9 ms·

Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’

67 points by notomorrow 5y ago

throwawaymanbot 5y ago
sydthrowaway 5y ago
bambax 5y ago
> Sometimes, our sense-making machinery has a glitch too. Many years ago, a McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive. Based on that study, they held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. Though Nokia had an internet-enabled phone with a color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera in 2004, the executives held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Between the peak of their mobile dominance and their sale of the mobile division in 2013, Nokia’s value fell by almost $250 billion. The first half of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" int the 3rd sentence doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. (Edited; the first version referred incorrectly to the "2nd" sentence instead of the 3rd. Also: > I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel (...) the contents of our conversation will remain private The whole purpose of the article seems to be to brag about having dinner with Mr Thiel. It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently.
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  > McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive Just goes to show what all those fancy consultancies are worth. Same applies to Gartner and their "predictions". When are people finally going to stop for the scam of the big five brands?
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    big five?
    - atarian 5y ago
      Parent is referring to consulting firms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_...
    - adenozine 5y ago
      FAANG? Facebook Amazon apple Netflix Google Not sure why Microsoft always gets left out...
      - magicjosh 5y ago
        HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118
      - lightbendover 5y ago
        No, consultancies.
    - anxrn 5y ago
      I think parent is referring to the cohort of large management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, et al.).
  - wand3r 5y ago
    Consultancies provide a valuable service of blame laundering. Obviously, this isn’t the exclusive use of consultancies, but it does allow management to save face all the time.
- leoh 5y ago
  Girard was also elected to the Académie Française…
- meowface 5y ago
  >The second sentence of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. I was confused by what you meant until I realized you were referring to the third sentence, not the second sentence. [Insert sentence here warding off replies about irony.]
  - bambax 5y ago
    Ah sorry yes you're right! I edited my comment accordingly (but mentioned the edit so as to try to not confuse people more).
- Zigurd 5y ago
  Many years ago I was traveling with an Ericsson executive who knew exactly the opposite: Mobile networks and phones were how the developing world would connect to the internet's resources. I'm certain Nokia's leadership knew exactly the same thing. I am familiar enough with Nokia's early smartphones to know they held nothing back, even though, at the time, Series 40 was the mass-market device, Series 60, was high-end. Series 60 ran Symbian, a true smartphone OS with an app runtime, 3rd party SDK, and an app store. Even higher-end Nokia smartphones ran Maemo, a Linux-based smartphone OS that roughly resembled Android. Nokia failed at smartphones because they were forced to abandon Maemo and Symbian in favor of Microsoft's under-baked smartphone OS and the generally disastrous "leadership" of Stephen Elop, and subsequently being bought by Microsoft to continue to try to make Windows Phone happen at the expense of everything that succeeded at Nokia.
  - d3vmax 5y ago
    Nokia was already failing prior to MS coming into the picture.
    - Zigurd 5y ago
      If Nokia was standing on a burning platform, Stephen Elop hosed them down with gasoline.
  - johnyzee 5y ago
    Yeah, Ericsson had a pretty slick touchscreen phone before the iPhone. The iPhone simply blew everything out of the water on both hardware and software.
- shalmanese 5y ago
  > Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. Wait, what Chinese refugee camp? Where? From what war? China hasn't had a mass displacement event since well before the iPhone came out. The reason I'm harping on this is because the author is committing the exact same sin they're accusing the McKinsey consultants of, a lack of cultural competence and curiosity that would rather have them substitute their stereotyped and prejudiced image of people rather than actual lived experience.
  - someperson 5y ago
    Likely referring to the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake that killed a reported 87,000 people (but likely far higher given what we know about the government of China).
    - ectopod 5y ago
      "Around that time" is referring to 2004.
      - someperson 5y ago
        > Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. The original iPhone was released in June 2007. The 2008 Sichuan Earthquake matches up.
        ectopod 5y ago
        You're right of course. The original anecdote makes no sense then.
    - shalmanese 5y ago
      The iPhone wasn't available for sale in China until Oct 2009: https://www.cultofmac.com/510563/today-in-apple-history-iphone-goes-on-sale-in-china-for-first-time/ https://www.cultofmac.com/510563/today-in-apple-history-ipho...
- coldtea 5y ago
  >It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently. Girard was never ridiculed in France (at least, not any more than any other who became a target at this or that point). He remains a very respected figure, and his theories are very deep. That said, they're not suitable for consumption by analytical philosophy types. Thiel, however, has only ever said trivialities regarding Girard and his theories, that reveal a very shallow understanding (if that), something analogous to "As Einstein said, everything is relative".
