Peter Thiel had an hour long interview with Ross Douthayt in the New York Tjmes. It covers some strange territory, so I was curious what interested Dopers thought about his views. I’ll give my two cents following this limited gift link.
First, it covers a lot of strange territory. Given that, I thought Douthat offered some reasonable counter arguments. However, Douthat is not very confrontational and never nasty; he knows how to get good people to do his podcast.
A short interview format might simplify or omit complicated ideas. In fairness to Thiel, who I thought was intelligent and articulate, some of the questions are hard to answer because they are so general and cover too much ground. On the other hand, intellligent people often try to overcomplicate ideas, obfuscate facts or engage in meaningless jargon. There is not always a lot of meat on the bone.
Equating wealth, success and intelligence seems particularly popular in America. Given the fuzziness of the interview and topics, I felt Thiel is all of these. He describes himself as a cynic. The discussion is strange and I am more cynical still - one wonders why and to what purpose Thiel discussed what he did.
The interview does not much mention Trump or Vance, who was heavily supported by Thiel and who may have persuaded Anderssen or Musk to publicly support them. I don’t know to what extent Trump’s policies reflect Thiel’s wishes and won’t assume full correlation.
Thiel questions whether a stable “stagnation” is worse than Armageddon. It isn’t. Particularly if stagnation is defined so vaguely and narrowly. It seems to mean you’re middle-class children did roughly as well, maybe slightly worse, than you did. It excludes digital progress.
One advantage of crises is that they give powerful people more freedom to try bigger or more co traversal things. And crises don’t come bigger than apocalyptic or demonic visions. 9/11 caused a reevaluation of the global calculus and laws reducing freedom and rights in the name of better security. Trump used emergency powers to justify excluding Congress and signed treaties regarding tariffs and trade, and expanded this into foreign and immigration policy, personal enrichment and a maximalist view of presidential power. There have been benefits to both Trump and Thiel from manufacturing crisis, and they don’t come bigger than Armageddon.
The religious aspect is also confusing. Billionaires may see their success as proof of intelligence and God’s grace. Some may be humble, but humility is not obviously a valued trait. If God is your copilot, you have done freedom to invoke faith. This comes in handy if reasons and logic are awkward or impossible to know. Trust the process, and pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. And feeling matters more than sustenance for many people.
I’m not a big fan of Thunberg. Your environment is enormously important to your health. I think it appropriate to consider it important, question whether the interests of corporations align with yours. Many companies have been happy to profit at public expense using externalities. Pollution is detrimental to health.
That said, most people simply do not want to make big sacrifices to their cars and comfort. Most are not ready to eat insects rather than delicious meat. I think oil and gas will be needed for many decades and the alternatives just are not where they need to be to seriously replace many uses of energy. Global warming is real. Someone like Thunberg is much more extreme than I am, and is too political and critical, though I understand why her contemporaries respect her.
However, she makes an odd demon. Really?
The new GLP-1 drugs seem to offer real hope for dementia and Parkinson’s. it is not true scientific progress has slowed. Most of human history has been a battle for survival; recently one has the time to think about things other than getting enough food. Disease was very real too, particularly in the couple years following birth. Vaccinations have a blessing. But have rarely been less popular. They save millions of lives. Until Covid, billions of people have been lifted out of severe poverty and have basic comforts like electricity , water and basic education and entertainment.and appliances. This is progress.
So why deny scientific progress is a thing, and insist things are stagnant in some vague way? Why pick on Thunberg? No one doubts intelligence is hugely importance, but it requires tempering with empathy, education, experience and taking the time and effort to examine complicated things before it is truly practical. The best thing about humanity is its humanity. I’m all for improvement. I think longevity medicine is fascinating. But being human is good enough. Transhumanism, some vague perfection, is seen by some as better. If it lacks empathy, it forgets its humanism, and may no longer be so.
Has liberalism failed? It has many flaws, hides a lot of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. It seems better than cruelty. I do not really understand the dislike for public health and univrrsities, or discrediting the science largely responsible for increases in health and comfort. So why knock environmentalists, even if sometimes extreme or over the top? Why knock the educated? It reminds me of ancient Roman senators who disliked the philosophers allegedly corrupting the morals of youth or undermining social cohesion. One might see history as fighting the same battles between tradition and romanticism or he Gracchi arguing society is more stable by sharing some wealth, limiting latitudes, and giving folks in
other cities or distant provinces a say. A view disliked by powerful people who think they built what is, know better, don’t trust those too average or too clever, and may be copilots with the very gods.
The world has changed enormously, but I don’t think people have changed very much since 170BC. I think history, even the Roman Empire, still has much to teach us as we fight the same battles. Rome had good emperors and bad ones. The best emperors were tolerant, expanded slowly, took care to drain the marshes to foster health, set a personal example, lived simply, and tried to stay grounded even during their biggest triumphs. The worst emperors ignored war entirely or expanded too far and too long, were intolerant, set a poor example, did not beautify the cities and employ artisans, and cared mostly about decadence or who paid the largest donate to the Praetoruan Guards, a personal army.
