Inbox: - Thiel reading list: https://thememeticist.com/other/2020/07/28/thiel-online-writing-list.html - Re-read and import notes from my [Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15n7i1TfHRRFz9bpjpZHIWWntMnUSK6W8atYm3qeAgek/edit) - 1.3bn crypto profit https://www.ft.com/content/0a1d5597-7145-4035-987b-ff033bba3d75 --- ![[Pasted image 20250428211128.png]] --- Where to start: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xqcorq5EyJBpZcCrN/thiel-on-progress-and-stagnation https://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-thought-experiment https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ Asd https://youtu.be/i_yJTCDU4uE?si=RZMpuIAygGEs8gtG https://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-thought-experiment https://www.evernote.com/shard/s542/client/snv?noteGuid=46c636b6-b404-45df-ab0a-1f84c6fdc8c2&noteKey=7c94233539b8258d72b395a063f3c589&sn=https://www.evernote.com/shard/s542/sh/46c636b6-b404-45df-ab0a-1f84c6fdc8c2/7c94233539b8258d72b395a063f3c589&title=That+Essay https://thememeticist.com/other/2020/07/28/thiel-online-writing-list.html --- Thiel Joe Rogan Nuclear energy block wasn't accidents fears but the fact that US gave India nuclear energy stuff but then India found it easy to make bomb. Too hard to de couple energy capacity from bomb capacity so regulate out of existence. China fraction of nuclear energy is only 5% and hasn't changed in a decade. Apocalypse fear. Stagnation is response to apocalypse fear. Feature or bug? Voltaire: religion motivated by desire to gakn political control. Durkheim: political control motivated by religion. Thiel Oxford Union 16:00 Stagnation is justified by X risk worry Centre left zombie Zeitgeist. 24:40 Bostrom VWH Problem of hyperspecialisation is: no accountability, it's all become a crazed racket. Freech speech stuff is a big issue, but it also distracts us from the fact that perhaps we don't have much to say. 47:00 why did PT back trump ## The Optimistic Thought Experiment https://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-thought-experiment Those who busy themselves with the meaningless ideologies of politics, or with the interminable drama of human soap operas, or with the limitless accumulation of wealth, are losing sight of the impending catastrophe that may unfold towards the end of history. The entire human order could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence — famine, disease, war, and death. For the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for all those who consider themselves cosmopolitan today, this sort of hysterical talk about the end of the world was deemed to be the exclusive province of people who were either stupid or wicked or insane (although mostly just stupid). Scientific inculcation would replace religious indoctrination. Today, we no longer believe that Zeus will strike down errant humans with thunderbolts, and so we also can rest peacefully in the certain knowledge that there exists no god who will destroy the whole world. And yet, if the truth were to be told, our slumber is not as peaceful as it once was. Beginning with the Great War in 1914, and accelerating after 1945, there has re-emerged an apocalyptic dimension to the modern world. In a strange way, however, this apocalyptic dimension has arisen from the very place that was meant to liberate us from antediluvian fears. This time around, in the year 2008, the end of the world is predicted by scientists and technologists. For the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for all those who consider themselves cosmopolitan today, this sort of hysterical talk about the end of the world was deemed to be the exclusive province of people who were either stupid or wicked or insane (although mostly just stupid). Scientific inculcation would replace religious indoctrination. Today, we no longer believe that Zeus will strike down errant humans with thunderbolts, and so we also can rest peacefully in the certain knowledge that there exists no god who will destroy the whole world. And yet, if the truth were to be told, our slumber is not as peaceful as it once was. Beginning with the Great War in 1914, and accelerating after 1945, there has re-emerged an apocalyptic dimension to the modern world. In a strange way, however, this apocalyptic dimension has arisen from the very place that was meant to liberate us from antediluvian fears. This time around, in the year 2008, the end of the world is predicted by scientists and technologists. [...] Even if it is not yet possible for humans to destroy the whole world, on current trends it might just be a matter of time. The relentless proliferation of nuclear weapons remains the most obvious case in point. [...] On the surface, the world’s financial markets remain eerily complacent. For the most part, they remain firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, when the march of History and Progress were more optimistic and certain. Although it encounters perturbations and larger corrections, the climb of the Dow Jones continues on an inexorable north-easterly