  - bambax 5y ago
    There are books about Girard that are pretty funny; one of them is this (published in 2010, while he was still alive): https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/rene-girard-un-allume-qui-se-prend-pour-un-phare/ https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/rene-girard-un-allu... His fixation is that all of human history can be explained by the fact that people like to copy one another. One of the (many) problems with that theory is that it's turtles all the way down. I don't think Girard can be said to be deep.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >His fixation is that all of human history can be explained by the fact that people like to copy one another. Well, in the same sense that "Einstein's fixation is that everything in physics can be explained by the speed of light and frames of reference". Or "War and Peace talks about Russia at the time of the Napoleonic wars". E.g. that "people like to copy one another", is a very crude approximation of "humans being social animals, learning from one another, copying one another, getting entangled in mob behavior, valuing things for social reasons, enforcing laws, rituals, and counter-measures to stop regression to anarchy, mob violence, and social conflict, and so on" -- which in turn is a very crude approximation of the far more detailed, argued, and nuanced treatment of those ideas by Girard as he examines the development of various institutions (religion, morals, governance, etc. >I don't think Girard can be said to be deep. The "turtles all the way down" strawman is rather not deep.
- mathattack 5y ago
  The irony of writing problems from an article that concludes by offering writing advice!
- lariati 5y ago
  Girard was a Stanford professor. His Uncommon Knowledge episode from the Hoover Institution is quite interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.
jrm4 5y ago
Perfect example of a brilliant thinker who needs to be contained. It's great to begin with ways of thinking like he does; but his love for secrets make him dangerous; people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing. Quite wrong. The article mentions that Thiel is anti-consensus - to him, 100% agreement with no real space for debate (on an issue with any amount of inherent complexity) is inherently fishy. This means that trying to figure out why the fence might be there is an especially worthwhile "search for secrets". And once you've done that work, you might end up tearing that fence down after all - or perhaps not.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    And you (probably like him) are going to miss the difference between theory and practice on this. His idea here is a good one. Explore and chip away at that 100% agreement thing when you see it. Problem is he strongly appears to be the type with the dumb ego that can't distinguish between genuine "dangerous 100%-ism" and merely "being disagreed with by a lot of people."
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      So you're just saying that he might be dangerous because of his ego, not necessarily his ideas. Y'know, I'm not going to disagree there. But taking that big ego for granted, a "search for hidden secrets" is still one of the most socially productive ways you might use it for. Jumping on the bandwagon of a dubious social consensus can be a lot worse.
      - KerrAvon 5y ago
        He literally funded Trump. “Productive” sometimes isn’t desirable.
atarian 5y ago
I thought the Nokia story was a pretty bad example because it’s not like they got everything else down perfectly.
magicjosh 5y ago
Huh I usually like Perell's stuff but this one seems a bit empty, like a cream puff without filling. The examples seem weak, for example the McKinsey story about smartphones is vague. Sure, people get things wrong, and groups certainly do. I wonder what the purpose of this piece is. Maybe there's 100 more pieces coming influenced by this dinner, this was just getting the crumbly cork out of the wine bottle. Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.
- civilized 5y ago
  Maybe this is petty, but any time the word "learnings" appears, my brain goes "this will be Business Blather, nothing of value will be said here, feel free to turn me off"
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    Yeah. It's a summation/averaging word. It's supposed to indicate "so much here" instead it means "nothing here".
JaimeThompson 5y ago
It is interesting to me that Peter Thiel doesn't want to live / follow the same rules / laws he would have everyone else live under. Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?
- voidfunc 5y ago
  If I had a couple billion dollars Id probably think I was better than the vast majority of people. Lets be honest though the vast majority of people are morons, I cite the last two years as evidence. Its not hard to be better than that.
- 0F 5y ago
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  What are examples of wanting different rules? I didn't see it in the article
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    His support of politicians who want to remove the rights homosexuals currently have. His views on women having equal rights to men are bothersome too. His stated views on individual rights do not mesh with the company he started to spy on everyone then sell the information to governments.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Interesting, my understanding is that he is prettymuch a bog standard libertarian, and believes in equality under the law for gays and women.
