Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
perell.comPerfect 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.
> but his love for secrets make him dangerous
I understood the part about "secrets" differently. I read Thiel's book about entrepreneurial mindset, Zero to One, a few years ago and found it valuable. As a long-time serial entrepreneur myself (initially unsuccessful and eventually quite successful), Thiel clearly understands the complex dynamics deeply and offers actionable insights. One of the things Thiel touches on is how entrepreneurs are often contrarians trying to identify the occasional exceptions where mainstream thinking got something important wrong.
Paul Graham also talks about this, observing that entrepreneurs aren't just looking for "good ideas", they are looking for "good ideas most people are wrong about". This is necessary because if most people hadn't missed something then the "good idea" would already be a hotly contested mature market with deep-pocketed big players slugging it out for dominance. Pretty much by definition, a high-growth start-up must believe they've identified some aspect of the opportunity other smart people missed. The start-up might be wrong but when they are correct it can be both disruptive and transformative.
This is the context in which I read the discussion of "secrets"
I don't disagree with a single thing you're saying here. I really like Zero to One as well, and I think a lot of people could benefit from that theory--
--but still, scale matters. Once a guy in love with that kind of theory begins to be this rich and powerful, he becomes 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.
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.
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."
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.
He literally funded Trump. “Productive” sometimes isn’t desirable.
“funded trump” - he quit FB board to help fund more trump-aligned candidates. Not exactly in the past yet
Thiel funded Trump early in his first presidential bid: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/11/peter-thi...
His company Palantir also threw one of their employee's under the bus, when it was published that this employee helped Cambridge Analytica with database development work. The work was to sort and query there psychometric data (harvested from Facebook) for people who scored high on a personality trait for neuroticism. These people are often highly addictive, and easy to influence with basic memetic warfare. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are highly susceptible to influence operations of this type, and were the target of the Trump campaign. Christopher Wylie's book: Mindf%ck, is a great read on this.
After the election, Trump appointed Thiel to his presidential intelligence advisory board as quid pro quo for his campaign funding, furthering his access to secrets.
Was surprised by that too and am wondering what he could have gained out of that. Thiel is an intelligent guy but something about him seems dubious but can’t really point my finger at it.
Stupid people can do bad things without thinking, but when intelligent ones do it's always because there is an agenda.
Perhaps to tear down the society we have now to replace it with a Libertarian paradise.
Sounds good to me…
This is a really easy question if you pay attention to his whole "maybe people don't know what's best for themselves" schtick.
A lot of libertarians were attracted to Trumps anti-regulation and anti-bureaucracy policy positions.
At a minimum, they got 3 originalist supreme court justices out of it.
Off topic, but why do so many statements about Trump contain the word "Literally!"?
He either funded Trump in which case one could just say so, or else he didn't.
"Literally" appears to be some sort of emphasis or "alarm" term?
"He's literally Hitler!" (no, he's literally not).
Also, he contributed to a politician you don't agree with. So what? Did someone else "Literally!" fund Joe Biden? Does that "Literally!" make them bad people?
Some people find it shocking and implausible that someone would actually vote for Trump. It is also important to distinguish between people who voted for a centrist democrat, and therefore practically voted for Trump.
> He literally funded Trump.
You stop here as if to assume this is enough info to prove his productivity was undesirable, and that everyone will understand and degree, but that’s an incorrect assumption.
What specifically was undesirable? Most people remember spending $1.50/less per gallon, spending less on everything else thanks to low inflation, the lowest illegal border crossings in decades, lower taxes, finally fighting back against China after decades of politicians saying a lot but doing nothing, peace talks with NK, a well handled foreign policy, and Operation Warp Speed which brought the US a wonderful historic vaccine in record time, 3 Supreme Court justices that will help America weather the current progressive zeitgeist meme fad policies (and many others), and some mean tweets and a very deranged media that covered him.
Before you bring up his handling of COVID, do recall that there were far more deaths under Biden in the same time period compared to under Trump, and that Biden’s only true move was making sure everyone had access to Trump’s vax. (Joe certainly didn’t shut down COVID like he claimed he would.)
So sometimes productive is, in fact desirable.
Ok, I’ll bite, but this is such a tired argument I won’t stick around for it.
Trump was beneficiary of long-term positive trends, his tax cuts helped set the stage for short-term economic growth and long-term financial ruin, and most of all his pathological narcissism has led him to do his best to destroy the rule of law.
Under his administration he tried to make the DoJ and DoD his political tools, he flagrantly flouted the law on a regular basis, he lied incessantly about anything that he felt made him look bad, and he surrounded himself with sycophants who would not rein in his destructive tendencies.
