The Libertarian Futurism of Peter Thiel (2011)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes

by romefort • 11 years ago

48 66 11 years ago

vegancap6• 11 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I really like Peter Thiel, but it's hard to consider him 'Libertarian', whilst selling advanced snooping software to the U.S. government.

stillsut• 11 years ago

Why? Libertarians think gov't is needed for certain institutions like an army, or a justice system.

jMyles• 11 years ago

Some do; some don't.

But that's not the point: most "libertarians" seem to believe that the ostensible usefulness of the nanny state can be eliminated by people choosing to do good and engaging in market activity with others who do good.

So profiting from something that's so evil is, to this way of thinking, counter-libertarian.

DickingAround2• 11 years ago

Necessary, but to be kept at a minimum. Especially when there's no pressing need; no active invasion of the US or imminent risk of one.

praxeologist3• 11 years ago

Logically consistent libertarianism requires anarchy. More here if you like to know why:

http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/b...

vegancap6• 11 years ago

I don't think they've ever made the case for large scale snooping software. Though you're correct that some Libertarians still want state military and justice system etc.

notahacker• 11 years ago

There are a wide variety of libertarian views on the suitable reach of government, but few of them involve the idea that liberty would be enhanced if intelligence officers were provided with an "intuitive way to extract insight from massive-scale data of disparate types" including "enterprise data sources, unstructured cable traffic, structured identity data, email, telephone records, spreadsheets, network traffic", which according to their website is what Palantir Intelligence offers.

melling• 11 years ago

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

The HN version of this is

"we wanted a thoughtful discussion about his ideas, instead we discussed the finer points of being a libertarian."

vegancap6• 11 years ago

Just a passing remark. Wasn't trying to start a political discussion.

whybroke4• 11 years ago

So Thiel is is uncertain about Darwinian evolution and believes Global warming is too clouded by political correctness to be properly assessed.

Discuss.

And I would extrapolate a third "disruptive" belief: that a quick discussion on a web forum by persons with a vague layman's understanding and absolutely no data beyond links to popular science articles (perhaps some of whom skipped college at Thiel's instigation) believe they can bring insight to these topics.

I would imagine anyone knowledgeable enough to discus these issues has left the building, likely to watch the Fonz jump the shark.

digitalzombie• 11 years ago

Maybe he's just a fiscal libertarian?

Bernie Sanders is a civil libertarian.

vegancap6• 11 years ago

Very fair point!

vinhboy• 11 years ago

He also bankrolls candidates like Ted Cruz who is anti-gay, anti-choice etc...

I am not trying to start a political argument here. I am only adding to the OP's statement.

DickingAround2• 11 years ago

I have to say, the writing style of this article is an immense time-waster. Even skimming it doesn't get to the point quickly because the history of Thiel (large in size but mostly unimportant) is inter-mixed with the ideas he's espousing (small in size but really the part we care about).

What ever happened to 'summary' then 'summary with more depth' then 'summary with even more depth'?

dudurocha• 11 years ago

This is not what The New Yorker tries to do. It's a different type of journalism. It do not worry about the lenghs of its articles.

indubitably• 11 years ago

The New Yorker is not Reuters.

ddingus• 11 years ago

Yes, it's thick. But it's those thick parts that will carry somebody through to the ideas. People tend to process things very differently. In general, the tech community feeds on, trades in, and works to realize and actualize ideas. Narratives get broken down to time lines, little nubs that help get to the ideas quickly, for example.

Others need / want context. Who has the idea? What motivates them? How are they as a person? Etc... In this way, ideas are a social thing. People, who may not be informed or able to work with the bare nature or essence of an idea can often get something out of a longer form, people centric, presentation. Another example would be, "How does Peter's life experience compare to my own, or to others that I trust or believe in?"

Trust plays an important role.

I see this distinction often in advocacy. Libertarians, as a great example, will often go to great lengths to demonstrate the technical purity, accuracy, and logical consistency of their ideas. In a very real sense, they've sorted it out to be "right" by some measure, and where that measure is consistent across individuals, they all will center on a few ideas and seek to include others.

Nothing wrong with this. Just making a point, mind you all.

This type of advocacy centers on the rational. And it's often framed as and presented in ways that are comparable to debate. But that isn't how everybody works. Effective advocates, and by effective I mean being able to reach very large numbers of people and seeing more of those people motivated to act on the product of the advocacy than average, employ all three components: reason, emotion, character. (logos, pathos, ethos http://courses.durhamtech.edu/perkins/aris.html)

This means large swaths of people cannot / will not even hear Peter and his ideas without sufficient context to warrant the exercise. "Who is Peter Thiel?" as a question actually matters, and it's not just fluff, which is why the New Yorker presents in long form as it so often does. And there is trust potential in that the person may well be one that "makes sense" or is appealing in some way, adding that resonance to an idea.

A contrast to this might be the religious right, where the reason may not be potent, but character and strong emotion can be linked to values and ideas anyway. One sees simple ideas, attractive in that they aren't complex things and in how they may resonate with our basic nature, coupled with strong characters and emotions that back the ideas, long form as we see here, in ways that do reach people while not centering on rational merits.

Where somebody like Thiel may center on the reason, the religious right may center on the person and emotion, for example.

This can also be seen in the left where the appeal is mixed in a different way through emotion and reason as the centers, leaving some slack in people and their character overall. BTW, I've always thought this is contributing to why the left does as well on social issues as it often does and embodies tolerance. It's core to how and why the advocacy works as it does. And that plays out too, with the left often expressing economic ideas in more complicated forms with mixed results too.