      - JaimeThompson 5y ago
        He said this which shows he doesn't care for women having the right to vote. He funds anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay politicians regularly. "The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."
vmception 5y ago
So he is contrarian solely for the probability of asymmetric alpha, even if he hasn't identified what that could be yet That puts a lot of color into his decisions, validates his decisions to me
d12bb 5y ago
For all the Germans here: ZDF Magazin Royale just yesterday did the show on Peter Thiel: https://www.zdf.de/comedy/zdf-magazin-royale/zdf-magazin-royale-vom-11-februar-2022-100.html https://www.zdf.de/comedy/zdf-magazin-royale/zdf-magazin-roy...
- shafyy 5y ago
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  - seneca 5y ago
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    - MrMan 5y ago
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- ksec 5y ago
  Completely off Topic: The video player is very nice. Instead of mbps bit rate we use in video encoding which most users dont have a clue. They are showing MB / Min. So the user know how much data the could be using when switching quality. I wish more player do they same. ( But leave an advance mode to show mbps for us nerds )
counternotions 5y ago
While I am intrigued by the tease of what kind of secrets could possibly have been discussed, this piece comes off as kind of try-hard, an excuse to flex that David took part in a private dinner with his #1 hero.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  A neat follow up article would be "I was so excited about my dinner with Pete, it overwhelmed my ability to write about it and here's what I learned about myself and my needs"
dc-programmer 5y ago
Perhaps relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219472
mrandish 5y ago
Sadly, a mostly content-free article. Surprising when the topic is such an interesting and successful person with some notable contrarian views.
analog31 5y ago
Discovering and acting against an erroneous consensus is easy to claim in hindsight, to boost your image as some kind of special "thinker." Maybe we need a version of pre-registration for thinkers, like what we now have for some branches of science: You have to document your ideas somewhere, before you test them, in order to get credit for the idea afterwards. And report both the right ideas and the wrong ideas.
- autophagian 5y ago
  I remember the Long Now Foundation did something like this, where people staked money on long term predictions (with the proceeds from said wagers going to charities): https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    > with the proceeds from said wagers going to charities That alone means it can't work as well as it would, if people not just had skin in the game, but also got to keep the proceeds: a betting market with a selection bias and no profit incentive is a poor imitation of an information market
- ppsreejith 5y ago
  I’d say profiting off those ideas would probably be a better test (which seems to be what Thiel focuses on i.e profitable secrets). Also, he has many failed investments too so it’s not like his status comes from predicting more wins
  - analog31 5y ago
    Good point, but even that's dicey. It can be hard to objectively link a nebulous broad idea to a specific investment. It makes me think of the entire genre of self serving business hero biographies. Also, the business success can be used to give someone's social ideas credibility, which I'm always skeptical of. It also creates a bias towards favoring the ideas of people who happen to be motivated by profit. Someone on HN mentioned the HIPPO effect: "Highest Paid Person's Opinion".
jdrc 5y ago
Remote education is going to be huge, especially if sufficient numbers of people move after the pandemic. It's just that teachers are not the right people for it.
- burrows 5y ago
  I’m furiously speculating that in person pre-college public American education was mostly bad and this badness just carried over to remote education, but for whatever reason the badness is more apparent when conducted remotely.
  - Bradlinc 5y ago
    I agree. Perhaps it was just easier to ignore when we weren't sitting directly next to our children. At least it was for me.
    - burrows 5y ago
      > Perhaps it was just easier to ignore when we weren't sitting directly next to our children. I like this take a lot. Similar to the difference between hearing about homelessness second hand and walking through an encampment in Seattle or DC. What has stuck out to you the most while observing your kid’s remote classes?
georgewsinger 5y ago
Does anyone here have any "secrets" they'd like to share?
windex 5y ago
I thought I was reading then introductory passage. And then the article/post was over! This is so pointless.
coldtea 5y ago
>Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’ Because like many ultra-rich has translated his "smarts+upbringing+luck+connections+right-place-right-time" success into just his capability alone, or just to his following some "success formula", and thinks such formulas can be canned and re-applied at will... Meanwhile the "reality-bending secrets" didn't prevent e.g. average to bad performace from his fund.
darod 5y ago
Is this quality of “searching for a secret” any different than any entrepreneur? Is the point of being an entrepreneur to find a secret that will give you a competitive advantage to make you a lot of money. Now him being a VC he would be doing the same from an investor standpoint? Maybe I’m missing the “secret” message in this article.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ykevinator2 5y ago
This guy is so overrated. He's like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.