He spent the last year of his presidency sowing distrust in the upcoming election, so inevitably when the pandemic cost him his job, he then spent months trying to overturn it, leading to the January 6th insurrection, and has spent the time since then beating that drum and corrupting the GOP further into treating loyalty to him as the litmus test.
He took an oath to the Constitution but has no understanding of or loyalty to its fundamental precepts. He’s willing to destroy the country to vindicate himself.
> You stop here as if to assume this is enough info to prove his productivity was undesirable, and that everyone will understand…
Everyone seems to forget how problematic the Democrat’s nominees were in 2016 and 2020. Support for Trump is not necessary hard to understand for someone like Thiel when the alternatives were Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Both candidates were well saturated with scandal, both openly dabbled in pay to play, and both pretty openly hostile to libertarian ideas (although I think Trump was as well, albeit selectively).
Not an expert on US politics. I believe Thiel supported other republican candidate before he switched to Trump?
He did/does. However, I thought the complaint was that his judgement should be questioned because he supported Trump specifically, not republicans generally. If the complaint is that “he supports republicans, so don’t trust him.” That complaint is simply generically partisan. At least for me, general partisanship or party alignment doesn’t sway my opinion of an individual.
Trump is divisive and an atypical republican, so I can certainly see how someone supporting him could raise an eyebrow to folks with conventional political wisdom, even if I understand why someone like Thiel would support him.
and facebook
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.
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"
Yeah. It's a summation/averaging word. It's supposed to indicate "so much here" instead it means "nothing here".
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-roy...
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 )
>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.
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.
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/
> 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
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
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".
> 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.
> 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.
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).
The iPhone wasn't available for sale in China until Oct 2009: https://www.cultofmac.com/510563/today-in-apple-history-ipho...
"Around that time" is referring to 2004.
> 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.
You're right of course. The original anecdote makes no sense then.
>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".
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-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.
>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.
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.
Nokia was already failing prior to MS coming into the picture.
If Nokia was standing on a burning platform, Stephen Elop hosed them down with gasoline.
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.
>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.]
Ah sorry yes you're right! I edited my comment accordingly (but mentioned the edit so as to try to not confuse people more).
> 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?
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.
big five?
Parent is referring to consulting firms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms#Big_...
I think parent is referring to the cohort of large management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, et al.).
FAANG? Facebook Amazon apple Netflix Google
Not sure why Microsoft always gets left out...
HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165118
No, consultancies.
Girard was a Stanford professor. His Uncommon Knowledge episode from the Hoover Institution is quite interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk
I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.
Girard was also elected to the Académie Française…
The irony of writing problems from an article that concludes by offering writing advice!
Perhaps relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219472
Sadly, a mostly content-free article. Surprising when the topic is such an interesting and successful person with some notable contrarian views.
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.
I thought the Nokia story was a pretty bad example because it’s not like they got everything else down perfectly.
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.
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"
Does anyone here have any "secrets" they'd like to share?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I thought I was reading then introductory passage. And then the article/post was over! This is so pointless.
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?
> Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?
Yes? Thiel is one of the major pusher / backer of “dark enlightenment” type theories and efforts. Neo-feudalism is his goal, or at least one if his goals.
What are examples of wanting different rules? I didn't see it in the article
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.
Interesting, my understanding is that he is prettymuch a bog standard libertarian, and believes in equality under the law for gays and women.
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."
>He said this which shows he doesn't care for women having the right to vote.
I think you are adding a statement to the quote that isn't there. He didn't say that women shouldn't be able to vote. He said the chance of a libertarian government died when they got the vote.
>He funds anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay politicians regularly.
Seems like you think that anyone who has other political priorities is actively against these things. I don't think that Theil is anti-gay ect, he is just willing to compromise on those values.
He actively now pushes for a libertarian style government so it isn't much of a stretch to think he doesn't want women to vote. And yes I think someone who uses there power and political connections to exempt themselves from the things those they fund wish to do to others aren't decent people.
consider that there are women and non straights who have an economic agenda, and even the furthest left mrxist nutter would understand an economic agenda
I think that is a big dump to make. Just because someone is libertarian and recognizes that women and welfare recipients are the biggest challenge, does it mean that their proposed solution is to take their vote away.
I'm willing to agree that by the nature of his power and position, he is insulated from the negative externalities of those he politically funds. The jump that I make, is that he ultimately wants the government out of those areas too.
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.
This guy is so overrated. He's like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.