You might see some of those differently, and that's OK. They are not absolute statements. We can and do see a variety of presentations and advocacy forms. A lot of the perception I'm presenting here depends on how familiar one is with the various types of advocacy and where we fall on the scale of what actually will reach us and motivate us to act, or at least (re)consider. Coarse differences can be seen through this kind of lens, and that's my intent, not to argue one over the other, or merits.

*I included some brief contrast incorporating several politics here to provide some support for my point, not to argue merit.

Seeing down votes suggests breaking that out and making it clear might be worth doing. It's not my intent to offend or make a value judgement. It is my intent to highlight the merits of this piece, and speak to it's style.

The primary point I'm making is the New Yorker can and does reach a lot of people in ways that are relevant and effective, which is why they do what they do. And we need that as much as we do the other forms and presentations out there so that the body politic is inclusive and relevant to everyone. We know that story, and we know something of who Peter is. A large portion of the New Yorker audience probably does not.

In a very simple sense, it's a lot like preparing a great meal to feature an ingredient rather than a spartan one where the ingredient stands alone, bare, depending only on it's intrinsic appeal. Some people will try it to experience it. Others won't. But they will experience it in the context of a great meal overall.

Edit: For what it's worth, understanding advocacy, it's components and various forms is valuable professionally. The selling of ideas and things sometimes requires reaching people who may not center on familiar norms. A longer form proposal, for example, may reach that person in ways that resonate where a Power Point, or other brief presentation might not. Understanding who, when, how has high value, again why I put this here.

et2o4• 11 years ago

It seems like Silicon Valley is full of people who love espousing their noble ideas but got rich via (as Thiel admits) at best socially neutral things like Facebook and Paypal.

As for the anti-aging research: Fund the NIH. Basic science like that needed in aging research isn't going to come on a startup timescale. Thiel makes a big deal about encouraging people to leave universities, but the smartest PhD students are generally not the ones leaving academia.

dnautics12• 11 years ago

The nih's run of good Basic science is over and may never come back. Government has this pesky thing called accountability that it needs to satisfy. There is no way to hold a scientist accountable when the fruits of 'basic science' are not provable for decades or centuries. It's just too easy for a snake oil salesman to extract funding from clueless program managers (the smartest PhD students are not the ones becoming program managers).

As for smart PhDs leaving academia... They are. Getting a faculty position is basically a crap shoot that requires politicking, landing a lucky project, getting a high impact factor publication, or all three. The labor market was so saturated by decades of encouraging more people to be PhDs (it kind of became a dumping ground for students who didn't want to med school or look for a job) that the distinction between a good scientist and a bad failed to be the standard academic metrics. Good scientists who diligently pursued difficult research were more likely than not rewarded with little because such projects might not be doable in a five year PhD or a two year postdoc. The other route out is fraud.

Edit: oh, I see, you're in the MSTP. Please consider Upton Sinclair's quote: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

et2o4• 11 years ago

My main point was that product-driven start-ups are not going to be able to do the basic science research needed to get revolutionary advances in things like aging research. You're complaining about getting only 7 years of protected research time with no real expectation of a viable product: How long will these types of places have?

If you're going to call me out on my vested interested in NIH funding, I think you should acknowledge you have a pretty similar (opposite) conflict of interest :)

Certainly the NIH basic science funding situation right now is absolutely dismal. However, it's ludicrous to suggest that the reason is because of some lack of "accountability." It's also not exclusively "clueless program managers" who are choosing how funds are disbursed: There are panels full of (decidedly) non-clueless professors who do that.

The real reason is because there are more PhDs than there used to be, more professors than there used to be, more people applying for grants than there used to be, and NIH funding has become nominally stagnant (declining in real dollars) after a period of massive expansion.

I'm not arguing that getting a faculty position is definitely something of a crapshoot, especially if you aren't a dual-degree candidate and don't have a clinical aspect to your work that you can fall back on.

eli_gottlieb5• 11 years ago

Getting a faculty position is basically a crap shoot that requires politicking, landing a lucky project, getting a high impact factor publication, or all three.

True. That's because we've been cutting the percentage of GDP spent on basic research, and because we structure academic careers pyramidally, ensuring there will always be more PhD graduates than permanent academic jobs (unless you wish to pave over the universe in professorial offices).

Now look, I'm in industry right now, but while some smart PhDs leave academia and some don't, most smart MS and PhD holders would rather be doing research. So don't talk about how research productivity has dropped off and will never come back: social determinism is the kind most likely to be wrong (since if people understand the prediction made by the social determinist, they act to prevent its coming true).

Instead, let's understand just how much everyone stands to gain from advances in basic science (to follow the given example: longer, healthier, happier lives) - how much we have always gained from advances in basic science - and restructure the scientific career to make it happen.

Throwing free money at anyone with a PhD doesn't maximize scientific productivity. Neither does starving out the overwhelming majority of all trained scientists with a pyramidal career ladder and ever-shrinking science budgets.

zo13• 11 years ago

"It seems like Silicon Valley is full of people who love espousing their noble ideas but got rich via (as Thiel admits) at best socially neutral things like Facebook and Paypal."

What's wrong with that? If Thiel is a Libertarian (haven't looked it up, not that it matters), then supporting and making money off-of socially "neutral" things such as Facebook and Paypal seems like a very good representation of the things Libertarians believe in. Namely, freedom from violent coercion in all forms, and the voluntary trade and association between free individuals.

Calling it "Neutral" is also quite a loaded term, to be honest. You've already created and started projecting some sort of internal (and probably shared-with-others) scale of social good. And then you apply it to something completely voluntary and non-violent, as if to degrade from what it actually represents.

s73v3r5• 11 years ago

"freedom from violent coercion"

The problem with that is, they're just fine with every other form of coercion.

The Libertarian Futurism of Peter Thiel (2011)

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