67 points by notomorrow 5y ago

> Sometimes, our sense-making machinery has a glitch too. Many years ago, a McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive. Based on that study, they held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. Though Nokia had an internet-enabled phone with a color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera in 2004, the executives held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Between the peak of their mobile dominance and their sale of the mobile division in 2013, Nokia’s value fell by almost $250 billion. The first half of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" int the 3rd sentence doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. (Edited; the first version referred incorrectly to the "2nd" sentence instead of the 3rd. Also: > I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel (...) the contents of our conversation will remain private The whole purpose of the article seems to be to brag about having dinner with Mr Thiel. It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently.

bitcharmer 5y ago
> McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive Just goes to show what all those fancy consultancies are worth. Same applies to Gartner and their "predictions". When are people finally going to stop for the scam of the big five brands?
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  big five?
  - atarian 5y ago
    Parent is referring to consulting firms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_...
  - adenozine 5y ago
    FAANG? Facebook Amazon apple Netflix Google Not sure why Microsoft always gets left out...
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118
    - lightbendover 5y ago
      No, consultancies.
  - anxrn 5y ago
    I think parent is referring to the cohort of large management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, et al.).
- wand3r 5y ago
  Consultancies provide a valuable service of blame laundering. Obviously, this isn’t the exclusive use of consultancies, but it does allow management to save face all the time.
leoh 5y ago
Girard was also elected to the Académie Française…
meowface 5y ago
>The second sentence of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. I was confused by what you meant until I realized you were referring to the third sentence, not the second sentence. [Insert sentence here warding off replies about irony.]
- bambax 5y ago
  Ah sorry yes you're right! I edited my comment accordingly (but mentioned the edit so as to try to not confuse people more).
Zigurd 5y ago
Many years ago I was traveling with an Ericsson executive who knew exactly the opposite: Mobile networks and phones were how the developing world would connect to the internet's resources. I'm certain Nokia's leadership knew exactly the same thing. I am familiar enough with Nokia's early smartphones to know they held nothing back, even though, at the time, Series 40 was the mass-market device, Series 60, was high-end. Series 60 ran Symbian, a true smartphone OS with an app runtime, 3rd party SDK, and an app store. Even higher-end Nokia smartphones ran Maemo, a Linux-based smartphone OS that roughly resembled Android. Nokia failed at smartphones because they were forced to abandon Maemo and Symbian in favor of Microsoft's under-baked smartphone OS and the generally disastrous "leadership" of Stephen Elop, and subsequently being bought by Microsoft to continue to try to make Windows Phone happen at the expense of everything that succeeded at Nokia.
- d3vmax 5y ago
  Nokia was already failing prior to MS coming into the picture.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    If Nokia was standing on a burning platform, Stephen Elop hosed them down with gasoline.
- johnyzee 5y ago
  Yeah, Ericsson had a pretty slick touchscreen phone before the iPhone. The iPhone simply blew everything out of the water on both hardware and software.
shalmanese 5y ago
> Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. Wait, what Chinese refugee camp? Where? From what war? China hasn't had a mass displacement event since well before the iPhone came out. The reason I'm harping on this is because the author is committing the exact same sin they're accusing the McKinsey consultants of, a lack of cultural competence and curiosity that would rather have them substitute their stereotyped and prejudiced image of people rather than actual lived experience.
- someperson 5y ago
  Likely referring to the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake that killed a reported 87,000 people (but likely far higher given what we know about the government of China).
  - ectopod 5y ago
    "Around that time" is referring to 2004.
    - someperson 5y ago
      > Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. The original iPhone was released in June 2007. The 2008 Sichuan Earthquake matches up.
      - ectopod 5y ago
        You're right of course. The original anecdote makes no sense then.
  - shalmanese 5y ago
    The iPhone wasn't available for sale in China until Oct 2009: https://www.cultofmac.com/510563/today-in-apple-history-iphone-goes-on-sale-in-china-for-first-time/ https://www.cultofmac.com/510563/today-in-apple-history-ipho...
coldtea 5y ago
>It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently. Girard was never ridiculed in France (at least, not any more than any other who became a target at this or that point). He remains a very respected figure, and his theories are very deep. That said, they're not suitable for consumption by analytical philosophy types. Thiel, however, has only ever said trivialities regarding Girard and his theories, that reveal a very shallow understanding (if that), something analogous to "As Einstein said, everything is relative".
- bambax 5y ago
  There are books about Girard that are pretty funny; one of them is this (published in 2010, while he was still alive): https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/rene-girard-un-allume-qui-se-prend-pour-un-phare/ https://www.editionskime.fr/publications/rene-girard-un-allu... His fixation is that all of human history can be explained by the fact that people like to copy one another. One of the (many) problems with that theory is that it's turtles all the way down. I don't think Girard can be said to be deep.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >His fixation is that all of human history can be explained by the fact that people like to copy one another. Well, in the same sense that "Einstein's fixation is that everything in physics can be explained by the speed of light and frames of reference". Or "War and Peace talks about Russia at the time of the Napoleonic wars". E.g. that "people like to copy one another", is a very crude approximation of "humans being social animals, learning from one another, copying one another, getting entangled in mob behavior, valuing things for social reasons, enforcing laws, rituals, and counter-measures to stop regression to anarchy, mob violence, and social conflict, and so on" -- which in turn is a very crude approximation of the far more detailed, argued, and nuanced treatment of those ideas by Girard as he examines the development of various institutions (religion, morals, governance, etc. >I don't think Girard can be said to be deep. The "turtles all the way down" strawman is rather not deep.
mathattack 5y ago
The irony of writing problems from an article that concludes by offering writing advice!
lariati 5y ago
Girard was a Stanford professor. His Uncommon Knowledge episode from the Hoover Institution is quite interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.

