Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending 'Secrets'

https://www.readtheprofile.com/p/peter-thiel-secrets

by ronfriedhaber • 12 days ago

7 9 12 days ago

zhouzhao2• 12 days ago

arguably the world’s most influential technology investor.

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Who takes their time to listen to all his bullshit and then write an article about him? I don't believe in any religion, but Jesus be with you bro

biorach• 12 days ago

With a skepticism towards consensus, Thiel says: “We always think that democracy is a good thing, and in a Democracy, the majority is more right than wrong. 51% is more right than 49%. 70% is even more right. But if you get to 99.9%, maybe that’s totally right — or maybe you’re in North Korea.”

This is inane and pretentious.

I’ve yet to see anything from this so-called intellectual that isn’t superficial theorising wrapped in a cloth of obscure cant, or millenarian nonsense.

zhouzhao2• 12 days ago

The article is just pure ragebait

PaulHoule3• 11 days ago

That whole mimetic thing drives me up the wall. What do you care what people think?

oliculipolicula• 11 days ago

I try not to let Thiel drive me. How that could work is by conceiving of him as a friend or even lover (not mildly successful, obviously, but I try)

He's done things he won't ever write about, that surprise me. Like using hafus for propaganda. Planting his own people (and most who get upset by mimetics only think they know who these are) in the audience. This guy understands his enemies deeper than the enemies understand themselves. Maybe even runs _their_ propaganda by _multiple_ frontier instances _after_ analysing it himself

(In the postGPT era, his own literary outpu-- uh, side-effects*-- therefore has to drop)

If I have to be honest.. I'd need "medical aids" to think about his thoughts in good faith.. so far I have not _felt_ such a need

(Maybe bc I've not felt myself to identify with his enemy.. [[Allez CH!!]])

*The writings/speeches are meant to teach only as a bonus: would this "fact" work as a band-aid?

jqpabc123• 12 days ago

The religion of Thiel.

coldtea• 12 days ago

For the same reason some Nazi officials looked into the occult (yeah, real world "Riders of the Lost Ark" style). Hubris and desire for ultimate control.

PaulHoule3• 11 days ago

He’s abusing the word “secret” for one thing.

Secrets are deliberately hidden. The Freemasons keep secrets. The construction of the atom bomb was kept secret.

Special relativity was not a secret, however, before Einstein discovered it. Dark matter is a mystery, not a secret. [2]

It was not a secret that smartphones like the iPhone could be successful, but a person in business might keep an opinion like that, their plans to act on that opinion, or details of how exactly you build such a thing as secret.

I think there is some bad theology there which comes from excessive personalization of capital-G God [1]; like to me when I read “created in his image” I think not just the image we see with our eyes but the image we see in an electron microscope —- like the way dna, rna, protein and cells work definitely is a window into the process of creation and how “he” works. I think Theil might like to think that God could have written up an explanation of all that in the Bible which makes it a secret but it doesn’t work that way.

Theil is so full of himself that I can’t picture him going to church and getting the boom of being part of a spiritual community which is very much about, for at least a moment, not being preoccupied with being better than somebody else.

[1] which unquestionably exists, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument, I would formulate it as “the reason there is something and not nothing” which tells us practically nothing about what it is, Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy further develops theology in terms of questions such as “Did God start the universe moving and step away from it or is he present in the world?”

[2] I did talk about how I see things with a Catholic priest the other day and he said “What if God created the universe with all those stars moving too fast?” which smells a bit too much like “God put all these fake fossil in the ground to test his faith.” The kind of behavior out of that other guy, the Prince of Lies.

Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending 'Secrets'

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