internaut

> I think we live in an era of incredible promise, which, yes, has probably been said of every era that predates this one, and will be said of every era that follows it. Our particular era of promise is one rapidly being transformed by technological change: We are more connected than ever and have access to evermore sums of information; we work more consistently and yet enjoy greater and greater flexibility in how and where we earn a living; we indulge in more idle time while deliveries of groceries and new running shoes arrive at our doorsteps; soon, all our Ubers will even drive themselves.

Right off the bat you have a chronocentric perspective. Our progress is not universal, it just appears that way to us Westeners because we're marinated in it. Actually it is specific in both time and space.

Even within our countries there are huge portions of the population, especially outside the cities, for whom there has been little progress for considerable time. There has been regression. That's a large part of why Trump got elected. Have you a single article on any of this?

Furthermore you Katie, are not a skeptic of Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, whom you abhor and call names in this article, is. So is Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier.

> At Gizmodo, the answer is this: We approach technology with both enthusiasm and scrutiny, covering the Silicon Valley elite with the skepticism and rigor that their billions of dollars and vast influence deserve.

You don't attack Silicon Valley, you just attack the personalities within it. It's like thinking the point of Christmas is fairy lights. If only we could arrange them properly with the right lighting configuration Christmas would be improved. No!

SV does need skeptics from the left and the right. It does not need a constant stream of whining about who is dicking who and how many women Elon Musk follows on Twitter. I checked your website. You don't have a single article on Gwynne Shotwell, who not only has an awesome name for a rocket company president but is running the show at one of the most important technology companies on (and off) the planet.

Torba, if you're reading this, consider that Curtis Yarvin's Tlon receives angel investment from well known SV VCs and he also posts here regularly.

So the guy who literally invented neoreaction isn't suppressed by YC because of his views then it is pretty unlikely you're getting persecuted because of yours.

Nick Denton constantly overreached in using freedom of speech as a cover for just simply fucking with people until it blew up in his face. Don't be the alt-right's version of that. You can afford to be magnanimous and give some gesture of conciliation.

Do you really want to be giving Pao material to work with?

Fighting censorship is serious business, forget this teacup war, nobody will remember any of it in a year.

> will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can.

This is the statement that upon rereading his email, troubles me the most.

The rest of it with the Principal of Charity could be taken more favourably.

In the context he can only mean shielding 'his community' from Trump supporters. What other 'movement' could he be talking about?

So it follows that his community does not contain Trump supporters. That's the presumption.

I started to defend him in an earlier thread, but now I wished I had not after I parsed that line properly.

I'm ashamed to see a fellow Irishman being so blockheaded.

I believe you can aid people in dismissing irrational discrimination. If it is based on a logical error than it can be corrected.

Something that is true has a way of needling away at people's brains until it gets in.

Discrimination is a very deep brain function. It is the ability to discern patterns.

Sometimes this system results in false positives, such as when you jump at shadows at night or get spooked because you imagine somebody to be in a room when they're not.

But most of the time it works. That is why it evolved. It had enormous survival value despite some of the drawbacks.

Thinking otherwise is magical thinking. Turning discrimination into an original sin is in of itself a path towards discrimination.

In truth nobody has 'the benchmark' for reality. Nobody is consistently right all the time.

Take CFAR - the Center For Applied Rationality.

They found a very interesting result when they studied people's opinions. They found that when people were polled on a large variety of different questions, that when their confidence level was 100%, that they were only right 66% of the time. I repeat, that was for their highest confidence level.

CFAR has a program where they study rationality and have come up with a list of ways to improve our own rationality by using clever heuristics.

http://rationality.org/checklist/

Here is an excerpt:

"Reacting to evidence / surprises / arguments you haven’t heard before; flagging beliefs for examination.

When I see something odd – something that doesn’t fit with what I’d ordinarily expect, given my other beliefs – I successfully notice, promote it to conscious attention and think “I notice that I am confused” or some equivalent thereof. (Example: You think that your flight is scheduled to depart on Thursday. On Tuesday, you get an email from Travelocity advising you to prepare for your flight “tomorrow”, which seems wrong. Do you successfully raise this anomaly to the level of conscious attention? (Based on the experience of an actual LWer who failed to notice confusion at this point and missed their plane flight.))

When somebody says something that isn’t quite clear enough for me to visualize, I notice this and ask for examples. (Recent example from Eliezer: A mathematics student said they were studying “stacks”. I asked for an example of a stack. They said that the integers could form a stack. I asked for an example of something that was not a stack.) (Recent example from Anna: Cat said that her boyfriend was very competitive. I asked her for an example of “very competitive.” She said that when he’s driving and the person next to him revs their engine, he must be the one to leave the intersection first—and when he’s the passenger he gets mad at the driver when they don’t react similarly.)

