Peter Thiel AMA (opens in new tab)

Thinking about this, I wonder: has anyone tried to systematically measure "eccentricity" vs. scientific productivity?

Also, I wonder if there a risk that this characterization just perpetuates the pointy-egghead stereotype - that good scientists don't have social skills? The discussion of "holistic" evaluation in Steven Pinker's recent essay on Harvard admission comes to mind [1].

Perhaps the funding agencies need a separate, high-prestige "individual contributor" track similar to corporate Principal Engineer or fellowship tracks, to allow non-political but brilliant scientists to work hands-on and avoid the grant scramble?

HHMI tries to provide something like this already, giving longer grants to early-career faculty to reduce grant pressure, and I guess NSF and NIH have also been trying to do this with CAREER awards and New Innovator grants...

[1] Very interesting piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277941

You see a similar effect in business of course. In booms like the tech boom I think we saw a crop of people with actual merit get rich, but normally it's the wheelers and dealers.

We need a "save the eccentric professor" fund. But how would we distribute the money?

Edit: Actually, just increasing the science funding, say by 1% of the total government budget, would probably solve the problem.

right? B/c if there is one thing I wouldn't call Elon Musk, it would be "charismatic". Maybe in private he comes of differently

When the sole reason you're doing an AMA is because you're promoting something - in this case Thiel's book that's about to out - you can do a brief appearance and get enough exposure. He doesn't care about doing an AMA otherwise, I bet.

As someone who struggles to distill his answers, I thought there was an eloquence and wisdom in his brevity.

Yeah, some seemed overly brief. But I think overall he got his points across pretty well and I suspect it might not be his preferred medium for such topics. Even his book was largely based on his Stanford lectures.

Just met him once or twice, but my impression is this is how he talks in real life as well.

Setting aside 3 whole hours can produce a surprisingly small amount of answers on an AMA.

I don't think most famous people need the karma bad enough to even set aside that much time.

Julius Caesar was the first historical Roman deified as a god, and Augustus promoted himself as a son of god, partly or mostly for political reasons.

Christ denied the prevailing notion of the day that Julius Caesar is a god (and Augustus is a son of god). Therefore, he is an anti-establishment, and an atheist or unbeliever in the political realm. Thiel refers to this as 'political atheism'.

In his last sentence, he mentioned that libertarianism is related to 'political atheism', which was Christ's view of the political order of the day.

The commonality I make out of his reasoning is that both Christianity in those days and current-day libertarianism are anti-establishment.

A very interesting shift in frame of reference. And you can point out that, politically, some Christian beliefs have in practice become part of the establishment today, which sort of contradicts his point. What do you think?

Please correct me if I'm wrong. My scant knowledge of the Roman era is mostly from Crash Course [1] (highly recommended for learning in an entertaining way, and I believe most of the contents are good too) and a bit from Wikipedia [2].

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/crash-course1/cr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar#Deification

I read it (after substantial rereading) as that Christ should be viewed as a "disruptor"; that he did not view the established authority as special (divine right of kings and all that). Political atheism as a term could be seen to make sense in this context, with the "theism" being the acceptance of the class hierarchy/strong ruler/whatever was oppressive about the State back in Christ's days. That would make political atheism seem (I assume in Theil's eyes) analogous to libertarianism, which calls for great freedom (in its most basic form; some would not call it true liberality, but eh, different argument).

So yeah, Christ can be seen to be against the controlling social order of his time, as can Libertarianism today.

Disclaimer: I'm so far left wing that most libertarians would call me a fascist, so assume some bias.

Hopefully Thiel clarifies what he means by "political atheism". All I could find on the net was an urban dictionary entry[0] and, well, this[1].

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Political%20A... > A person or persons who has a disbelief in the ruling of a dominating government with morals of any kind. Those who have belief that not everything produced by politics or the media hold truth of any kind. He/she whom holds their own belief in what is wrong or right not based on what is fed to them by what the general public allows themselves to be brainwashed with.

[1] http://politicalatheist.com/

Think of it this way.

Absolute rulers generally need to have some linkage or endorsement of their power. It's an important critical element of political legitimacy. So they tie themselves to some higher power -- god, "the people", the sun, ideology.

Christianity broke the mold (by acknowledging only one god, not caesar) and undermined the legitimacy of imperial Roman rule.

I guess he means that libertarianism is mainly anti-statism, with statism being the imposed/de-facto religion nowadays.

On the other hand, the blind faith in the 'forces of the market' is another politically deistic stance, so i don't know how 'politically atheist' it is.

Guess he was hyper-focused on law at the time? It is still an interesting statement.

Very interesting. I wonder what he thinks now.

Jesus, he's exactly like Peter Gregory from HBO's Silicon Valley.

There is a whole shadowy world of property owners who own poorly maintained slum property that they buy cheap, fix up to a minimum standard, and basically farm for rent at premium rates. Typically in most cities there is a cartel of a few dozen people who own a large proportion of this type of property. It's difficult to identify them as they work through shell companies.

Much of this property is subsidized under the Federal Section 8 program, which pays a "prevailing rent" rate for low income property. Often these rents approach the rates paid for luxury apartment complexes in the suburbs.

These folks need to keep the areas around their property poor and ignorant. So they work with phony "progressive" mouthpieces/lobbyists that block good construction projects using the environmental impact review process. They'll blow up issues like traffic impact, greenspace, impact on storm sewers, etc to block things like medium-density housing. (Typically, they are silent when their sponsors drop a 200,000 square foot big-box + strip mall nearby)

In San Francisco, the people that own the slum houses around 16th and Mission where rent is actually quite expensive - some of them probably connected with the mafia groups that do more in the city that many people are aware of, as the Leland Yee arrest showed...

Maybe some of the worlds largest philanthropists could settle this matter during the next major boardmeeting of Microsoft.

They're already busy in the field of parasite extermination, it seems like it would be a small broadening of the scope to me.

What gave you that impression? I did not get that vibe at all. What is best for the overall country seemed like his primary concern.

Leo Strauss was an influential neoconservative philosopher who thought that a lot of key classical texts had an 'obvious' reading which was propaganda for the masses, and a 'secret' reading which only the adepts could decipher. He emphasized this especially to Greek texts from Plato.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss#Strauss_on_reading

> Nothing prevents [disrupting google] but the lack of people willing and able to do it.

Nothing prevents people leaping over skyscrapers in a single bound except the lack of people able to do it.

Possibly relevant recent article:

"Are restaurants like State Bird Provisions, which seems to resist simple economic analysis, the exception or the norm? And if they are the norm, is that because it is somehow self-defeating to raise prices even at booming restaurants? Or are chef proprietors a unique breed in the business world, immune to supply and demand and content to leave money on the table?"

http://priceonomics.com/why-dont-restaurants-charge-for-rese...