path. [...] More generally, apocalyptic thinking appears to have no place in the world of money. For if the doomsday predictions are fulfilled and the world does come to an end, then all the money in the world — even if it be in the form of gold coins or pieces of silver, stored in a locked chest in the most remote corner of the planet — would prove of no value, because there would be nothing left to buy or sell. Apocalyptic investors will miss great opportunities if there is no apocalypse, but ultimately they will end up with nothing when the apocalypse arrives. Heads or tails, they lose. In a narrow sense, it seems rational for investors to remain encamped at the altar of the efficient market — and just tend their own small gardens without wondering about the health of the world. A mutual fund manager might not benefit from reflecting about the danger of thermonuclear war, since in that future world there would be no mutual funds and no mutual fund managers left. Because it is not profitable to think about one ’s death, it is more useful to act as though one will live forever. [...] For macro investors, it would be an abdication not to wrestle with the central question of our age: How should the risk of a comprehensive collapse of the world economic and political system factor into one ’s decisions? [...] Any investor who ignores the apocalyptic dimension of the modern world also will underestimate the strangeness of a twenty-first century in which there is no secular apocalypse. If one does not think about forest fires, then one does not fully understand the teleology of each tree — and one badly will undervalue those trees that are immune to all but the greatest of fires. Even in our time of troubled confusion, there exists a chance that some things will work out immeasurably better than most believe possible. ## Socrates in the City interview https://socratesinthecity.com/listen/zero-to-one/ Universities are about as corrupt as the medievel Catholic church. ### On faith, reason and hyper-Christianity https://sun.pjh.is/peter-thiel-on-faith-reason-and-hyper-christianity 10 commandments: two most important are the first and last. The first: only worship God, look up to one true God. The last: you should not look around at your neighbour, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbour. When you do not have a transcendent religious belief you end up just looking around at other people. And I think that is the problem with our atheist liberal world, it is just the madness of crowds. It's not reason, it's not rational, it's just mass insanity. There's a contrast between evangelical Christian Bible study. The outward-facing thing is often that people are somehow more moral or better. And the inward-facing thing is that you're kind of sinful and there's a lot of stuff you need to fix. If you read the bible and you say I've figure it out and everything is perfect in my life you probably haven't quite gotten the message. Whatever the paradox and contradictions around that are, I think there's a strange contrast with the atheist rationalist group. Where the outward-facing thing is that you're more rational than people, and the inward-facing thing is that you're not capable of thought at all, that it's just spaghetti code. To use the Thomistic Medieval distinction: the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect, and the moderns believe in the power of the will but the weakness of the intellect. So I guess I think faith and reason are compatible and in fact when you get rid of faith you end up in a world where there's no reason either. And we're living in a much less rational world than we were living in 100 years ago. [...] Envy is the one mortal sin that is still completely taboo. All the others can be turned into a positive. Envy is the one we still don't talk about, and I suspect it's the one that is still pervasive and most destructive. [...] I always think there are two different kinds of arguments. One is a metaphysical argument: God doesn't exist, so the Bible's not true. The second: the Christians aren't Christian enough. And I think we have to think of what we're struggling against as kind of hyper-Christianity, something like that. It's sort of an extreme deformation of it. There are all sorts of forms that this takes. I think it's not that there's a shortage of morality it's that there is too much morality. I mean Greta [Thunberg] is so moral she wants to shoot everybody who is not as committed to climate change. If you think of medieval Christianity, the two most important attributes of Christ were that he was divine and than that he was poor. So anyone you saw who was poor might be Christ in disguise. But then in the 19th century you had people like Tolstoy or Marx who pushed this in a hyper-Christian direction, we had to do more than the Christians, we have to have a violent revolution, we're going to do more for the poor in this world, right away. And so I think the Christian alternative is to come back to see that we're in this context, that it's only if you realise you're