Should I have respect for Peter Thiel in him trying to help Trump? It is odd, maybe he is playing Trump, maybe Elon is too?
I feel like even talking to Trump validates his lies and just disgusting moral integrity of what it means to be American.
I feel like even talking to Trump validates his lies and just disgusting moral integrity of what it means to be American.
Peter Thiel like everyone else is supporting views which also happens to be very popular views in this country. I not only have respect for Peter for supporting Trump but I think tech industry should be thankful to him for supporting Trump and ensuring Trump gets a good insider view of what role Trump should play or stay out of for tech industry to grow. By any stretch of imagination Thiel has helped tech industry, all the people employed in tech industry and as a result America too. When Trump's immigration team meets to discuss H1B, Thiel is going to argue on our behalf.
Trump literally pissed on NYT and other media businesses while was much more positive in in Tech meetings.
But then again, you'd have to overlook his incorrect views on things like macroeconomics (Clarium was quite the hedge fund!).
I like the Bezos quote, frankly. I think it sums up Thiel well. As a startup investor, you only have to be right a few times, and being wrong doesn't hurt that much.
Sadly, governing -- and choosing our represented leaders -- comes with higher stakes and worse outcomes.
[1]: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
I suppose there are different ways to read that, but Thiel doesn't believe democracy with universal suffrage leads to the best outcomes. I disagree.
Yeah, "rural" America has had it tough -- that's basically true of every "western"[1] nation -- but here's what I personally don't understand[2]... How are they supporting someone who is the elite? I mean, he may not be part of the "intellectual elite" or "academic elite", but he's clearly part of the "economic elite"... and, as such, will continue to bolster his own (+cronies) position.
Much as it pains me to say it, I think what we're facing is a cognitive disconnect fueled by a (socio-)economic disparity in education/critical thinking. (A tiny bit of sort-of-reasoning to support this: The majority of people don't have reading skills above n'th grade... where n <= 8ish?)
EDIT: I should say for disclosure that I'm not USian, but I do fear what consequences this will have for the rest of the world. I can only hope that most sane leaders won't take his pronouncements seriously. Yesterday he tweeted in ALL CAPS, for $DEITY's sake.
[1] AFAICT it's just because China (and most of the rest of Asia) can afford to just "throw people at the problem" at very low cost. (No health/environment regaulations, the situation for workers is so dire, etc. etc.).
[2] I mean, I hope I don't understand. Maybe all information exchange has just been subverted permanently by just shouting "FAKE NEWS", but I really nope not. I sense that the situation in the US is almost that dire (wrt. red/blue team), but if this spreads it could be disastrous for civilization itself.
Trump's superb speaking, performing, and persuasion skills.
>Yesterday he tweeted in ALL CAPS, for $DEITY's sake.
I don't support Trump, but I think all caps was probably warranted for that. It was his first response to extremely serious allegations (that Russia had footage of him telling prostitutes to urinate on each other; his inner circle was clandestinely meeting with Russian intelligence operatives and diplomats; etc.).
EDIT:
> Trump's superb speaking, performing, and persuasion skills.
Is he genuinely persuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree or support his recently-found party? I watched a bit of the coverage of both sides in the debates and they were incredibly partisan in their perceptions of how each candidate had performed. I suspect that most voters just watched the summaries (which is sad, because they're stuck inside their bubble).
... then again, I'm a filthy Socialist Scandiwegian, so...
I'm not sure, honestly. But he's definitely very persuasive to that group, and also at least somewhat persuasive to many rural and lower class ex-Obama voters.
Also, content aside, he undeniably has a captivating speaking style and cadence.
Debates have never meant anything.
I sense echoes of Godwin here... but may that's what you were going for? ;)
His entire branding schtick (gold-plated everything, slapping his name on steaks, for God's sake??) is what a poor person imagines a rich person's life is like. He's aspirational, both in the low-quality but glitzy products he peddles, and in how he talks trash about educated people and technocrats. It's true that he's taken advantage of the system, like with outsourcing and all that, but he's in no way smart enough to have developed any of that. He's more of a remora than an actual treaty-crafting shark. So he gets a pass on the economic elitism.