I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)

I notice my mind flinching away from a thought; and when I notice, I flag that area as requiring more deliberate exploration. (Recent example from Anna: I have a failure mode where, when I feel socially uncomfortable, I try to make others feel mistaken so that I will feel less vulnerable. Pulling this thought into words required repeated conscious effort, as my mind kept wanting to just drop the subject.)

I consciously attempt to welcome bad news, or at least not push it away. (Recent example from Eliezer: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn’t really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the “bad news is good news” pattern to rephrase this as, “This point doesn’t change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year.”) "

This and not a rote education, is what we need. There is an infinite number of lies, you can't fight them all one at a time. CFAR is a great organization, I'd go to their meet-ups in a shot if I could afford to. These are the true crusaders for looking at the world scientifically.

I think Alex Karp, much like Thiel's friend Sam Altman, is very much his own man. If they were automatons they wouldn't be in the position they're in.

99% of Silicon Valley disagrees with Thiel, the simplest explanation is that Karp is from that group also.

The alternative explanation appears to be Karp and Thiel conspired to make Trump US President in 2012.

I mean wow. Just wow.

I'll be the first to admit that there may be holes in my arguments. I hazard perhaps it just hard to articulate for ordinary mortals such as I but there is a thread running through out I feel passionately about. That is why I recommend Wolfe. He manages elegantly illustrate concepts that remain mere fizzing and bubbling of ideas in my brain. He is the master artisan, so go to him rather than me.

I am convinced Thiel has seen a glimpse of something really important in the big picture. Events are in motion, as we can see from recent events, formerly influential stories we tell ourselves about the world appear to be flying apart.

Please tell me what your experience was when you finish your first Labour! (My email is in my profile.) :-)

Here are the specific recordings I meant, there's a few alternatives drifting about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjz9m1TkQ_A

They themselves are remarkable, they took electromagnetic sensor data from Voyager 1 and 2’s trip past Jupiter and Saturn and then converted the radio waves into sound accessible to ears.

There is a little bit of similarity, but to be honest the complexity is completely different.

Gene Wolfe is several orders of complexity higher than the Foundation series. Its threads are tied together in ways that will blow your mind. You need to be totally, totally awake to understand what you are reading. You don't get 'clues'. You get one chance to grasp something Wolfe is telling you. It is extremely rewarding as well as intellectual.

I cannot count the number of times I had a "holy fuck" moment, Wolfe is unbelievably smart.

You know how people on Reddit and 4chan look for 'mindfuck' movies.

This book, The Book of the New Sun, is on another level. My mind changed its frame of reference about a dozen times reading it. Normally a good author manages to accomplish that once.

There is basically no way I can ruin this book for you by hyping your expectations. It is just that good.

Also; I must beg a favour so I can return one to you. You must read the book (there's two volumes of 4 books total) while listening to a piece of 'music'. The Voyager Recordings.

This is not actually music. It is what the sensors picked up on the spacecraft as they pointed their arrays at the different planets.

If you listen to this while you read the book, it'll make it much more immersive.

I know this sounds dumb as hell, but it is hard to explain. Just do it, you'll thank me later.

P.S. Your initials won't happen to be N.D would they? Foundation is his favorite book also. If so I won't hold it against you, I'm not that kind of guy, but do read and listen. It is rewarding, and important, I think. I know I somehow changed after doing this, it was as if the world had deeper textures and certain things just clicked or something. Maybe I'm a strange person on the internet, but it is worth taking a risk to find out.

> Do you really think a politician appealing to an imagined past is somehow unique or novel or goes unrecognized by the press? "Make X Great Again" is the oldest political slogan, ever.

Can you restate this. I cannot parse all of what you're saying.

I think I have the gist of it so I'll make this comment:

Thiel is very consistent. He is not insane.

I have been watching the guy talk, reading his essays for a decade. I don't know him personally, but I do know his ideas. They stay the same. It is a coherant worldview that does explain his actions in a concrete way.

"Opportunist" is not a good characterization of Thiel.

An opportunist is somebody who can go back and forth, a weathervane. Thiel has very concrete, fixed ideas of what is going on. He does not think reality is subjective. Just objective with many complex interwoven layers.

In other words, his actions are not random. They are guided by a central narrative. That is what my essay is trying to explain. It is extremely difficult because most people simply do not really grasp what he is saying, the concepts just slide out of their brains because their frame of reference is utterly orthogonal to Thiel's one.

