Chu for backing Solyndra. Fine, post-facto due diligence shows it was a bad investment. But the DoE's investment portfolio has better success rates than most VC funds, it's not that Thiel himself has never made any dumb investments. Broadening your portfolio over a large number of companies (some of them starting with a dumb idea) is not necessarily a bad strategy and even companies with unworkable ideas can sometimes pivot to companies that are big hits. Solyndra didn't, but there are numerous examples of others who did. Even PayPal is an example of a pivot, I did technical due dilligence on the original idea, Confinity, in 1998, when it was about peer-to-peer payments between Palm Pilots. Switching to Digital Wallets was also a failure. None of the eWallets that were installable apps on the desktop got traction. It was only when it pivoted to email that it worked. 5) Thiel himself built Palantir on the backs of US taxpayer money. Hypocritical for him to criticize the government and government investment. He also got lucky from a serendipitous meeting between him and Zuckerberg, did he really know then when he gave seed money to Zuck Facebook would be so big? Was FB technological progress? So in summary: 1) we don't have a way to measure technological progress in a way that permits computing the rate. Lots of flawed proxies, e.g # of patents, etc It's subjective, and your wonderment as a child at changes in technology become disillusioned and nonplussed as an adult. 2) wages are stagnated. Unemployment isn't "low", not when your replace a big chunk of stable middle class jobs with benefits with temp/gig work. 3) public transport is successful all over the world, and Thiel ignores the billions spent on other modes (like airports). e.g. California government has spent $60 billion on SFO/LAX/OAK/SJC/ec 4) no evidence regulations are stopping technological progress, there is evidence that risk aversion from conservatives attacking government R&D for decades has, especially in areas of renewable energy or climate (e.g. ARPA-E program) The only thing I agree with him on is that our Sci-Fi is predominantly dystopian now. The United Federation of Planets (ironically, post-capitalist according to Picard), a multicultural society of tolerance and freedom from want, has been replaced with cyberpunk misery. But this is largely a reflection is the fact that 40 years of wage stagnation, and continued attacks on collective action in building a better future, gave way to rugged individualism and survivalism. In Sci-Fi, grand utopias usually aren't built by spontaneous order, but by collective action.
- noetic_techy 6y agoSo lets cut to the chase shall we: what would be the non-biotech arrangement of atoms that we can conceive of now that would be mega technological leaps for our species and achievable within 10 years of investment? I think making things not accessible for a single person financially would be the my main focus. You can do things today that your ancestors had no chance of accessing, so what things would be the next quantum leap for your productivity that currently only the uber-rich have access to? I will start: - Robot Servants - Eliminate of all trivial work and leave the creative endeavors for humans. Think about if 1 person could start a factory with the capital he saves from his full-time job. - Space Elevator or equivalent - Access to space is achievable for even small 1 person operations. - Fusion Reactors - Unlimited clean energy for said people, robots and factories. Couple that with some infrastructure to beam it into space and you could have some VERY interesting things emerge. My theme is: Access to labor, access to resources, access to energy. Anyone have any other ideas?
- GoodJokes 6y agoStop boosting Thiel like a bunch of fake intellectuals.
- laughinghan 6y agoI'm biased because I already expected to disagree with much of his worldview, but I think a lot of Key Quotes Summary are bad takes: The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. Actually the real price of oil was basically the same for the decade before 1973 (ranging $22.21 - $27.37) as 1993-1999 (ranging $18.86 - $33.63): https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/ https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices... It's true that it spiked in 1974-1985, and was elevated from 1986-1992 (ranging $32.48 - $45.65 — far from quadruple), and has been much higher than pre-1973 prices since 2000, but that doesn't really match up with the stagnation of wages. Policy changes in the 80s (Reaganomics) causing rising inequality are a much better explanation: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-and-curbing-the-rise-of-inequality/#_ref5 https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-... Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started. He thought that was a problem under Obama and he sought to change that by elevating...Trump? Tesla was out-competed by Edison, even though Edison had an inferior technology. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane, but they didn’t get to be rich. Edison having inferior technology is kind of a myth, or at least a vast oversimplification. DC is superior to AC in many situations; ironically, Tesla the car company is all about innovations in DC technology, as is Musk's SolarCity. The Wright brothers are arguably the first to privately achieve powered controlled flight, and it's obviously impressive that they were "just" bicycle mechanics before, but it's an American myth that they "invented" the airplane. French-Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually publicly demonstrated his independently developed powered controlled airplane in 1906 before the Wright brothers did in 1908, and there are many other claims to having been first, all independently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl... More importantly, the Wright brothers did a bad job of turning their prototypes into useful airplanes, while Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators did a better job; instead, the Wright brothers focused on guarding their patents and promoting their names as the first inventors. If anyone would agree that execution matters more than ideas, it would be the HN crowd. If you're a professor in academia, [you say]: the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure. So I think there’s this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it. Um...and what reason is there to believe that the VC-based tech industry isn't exactly like this, and that is how Thiel himself became successful? Cancer researchers are at least objectively making progress against cancer. Thiel got rich by founding or investing in some companies that he sold to other rich people. On the other hands, some of these are interesting thoughts: Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance [...] A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. [...] In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money [...] I think there is a big hysteresis part to this where success begets success and then failure begets failure, where if you haven’t had any major successes in a number of decades, it does induce a certain amount of learned helplessness, and then it shifts the way science gets done or the way innovation gets done in to a more bureaucratic, political structure where the people who get the research grants are more the politicians than the scientists. You’re rewarded for very small incremental progress, not for trying to take risks. The "two perspectives on China" thing might be interesting, but I'd want to see a lot more substantiation. Who is saying what, exactly?
- eb3c90 6y ago> I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to apocalypse. What apolcalypse is he worried about? Or is it the breakdown in politics, due to the stagnation, the problem? Why should the breakdown lead to an apocalypse, rather than a reformation?
- Balgair 6y agoFirst, Wow, this is going to take some time to chew through. On deregulation: I totally disagree. I think he has the cart before the horse. To me, it's under regulation. $1.3B per new drug is a bargin. Look at exercise machine infomercials, that's what the drug environment looks like, at best, without regulation. To have a drug checked over, tip to tail, pregnant or not, old or young, etc., costs a lot of money. Not centralizing this process would be fantastically more expensive and error prone.
- Shmebulock 6y agoWhat is meant by "SAS enterprise software, really overrated"? Does he mean SAAS as in Software-as-a-Service?
- novalis78 6y agoI highly recommend the website https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ and in particular their excellent newsletter. Surely, it would be an oversimplification to reduce everything to one cause but how much the setup of the original gold standard of the bank of England in the late 1770s spurred on the industrial revolution and how the centralization of gold and the final abolishing of the gold standard and ensuing financial tinkering led to malinvestments and threw wrenches into the engine of capitalism, wealth generation and ever increasing living standards has IMHO not yet sufficiently been investigated (Prof. Saifedean Ammous work here being one laudable exception). In an interview from 2019 Peter Thiel mentions that Paypal would have never succeeded had the Patriot Act existed at the time. Banking regulations would have never allowed Paypal off the ground. Just a few years between Paypal and that monstrocity: We would not have Tesla. We wouldnt have SpaceX. There wouldn't be any Boring company or any Neuralink. The opportunity cost of all of that is unfathomable.
- Shmebulock 6y ago"The easiest way to see this, and this is always my challenge—people don’t agree with this—is challenge you to name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it’s not dystopian, it doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t destroy the world, it doesn’t not work, etc., etc." Interstellar?