The other part of it is that Hillary Clinton, imperfect as she might actually be (and it's nowhere near as bad as her detractors would claim, of course), has also endured a decades-long right-wing slur campaign against her. Literally as long as I've been alive the right has attacked Clinton for one thing or another, occasionally legit, usually not. Enough of a sustained attack just made her easy to hate in a way that, say, Elizabeth Warren just wouldn't be hated.
EDIT: I don't know if I just came up with this, or if it's something I heard: Essentially Trump won a popularity contest even though he wasn't the most popular. (Point being the Electoral College, obviously.)
In the end, it seems Peter Thiel was, as a good investor, much better at predicting the future than everyone else.
Thielf's owning Palantir only God knows what kind of real information of state of voters pre-election he was able to grasp.
Proven fake how? Bad at predicting the end result? Sure. Misinterpreted? In a lot of cases, yes. Stats and predictions are not intuitive and widely misunderstood, and I certainly think that news outlets should do a better job using and explaining them.
Using the 80% figure, that's a 1 in 5 chance of being wrong, which is what happened. This isn't to defend CNN by any stretch. I find the information density poor and not particularly subtle in its interpretation, and its website is annoying. But unless you have evidence of the numbers being made up out of whole cloth, throwing around "the polls were fake" is a gross misrepresentation. If you do have evidence that the numbers were made up, I'd love to see it.
By all means, take CNN off of your list of trusted news sources. But please don't use fake polls as a reason for it.
Almost all of the mainstream polls were about national popular vote, and predicted that Clinton would win it (she did) and within their margin of error (about 2 points lower than they predicted).
The problem is that they construed winning the national popular vote as winning the election, and while they're correlated, one doesn't entail the other.
So while their prediction about popular vote turned out to be correct, their misestimation was localized mostly in a few key regions, which narrowly flipped to Trump.
And thus we find ourselves in the case where CNN pollsters were right and CNN analysts were bad at explaining it (and made lots of untrue inferences).
Respect is an odd animal. It's an interesting trend that conservatives & libertarians will respect people who hold different opinions, but if a liberal meets someone who holds a differing opinion, they vilify them for it.
(second paragraph of link from article, direct link here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...)
Since when do we have to tolerate this kind of thing? Extremism in the defense of liberty never used to be a vice.
But government can also diminish our freedom. We get spied on. We can't do harmless recreational drugs. For a long time we couldn't have sex in certain ways or with certain people. We can't choose how our child's school money gets spent (it by default goes to public schools-- I'd prefer a voucher system.) There are thousands of stupid laws! We incarcerate people at the 2nd-highest rate! And since we're the 3rd most populous country, it means that our government is one of the biggest instruments of tyranny in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Oh, come on! Seriously? Is this the level of discourse we're reduced to?
(EDIT: Just as a counter-example, Senator McCain.)
So here's the problem in it's essence. 1. Person A strongly believes that a policy will help the nation/world 2. Person B disagrees with the policy. 3. Person A calls Person B repugnant for not wanting to help the world!
But we're lost something here. Person B doesn't hate the world, they don't want to burn it down. They have a different model of the world. So either they think that we have different priorities, they think that the policy uninformed and will have unintended side-effects.
Like, in the 1970s, when we had gas shortages? The US initiated price controls. Because they said: "hey, you shouldn't have to pay a lot of gas!". But I would've been against that. Do I want people to pay high prices for gas? No! But I think that the side-effects of price control (namely, that you're going to cause long lines, and possibly start a dangerous black market) is worse than having high gas prices. Futhermore, having high gas prices will incentivize prospecting, or it will incentivize oil companies to increase supply in other ways.
Unfortunately, we people have an unfortunate tendency to attribute disagreements to "we're just not like them" and agreements to "we're exactly like them". (Tribalism rules IOW, but just on the basis of having the same opinion rather than Geography.). Even if most of the people on the Internets don't literally hate the people who have opposing opinions, they'll usually say that they do (again, on the Internets), leading to further fueling of the emotions/hatred of the "other".