I think Thiel is smart. Why does who choose to talk about these things in particular? It may be true what is good for Sauron and Mordor is also good for Hobbitin. However, I have my doubts. Is technocracy is equivalent to an apocalypse? Don’t know. But if you make the stakes high enough, it would be tough to manufacture a bigger crisis. I don’t really know the many alleged Chinese meanings of the word for “opportunity”. But I’ve met my share of opportunists. Some share my values more than others.
I’d imagine it can be annoying to be a billionaire. Probably most people want something from you. There may be pressure to speak smartly. Certainly you have soapboxes others don’t. Thiel has more power than most. He namedrops Musk and Zuck, perhaps seeing himself as a spokesman for Silicon Valley. I hope Musk has not given up on Mars. But I think caring for the public health if children now is better than wondering about some highly hypothetical situation generations in the future. The best Emperors cared about the wellbeing of their minions.
It should be noted that Douthat is a devoted (albeit non-Trumpist) conservative ideologue who worships at the alter of the “New Right” which created the conditions for someone like Thiel to wield influence, so aside from being “not very confrontational and never nasty”, he is also quite sympathetic to some pretty extreme ideas and in the past has written fondly of odious people like Newt Gingrich, championing him as heralding a ‘second act’ for conservatism in American politics.
For a progressive and sardonic take on Peter Thiel which addresses a lot of things Douthat glosses over or doesn’t touch on about Thiel’s past, I present the dependably critical (and openly biased) Robert Evens and his Behind the Bastards podcast:
Stranger
never mind.
Theil is not a deep or original thinker, and he has poor self awareness. The first half or so of the interview is devoted to whether “We” have stagnated.
The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.
The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s has a large economic literature; Robert J Gordon was a prominent discussant; Paul Krugman wrote a couple of books on the subject. There is much controversy, but Thiel doesn’t seem to grasp the broad contours. Productivity growth accelerated following the Great Depression and WWII. Then it slowed. Productivity growth before 1890 was much slower than either period. So if you think we’re stagnating now, you should also believe we were stagnating before 1920 or so and backwards forever.
A more reasonable hypothesis is that 1950-1970 was an exceptional period, where we benefited from the industrialization of research and development and a backlog of discoveries that were held back due to war and economic mismanagement from 1930-1945.
If you’re going to engage in Big Think, you should take care to compare your impressions with observable and readily available facts. Theil isn’t interested I guess.
Not only is productivity growth not stuck now, it is absolutely miraculous compared with any era before 1890. It only doesn’t seem so hot relative to the US in 1950 to 1965.
Theil allocates a lot of investment funds. I am disappointed that he doesn’t grasp the basics.
If you are attracted to Big Think articles that are constrained by readily observable facts, I would recommend Noah Smith. Example:
Theil should commission a piece from Smith on something like, “How should one locate the best investment projects?” That’s Theil’s wheelhouse. Maybe Smith has a little insight, though he would never implement it as well as Theil could.
My guess is that chasing pockets of extra-normal profits is probably the most profitable method, but building the future is more fun. And the latter is at most half substance with the remainder being PR.
Sorry for the number of crappy spellings and uncorrected autorecorrections. We’ve had a heat wave made manageable by a powerful fan, but it dries out my contacts and worsens my vision.
Didn’t know Douthat was republican. I don’t think he is a poor interviewer, but his challenges are pretty gentle.
The idea that there has not been general scientific and socioeconomic progress, possibly excepting the last five years for political reasons, is ludicrous enough Thiel seems to work pretty hard to find an undefined definition where there is a significant degree of stagnation. Thiel is certainly smart enough to have reasons behind his musings. Europe and Thunberg may be disliked by some, but do not seem to me like obvious targets of being the antithesis of Christianity. So the reasons behind these feelings are probably worth thinking about, given the influence of the interviewee.
Theil thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket. That’s not a new idea. That’s a very old one. It tends to support conservative views. Even when the particular conservatives that it supports like Donald Trump proceed to dismantle free trade and blow up the budget deficit.
Theil’s most prominent idea in his 2009 essay was, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It’s hard to take a guy like that seriously. It’s harder to take a reviewer seriously that ignores that claim entirely.
You can try, but that sounds like a rabbit hole. If Theil is emotionally incapable of supporting OECD center-left/center-right liberal ideas (like many other bog-standard plutocrats, nevermind that their fortunes wouldn’t exist outside of such an environment), taking his ideas at face value would be an error.
Perhaps. Thiel’s ideas seem a little more polished than some of the people he mentions. I’m just starting Dalio’s new book, perhaps his ideas are a little more developed.