Not this again. This just so wrong.

Palantir worked for the Clinton Foundation.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/45010

For at least several years and definitely before Trump was on the map politically.

The Podesta Emails literally have Alex Karp, the CEO, paying 100k to talk to Bill Clinton.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/05/02/3A142FF40000057...

"Everybody Knows" is one of my favorite songs, just on grounds of its lyrical quality alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg

Some replies. I'll put it on one so my post count isn't so high.

> >Interesting read. > >Could be more interesting with a bottle of scotch. :)

But Sir! I expected my readership would be already adequately provisioned! ;-)

>> "Trump is Sauron!" > >Seriously?

I was referring to the perspective of Californians. My often mocked but secretly loved blue rascals.

> This is extremely condescending. Just because you might not understand science doesn't mean there are no scientists anymore. Science works slow, what do you mean how little they achieve? Maternal mortality is at an all time low, we nearly have a cure for AIDS, life expectancy has dramatically increased, Cas9 offers new therapeutic hope for millions.

Resist attacks on my person. Direct those to my ideas if you must. If you want credentials, I've been to an elite university. Have studied science there, made the Dean's List, even won international recognition as a student. More importantly I do really care about science in a more generalist way. I am pro-science. Not anti-science. Let us be super straight on that.

I am talking about the impact of science through technology. I am saying it is unimpressive when contrasted with past accomplishments in the previous years.

Even on a purely scientific basis output has declined though.

The 'science industrial complex' is huge and produces relatively little of value. Understand this is in relation to former times. In 1900 we had 1000 physicists on the planet. We had a lot of good work done. 100 years later, we have 1,000,000 physicists on the planet and comparatively little to show for it. Do we have 1000 times more advances in physics since that time? Of course not. There have been diminishing returns. That is normal in any field, but the lack of progress generally (we should see a flowering of different disciplines if things were going well) is not.

The discovery of DNA is a great scientific leap forward. It not a technology. It could be turned into technology with advances in biotech. Presently it has benefited almost nobody on the planet.

Please pause and think about it. The PR is utterly out of control in relation to the actual physical effects.

That is not heresy. It is a fact.

I know it is a fact because the FDA could only be making legal about 16 new biotech drugs per year. Those are the kind of numbers we're talking about. This is not world shaking stuff.

Even though I think there are problems with the FDA, I am not blaming them for this. This is a much deeper problem that has largely gone unacknowledged. The 'Science' -> 'Technology' -> 'Mass production' algorithm isn't scaling the way it used to. We need to talk about that, but first we must recognize the problem is real.

> "If the advances were occurring in the factories we should be seeing more refined low cost goods on a massive scale." Do you know how cheap goods are these days? So cheap that American fisherman catch tuna, ship it to china to be processed ad canned and ship it back to US markets.

I credit you that shipping containers are a great engineering solution. Fish including tuna is still expensive. Demand is high in the developing world. Many seafood items that were categorized as waste by our ancestors are now prized foodstuffs, such as lobster. That process now appears to be accelerating.

In fact this is a perfect example. Fish has been getting more expensive for a while now and with present trends there shall be no more Fish in the ocean in few decades.

Aquaculture is evolving into place, but the prices of fishes mean it shall become an elite foodstuff. Used to be that salmon was something the poor ate.

This is the kind of problem technology is supposed to solve for. We were supposed to be creating vats with quality meat in them. The end of farmed animals. That has been science fiction for 50 years and still is.

As you may be aware, there is not enough land on earth to feed the cattle that would be required for each Indian and Chinese person to have a meat diet equal to that of the average American.

Thusly, we have a technological problem on our hands. One that we have been told would be solved 'in ten years' for 50 years.

In fact this is something of a theme. If you read old magazine e.g. Readers Digest and articles from journalists, all the stories sound very familiar. A lot has been promised. Not much has happened in reality.

Mostly true, I doubt Matt would fire somebody just for being right wing but there is such a rash of violent attacks (I've already seen a dozen videos of Trump supporters being beaten up) and rioting that it would be easy for a right winger to take it the wrong way.

Don't scapegoat Matt, blame the people going around beating up Trump supporters right now. That is not productive!

I wrote this essay (from my HN comments) about Peter Thiel before Trump got into power.

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de....

And here is the original comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

Here is a teaser:

"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.

If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.

This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."

This is typical journalist stuff. Sound and fury.

They don't understand Thiel because they simply have not been listening. I don't think they can wrap their heads around his ideas. They have no desire to get outside of their usual frame of reference.

I wrote this essay (from my HN comments) about Peter Thiel before Trump got into power.

