Peter Thiel's argument at RNC makes no sense. Here's what I think is going on | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel's argument at RNC makes no sense. Here's what I think is going on

vox.com

17 pointsabhi37 comments

Software engineers often have a tendency to look at old code and think, "This is crap. It would be so much better if it was written in (some new popular language/framework/architecture".

What we often fail to see is that if the software works, doing a full ground up rewrite will take considerable effort, and in the end, it'll work pretty much the same as before because of external constraints.

It took over 200 years for our country to develop the framework that our society currently enjoys. How long did it take for us to finally decide that slavery is bad, or that woman should be able to vote, or discriminating against people is bad?

Those changes in our society happened in an evolutionary way. Restarting the government from scratch may allow us to smooth over some past warts, but how long would it take us to figure things out again?

Evolution, not revolution, has always been the best way forward. Just ask people in the Middle East where dictators have been deposed and left a vacuum of power.

Really?

When I look at the past, I have the feeling everything stagnated till some special events happend.

Revolutions, wars, disasters, etc.

That's because history books tend to cover exciting events, and not the daily doldrums of life. Revolution and war typically have long preambles, most of which gets glossed over in favor of the actual event itself. The Cold War was a decades-long preamble that failed to lead to an actual war, and that was far from being stagnant.

Society is ever-changing, but often in subtle ways that eventually coalesce to the "big-bang" event written about in history books. Much in the same way as technology -- it took many incremental improvements to many technologies to finally allow Apple to build the iPhone.

Same sex marriage was very evolutionary. It started slowly with a few states allowing "unions", that spread further, then a few finally passed laws allowing for "marriage". That went to the courts and through that it eventually became legal nationwide. That didn't happen because of a revolution or a war but a slow, evolutionary change.

There isn't any substance to this article. It's basically "Thiel endorsed Trump, I don't like Trump, so this doesn't make sense."

Why are so many people having a meltdown that a rich entrepreneur is endorsing a Republican? Why is Thiel so important compared to any of the other speakers that were at the RNC?

Thiel is an excellent example of an anarcho-capitalist. Endorsing Trump makes perfect sense if you want the federal government to be (further) delegitimized.

On the one hand - even if he is never elected - suggesting that Trump is capable of being president trivializes the responsibilities of that office. On the other, if he is elected, he's going to break a lot of things, tie up resources in debates/lawsuits about his legal authority to do whatever whimsical thing he decides to attempt, and generally make it very difficult for government to work effectively.

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