jrm4 5y ago

Perfect example of a brilliant thinker who needs to be contained. It's great to begin with ways of thinking like he does; but his love for secrets make him dangerous; people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.

zozbot234 5y ago
> people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing. Quite wrong. The article mentions that Thiel is anti-consensus - to him, 100% agreement with no real space for debate (on an issue with any amount of inherent complexity) is inherently fishy. This means that trying to figure out why the fence might be there is an especially worthwhile "search for secrets". And once you've done that work, you might end up tearing that fence down after all - or perhaps not.
- jrm4 5y ago
  And you (probably like him) are going to miss the difference between theory and practice on this. His idea here is a good one. Explore and chip away at that 100% agreement thing when you see it. Problem is he strongly appears to be the type with the dumb ego that can't distinguish between genuine "dangerous 100%-ism" and merely "being disagreed with by a lot of people."
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    So you're just saying that he might be dangerous because of his ego, not necessarily his ideas. Y'know, I'm not going to disagree there. But taking that big ego for granted, a "search for hidden secrets" is still one of the most socially productive ways you might use it for. Jumping on the bandwagon of a dubious social consensus can be a lot worse.
    - KerrAvon 5y ago
      He literally funded Trump. “Productive” sometimes isn’t desirable.

atarian 5y ago

I thought the Nokia story was a pretty bad example because it’s not like they got everything else down perfectly.

magicjosh 5y ago

Huh I usually like Perell's stuff but this one seems a bit empty, like a cream puff without filling. The examples seem weak, for example the McKinsey story about smartphones is vague. Sure, people get things wrong, and groups certainly do. I wonder what the purpose of this piece is. Maybe there's 100 more pieces coming influenced by this dinner, this was just getting the crumbly cork out of the wine bottle. Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.

civilized 5y ago
Maybe this is petty, but any time the word "learnings" appears, my brain goes "this will be Business Blather, nothing of value will be said here, feel free to turn me off"
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Yeah. It's a summation/averaging word. It's supposed to indicate "so much here" instead it means "nothing here".

JaimeThompson 5y ago

It is interesting to me that Peter Thiel doesn't want to live / follow the same rules / laws he would have everyone else live under. Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?

voidfunc 5y ago
If I had a couple billion dollars Id probably think I was better than the vast majority of people. Lets be honest though the vast majority of people are morons, I cite the last two years as evidence. Its not hard to be better than that.
0F 5y ago
s1artibartfast 5y ago
What are examples of wanting different rules? I didn't see it in the article
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  His support of politicians who want to remove the rights homosexuals currently have. His views on women having equal rights to men are bothersome too. His stated views on individual rights do not mesh with the company he started to spy on everyone then sell the information to governments.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Interesting, my understanding is that he is prettymuch a bog standard libertarian, and believes in equality under the law for gays and women.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      He said this which shows he doesn't care for women having the right to vote. He funds anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay politicians regularly. "The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."