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

And here is the original comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

Here is a teaser:

"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.

If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.

This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."

> Reducing the average level of experience in the particular legislative institution, and in legislative affairs generally, of the first group increase the relative advantage in systematic knowledge and effectiveness of the latter two groups compared to the first.

That's a good point. How would you solve for X here?

> Term limits aren't sortition (it's not random, and political parties and the donor class are actively involved in choosing who stands for seats and how much support they have, so, the effects you point to in sortition of breaking up factionsome and reducing corruption simply aren't present.)

I was thinking broadly of the system being more or less organized and how in some way incompetence may be less truly dangerous than a bad actor abusing the system.

How about we simply put restrictions on politicians and their interaction with mass media? This many minutes on television, paid for by the State so you don't have to scrounge around for cash? That is just a half-baked example, I take it you understand what I mean by it.

Corruption is a problem in every country but I don't think lobbying and donors exert such an influence in my country Ireland (could be naive here!).

> in any case, the level of complexity of a modern nation of 300+ million people different considerably from that of ancient Athens.

Ha! True. We need a new OS, that is for sure. That is why Patri Friedman (seasteading) has so many of my sympathies.

It's not flight, but a Chinese designer, Chen Jianjun, came up with this for trains:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh5W_-_WFvc

I think the answer you seek is in front of you. Look at it this way hiou.

There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.

The real answer is that people's brains work differently.

If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.

I see you deleted your initial response (I have cached replies that enables me to see posts that were deleted), which is fine, but I wanted to respond to three of your queries. To respect your deletion I won't quote from it.

1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.

2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.

3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)

Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.

> What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.

Very true unfortunately. That's not all of HN of course. Many of us supported Thiel and his ideas, or else thought it was worth having an opposing voice around even if they disagreed with it.

I wrote an essay on Peter Thiel's ideas and (partly about) how the Media misunderstood him here:

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

It was composed from a chain of HN comments before the election went to Trump, so I can credibly state that I saw a media malfunction with reality on the cards.

I was watching his press conference from a few days ago at the National Press Club event, and I really did Laugh Out Loud when he said (paraphrasing), "You know, this is pretty much the first time I'm not making a contrarian stance, I mean literally how can I be a contrarian when half the population agree with me, and for this I get the flak? Unbelievable!".

Together with the investment in Seasteading, this has been incredibly high impact for comparatively minor sums of money. Thiel has managed managed to make himself the only venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who appeals to the majority of the working class. That is power. He'll be reaping dividends from that for the rest of his life.

This is because many serious inventions and innovations were created by the working class, not the middle class as they appear to think today. In fact historically (and I would argue currently too) the middle classes and elites looked down on entrepreneurship. Entreprenurship is seen as being unprofessional. Most engineering was created by working class with the aristocrats holding up the exploration of science. The water mills, the steam engines, these were not created by the kind of people who studied at universities. We no longer understand our own past.

This may sound like an attempt at provocation, but I swear it is not. I really do think many of the best innovators and inventors have a working class way of looking at the world.

Let us take something that isn't directly in Silicon Valley's ballpark. Tiny Houses.

All the non-cosmetic innovations I've seen in Tiny Houses have been created by working class people.

The majority of Tiny Houses are created by young aspirational middle class or those who want to retire without worrying. It is especially gratifying to see many young women picking up the hammer to forge something for themselves. I saw one who built a VOC-free house recently and that is impressive if you know anything about building.

Despite this, the only major differences between most builds are cosmetic. People really are afraid of being different despite being adventurous enough to live differently to most. There is a finite amount of adventurousness people have and it is easily exhausted.

The names in italics are Youtube channels if you wanted to inspect what I'm talking about.

Esket Tiny House is built by a carpenter, and he has built a magnificent curved roof when everybody else went with a standard gable roof. If you're perceptive you'll notice that a Tiny House only has 13 ft 6 inches to play with. So logically changing the roof shape would hugely improve the living space in the loft area. Yet they choose not to change it.

Tiny House Customs is another working class Joe (framer). He has cleverly hidden the trailer's wheels and tow bars so it doesn't even appear to be a potentially mobile structure.

Life in a Box (electrician) has introduced the concept of a rain screen, despite being in Arizona! Everybody's builds (in the more rainy regions) are going to have the siding rot off in five years! This is smart.

The Not So Tiny House (power plant operator but definitely working class) has very cleverly hidden his trailer using a faux rock skirt. It now just looks like a regular house on a foundation. It is a rather brilliant solution.

The reason why I mention these is because there are very few working class people building Tiny Houses. I think that is a shame. However the thing to notice here, is that when they do build, they build them very differently to the cookie-cutter approach most middle class people do.

