
My Dinner with Peter Thiel - djrobstep
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/nick-bilton-dinner-with-peter-thiel
======
mlyang
What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity
to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their
vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was
hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?

~~~
mathattack
I hate this style of lazy tech journalism where the interviewer inserts
themselves into the story. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson a lot better than
this writer.

~~~
GunboatDiplomat
That's because Hunter S. Thompson was interesting in and of himself.

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sixQuarks
The author says Peter Thiel is buddies with Elon Musk. From what I've read,
they're not really that close. They kind of had a falling out at Paypal if I'm
not mistaken.

~~~
pjscott
The article also said that "Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college
because it’s a waste of time" and then threw in a misquote of Ayn Rand for
good measure.

What all these things have in common is that they're false but truth-adjacent:
they sound similar enough to something true that the guy who wrote them can't
be fired for journalistic misconduct. It's a very common type of falsehood for
reporters looking to make reality fit the story.

~~~
internaut
> 'truth-adjacent'

I'll have to remember that one.

There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes
them especially prone to such semi-deliberate lies.

My hunch is that being overly socialized, hyper-socialized, causes people to
do this. Suppose you have to interact with a large number of people, at least
some of which could affect your future deleteriously. You can't plausibly
remember the specific details for each person to know what will or won't cause
offense, especially when you must also gauge people telling their friends
about something you said. As a rule people remember a negative feeling e.g. an
irritating remark much more so than a positive one e.g. caused by a
compliment.

The heuristic here is to gauge the general atmosphere in a room or discussion
and then play to the crowd. The act of this averaging results in satisficing*
which could also be described by this truth adjacent quality. I wouldn't even
be sure it's intentional. They probably don't even realize that in most
domains outside of social interaction this is maladaptive. There's an
expression to the effect of "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If you
reverse autism you don't get normality, you get people barely able to cognite
outside of the social realm.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing)

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moritzplassnig
Don't get the point why people who made their money from tech (like Thiel)
should be worse (regarding what they do with their money) than people who
didn't make their money from tech. It's imo. positive that they have strong
opinions and take actions vs. laying on the beach and drinking cocktails
(quoting the article).

~~~
mwfunk
Depends on the strong opinions held and the actions taken. For some
individuals, the world might be better off if they just sat on the beach and
enjoyed their wealth. With great power comes great responsibility, but if
someone doesn't care enough to agonize over the responsibility part then I
would prefer that they didn't exercise the power.

~~~
neffy
Oth. If the alternative to people who actually had to build something and make
it work is people who graduated from Harvard with journalist degrees....

...both groups will contain sociopaths, abut at least one of them will have
learnt to do something useful.

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100k
There's another story of a dinner with Thiel in George Packer's The Unwinding
([https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-
America/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-
America/dp/0374534608)). The vignettes about Thiel are a small but interesting
part of a great book.

------
nullptr888
tl;dr: People with power and money do their own thing.

~~~
api
People do their own thing.

If the author had gotten a big lavish dinner he'd use it to talk about the .1%
and how out of touch they are. Instead he got an eccentric geek circle with
probably a lot of boring SV inside baseball chatter and no food and uses it to
drag out the spectre of the rich weirdo.

We've survived two centuries of mega rich people with strange agendas and we
can survive this. Honestly this crowd is far, far less scary than the Ahmanson
family and other supporters of things like "theonomy." Google the "Chalcedon
foundation." Or Henry Ford and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, or
countless other examples. The SV crowd and their rather tame gentrified
version of transhumanism and Ayn Rand is fluffy bunny of light stuff compared
to those things.

Is Thiel actually a Trump supporter or is he just contractually bound to cast
a vote for him due to being a delegate?

I'm getting bored with the SV bashing genre. You can criticize SV for many
things, but SV did not cause the decline of the middle class. That trend was
firmly in place by the mid-late 70s and began a full 30 years before SV rose
as a power. It's largely due to outsourcing, the decline of unions, and the
siphoning of trillions out of the American economy to support our pointless
waffling quasi-empire. Blame Nixon.