in a context in which things are pretty screwed up that you have any chance of moving beyond it. The two vignettes I always give on this subject: in the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, Pontious Pilate is seen as a saint. The reason is that you can't expect more from a politican. It's not that if you had lived in the time of Christ you would have done better. Which was the cause of medieval anti-semetism, you know, we should go after the Jews because if we had lived at the time we would have done better. Or more modern liberals say they would have been more tolerant in the middle ages, whereas its the people who style themselves as being part of the resistance—that very fact often tells you that they would have just been collaborators. And the second vignette: the Catholic doctrine of substantiation is super humbling, where it's literally the body and the blood of Christ and you're stilll no better than a cannibal, and still the problems of human nature the problems of violence are this continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better is to realise that we are still this contiguous with the past. And when we think we've set that behind us, we've transcended it, we're much better, we're hyper-Christian, we're communist, we're the tolerant people who would have been super tolerant in the middle ages, that's when your simply worse. ## Runciman LrB interview State capture is where the money is. (???) Think of that as Thiel's speciality. (???) ## Thiel at Singularity Summit 2011 Finda it very weird more people aren't working on health and longevity. Guess that main reason is denial, normalisation of death. Recognises that this sounds "bat shit crazy" but thinks it's true. (Bostrom thinks the same.) Longevity: - lowest hanging fruit is nutrition. - Take responsibility for your own health. People often ask what policy do we need to get more innovation? I encourage people to ask: what can you do? Presumably this relates to definite / indefinite thing? --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yzQJF-UZ0M Thiel: Extreme ambition is just not considered cool in Europe. Not considered socially appropriate, you're always supposed to downplay that "Berlin is the city people move to in their 20s to retire." --- Thiel on the Bible People say that everything in the Bible was in the classics, but that's not right. The Gospels tells us that Peter ran away, like everybody. Even the person for whom the church was founded. And it tells us what Plato did, when Socrates died: he wasn't preaching philosophy he was somewhere running away and hiding at best. And the lie that philosophy tells us is that it's somehow strong enough to preserve the truth in this purely naturalistic rationalistic sort of way. Interviewer: Plato / Socrates claim to strip away mythology but really it's just creating a more intellectually respectable mythology. Thiel: Yes. The idea of a victim, the idea that victims exist: it comes from Judeau-Christianity and nowhere else. Interviewer: so Jesus through gospel stories creates this idea that victims can be innocent. Nietzsche understood better than anyone in 19th century how Christianity subverted ancient values. N would have said that Dionysus was lift affirming while Christ was life denying. Just before he went insane, N saw that Dionysus and the crucified were the same. Interviewer: ... they say well maybe this victim is innocent, maybe this is like that Jesus story. So the ability to create order by killing an outsider is weakened. Girard saw racism and communism in the 20th as attempts to increase the dosage: one scapegoat victim no longer works, but maybe millions will. Fascism wanted to go back to the past. Communism was more modern, hyper modern, almost ultra Christianity. Victimise the victimisers, scapegoat the scapegoaters. Even though on a philosophical level Marxism is materialist, atheistic philosophy, the sort of ethical moral valance is always something like: the Christians aren't Christian enough, we need to be more Christian than the Christians. The Curses against the Pharisees These people who were saying if they had lived in the time of the prophets they would have honored them. But somehow the fact they said that suggested the opposite was true. They thought they were better than other people so they were acting just like the people who were going to persecute the prophets. In claiming that they were better than the people who came before them, they were just going to repeat things in this cycle of violence. Interviewer: because they won't let the text read them. Thiel: exactly. We're in this strange intermediate zone where we're perhaps not insane enough to push the nuclear button and go all the way to limitless violence but we're not sane enough to embrace the gospel wholeheartedly and reject violence in all its forms. We don't know yet whether it's going to end in the apocalypse or the kingdom of god. Ai should be thought of as primarily a military technology that will be used to kill people on the other side. Me: c.f what is philosophy?