In retrospect, all their innovations are extremely obvious. That is quite curious.

I think this says something pretty profound. There is something about being middle class that could damage your ability to integrate innovations into real life. I realize this is anecdotal but in retrospect I have the feeling I see this pattern everywhere in life.

One explanation could be that: once your comfort increases, your comfort 'zone' decreases. I think this could be a powerful explanation for why so few Silicon Valley companies are truly inventive despite being a Mecca for all kinds of talent and enterprise.

As Peter Thiel points out: all kinds of clever young minds go to Harvard, and despite that they keep electing to join industries just as bubbles are bursting. That is not an accident, it is culture.

tldr; When you think of diversity, maybe think of the working class also. Maybe they have something to add nobody else does.

The BBC, CNN and similar. Especially on Islam.

It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.

Let's take the case of Islam.

The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.

Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.

So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?

This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.

With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.

If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:

Which is the more likely?

That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.

Can you provide a supporting line of reasoning?

I think corruption is like a weed. It grows when you become acclimatized to your environment and start to exploit it.

Term limits get us closer to a part-sortition. From the wiki:

Author James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Additionally, from time to time, some in the Council would improperly make small quantities of money from their civic positions. However, "systematic oppression and organized fraud were impossible". These Greeks recognized that sortition broke up factions, diluted power, and gave positions to such a large number of disparate people that they would all keep an eye on each other making collusion fairly rare.

> when we find a good legislator I think we should be allowed to keep them.

It's a fair point. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the 'term limits' mean, whether they are similar to presidential term limits (my original assumption) or not.

The question I find myself wondering is:

Is the range of possible upside equivalent to the range of possible downside?

My intuition is that there's a limited amount marginal improvements except in special cases but the potential downside goes from bad to worse to flat out catastrophic.

Maybe it is like how most programmers can improve a code base, but a single bad actor could fuck it to hell and back with greater ease.

I'm looking at you Dianne Feinstein. Evil bat-witch.

Interesting to note here that Alex Karp offered to help Hillary.

Repost.

Having watched and listened to Thiel for several years now, I came up with a pet hypothesis I call 'The Wolfian World' that I feel describes what's going on more accurately than the newspapers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

> FIRST propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.

If he does this alone, then he's made a huge impact.

I'm really concerned he might be assassinated.

My email is in my profile if you or anybody else wanted to talk about BOTNS and why there's a deep connection between Peter Thiel's ideas and those of Gene Wolfe.

I don't think it is a coincidence that Wolfe was an engineer during the same period that Thiel has been scrutinizing. There are many intriguing connections. The energy crisis in oil, the rejection of nuclear energy (the New Sun). I fancy I see allegory. Maybe I'm mad but I am fascinated by both sets of ideas and cannot help seeing a wonderful marriage. ;-)

> What convinced you to make these predictions?

I think this because I believe a great deal of what we call society is cyclical. We're at a point where I think many old ideas are about to be revived.

Talking explicitly about the last prediction will probably get me a hellban but my email is in my profile if you wanted me to elaborate.

> And how far ahead of these events did you predict them?

This is rough, I didn't keep a notebook for them. To do it properly like Scott Alexander I'd have to state a probability and some limit so a failed prediction couldn't be weaseled into a 'prophesy'. To the best of my memory it is this:

In the case of Brexit, at least six months, maybe a year. In the case of Trump, close to half a year. In the case of the same sex marriage, as soon as I heard it proposed, I don't remember when that was. And the civil conflict prediction is about 1-2 years old. Those are highly random difficult to predict events. I think I would have put it into a 'Five Year Plan', and 2016 would be Year 3, so that's 2 years 2 months to go. I increased my confidence when I found out the CIA had the same prognosis on civil conflict in Europe for the same time period.

Here you go.

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

If you mean Gene Wolfe's masterwork, then yes, there are interpretations/commentary available online.

If you meant the 'Wolfian World', I came up with that 2 days ago, so no.

I did clean up the essay, added some material, made it a bit more accessible to non-HN readers and put it here:

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY

The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.

I called both Brexit and Trump but I can't quite agree with your synopsis. You might be surprised to hear that from a quasi-neoreactionary. I see migration and globalization as important elements of a more disturbing pattern not many people seem to have picked up on.

I don't know that Trump understands this himself, but Thiel sure does.

Having been a fan of Thiel's ideas for some time, I concocted a hypothesis called the 'Wolfian World' that gives a high level look at older currents moving in the world. It is here if anybody's interested in something different from chronocentric newspapers and talking heads with their short sight and overconfidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413