vmception 5y ago

So he is contrarian solely for the probability of asymmetric alpha, even if he hasn't identified what that could be yet That puts a lot of color into his decisions, validates his decisions to me

d12bb 5y ago

For all the Germans here: ZDF Magazin Royale just yesterday did the show on Peter Thiel: https://www.zdf.de/comedy/zdf-magazin-royale/zdf-magazin-royale-vom-11-februar-2022-100.html https://www.zdf.de/comedy/zdf-magazin-royale/zdf-magazin-roy...

shafyy 5y ago
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- seneca 5y ago
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  - MrMan 5y ago
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ksec 5y ago
Completely off Topic: The video player is very nice. Instead of mbps bit rate we use in video encoding which most users dont have a clue. They are showing MB / Min. So the user know how much data the could be using when switching quality. I wish more player do they same. ( But leave an advance mode to show mbps for us nerds )

counternotions 5y ago

While I am intrigued by the tease of what kind of secrets could possibly have been discussed, this piece comes off as kind of try-hard, an excuse to flex that David took part in a private dinner with his #1 hero.

magicjosh 5y ago
A neat follow up article would be "I was so excited about my dinner with Pete, it overwhelmed my ability to write about it and here's what I learned about myself and my needs"

dc-programmer 5y ago

Perhaps relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219472

mrandish 5y ago

Sadly, a mostly content-free article. Surprising when the topic is such an interesting and successful person with some notable contrarian views.

analog31 5y ago

Discovering and acting against an erroneous consensus is easy to claim in hindsight, to boost your image as some kind of special "thinker." Maybe we need a version of pre-registration for thinkers, like what we now have for some branches of science: You have to document your ideas somewhere, before you test them, in order to get credit for the idea afterwards. And report both the right ideas and the wrong ideas.

autophagian 5y ago
I remember the Long Now Foundation did something like this, where people staked money on long term predictions (with the proceeds from said wagers going to charities): https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > with the proceeds from said wagers going to charities That alone means it can't work as well as it would, if people not just had skin in the game, but also got to keep the proceeds: a betting market with a selection bias and no profit incentive is a poor imitation of an information market
ppsreejith 5y ago
I’d say profiting off those ideas would probably be a better test (which seems to be what Thiel focuses on i.e profitable secrets). Also, he has many failed investments too so it’s not like his status comes from predicting more wins
- analog31 5y ago
  Good point, but even that's dicey. It can be hard to objectively link a nebulous broad idea to a specific investment. It makes me think of the entire genre of self serving business hero biographies. Also, the business success can be used to give someone's social ideas credibility, which I'm always skeptical of. It also creates a bias towards favoring the ideas of people who happen to be motivated by profit. Someone on HN mentioned the HIPPO effect: "Highest Paid Person's Opinion".

jdrc 5y ago

Remote education is going to be huge, especially if sufficient numbers of people move after the pandemic. It's just that teachers are not the right people for it.

burrows 5y ago
I’m furiously speculating that in person pre-college public American education was mostly bad and this badness just carried over to remote education, but for whatever reason the badness is more apparent when conducted remotely.
- Bradlinc 5y ago
  I agree. Perhaps it was just easier to ignore when we weren't sitting directly next to our children. At least it was for me.
  - burrows 5y ago
    > Perhaps it was just easier to ignore when we weren't sitting directly next to our children. I like this take a lot. Similar to the difference between hearing about homelessness second hand and walking through an encampment in Seattle or DC. What has stuck out to you the most while observing your kid’s remote classes?

georgewsinger 5y ago

Does anyone here have any "secrets" they'd like to share?

windex 5y ago

I thought I was reading then introductory passage. And then the article/post was over! This is so pointless.

coldtea 5y ago

>Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’ Because like many ultra-rich has translated his "smarts+upbringing+luck+connections+right-place-right-time" success into just his capability alone, or just to his following some "success formula", and thinks such formulas can be canned and re-applied at will... Meanwhile the "reality-bending secrets" didn't prevent e.g. average to bad performace from his fund.

darod 5y ago

Is this quality of “searching for a secret” any different than any entrepreneur? Is the point of being an entrepreneur to find a secret that will give you a competitive advantage to make you a lot of money. Now him being a VC he would be doing the same from an investor standpoint? Maybe I’m missing the “secret” message in this article.

deleted 5y ago

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ykevinator2 5y ago

This guy is so overrated. He's like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.