He opposes totalitarianism, and yet by his actions Palantir is reasonably the most authoritarian, pro-surveillance company in the West? He is skeptical of institutions and governments, yet funded and propped up the sitting Vice President? Give me a break, please.
I worry that trying to find coherence in Thiel is lending way too much credence to a guy who is essentially just confabulating as he goes (but this is one of the best efforts to do so that I’ve seen!). His true philosophy is what he does, not what he says.
If EAs decide to oppose Thiel, I think it would be mistaken to try to reason with his followers as if they are plain ideologues; we should focus on breaking his power bases by withstanding his authoritarian impulses and building popular alternatives.
Fwiw my (admittedly vibes-based) sense is that Palantir was a deliberate push to fill the niche of ‘surveillance company’ in a way that had guardrails and civil liberties protected.
I think it’s important to note that Thiel’s worldview is pretty bleak—he literally describes his goal as steering us towards a mythical Greek monster! He just thinks that the alternatives are even worse.
In EA lingo, I would say he has complex cluelessness: he sees very strong reasons for both doing a thing and doing the opposite of that thing.
I expect that there are Straussian readings of him that I am not understanding but for the most part he seems to just sincerely have very unusual views. E.g. I think Trump/Vance have done more than most presidents to dismantle the global order (e.g. through tariffs), and it doesn’t seem surprising to me that Thiel supports them (even though I suspect he dislikes many other things they do).
wrote this elsewhere but while I agree that he sincerely has unusual views, I question the strength and commitment he has to these views. I asked 03 to aggregate his total donations and it looks like he has given about 80m away, with almost half to republican politicians (i’m guessing this is wrong but couldn’t find anything better).
For someone with probably >10b net worth this seems like a weak signal to me that he doesn’t really care about anything.
Agreed that it is weird that a guy who seems to care so much about influencing world events (politics, technology, etc) has given away such a small percentage of his fortune as philanthropic + political donations.
But I would note that since Thiel’s interests are less altruistic and more tech-focused, a bigger part of his influencing-the-world portfolio can happen via investing in the kinds of companies and technologies he wants to create, or simply paying them for services. Some prominent examples of this strategy are founding Paypal (which was originally going to try and be a kind of libertarian proto-crypto alternate currency, before they realized that wasn’t possible), founding Palantir (allegedly to help defend western values against both terrorism and civil-rights infringement) and funding Anduril (presumably to help defend western values against a rising China). A funnier example is his misadventures trying to consume the blood of the youth in a dark gamble for escape from death, via blood transfusions from a company called Ambrosia. Thiel probably never needed to “donate” to any of these companies.
(But even then, yeah, it does seem a little too miserly...)
But I would note that since Thiel’s interests are less altruistic and more tech-focused, a bigger part of his influencing-the-world portfolio can happen via investing in the kinds of companies and technologies he wants to create, or simply paying them for services.
agreed.
Some prominent examples of this strategy are founding Paypal (which was originally going to try and be a kind of libertarian proto-crypto alternate currency, before they realized that wasn’t possible), founding Palantir (allegedly to help defend western values against both terrorism and civil-rights infringement) and funding Anduril (presumably to help defend western values against a rising China).
but it’s hard to say if he did this because he was actually value aligned or because he thought these things would be good investments. Uncharitably, he might be verbally in agreement with the philosophy described here but it could be the case that he is either lying or cognitively biased to believe in the ideas he also thinks are good investments.
His two biggest donations to date seem to be 13m to vance and 15m to masters. If you take seriously either of these donations, they directly contradict your claim that he is worried about stable totalitarianism and certainly personal liberty ( I am a biased center left dem though) . I don’t take these seriously though, my read is that these are investments in political puppets.
it could be the case that he is either lying or cognitively biased to believe in the ideas he also thinks are good investments
Yeah. Thiel is often, like, so many layers deep into metaphor and irony in his analysis, that it’s hard to believe he keeps everything straight inside his head. Some of his investments have a pretty plausible story about how they’re value-aligned, but notably his most famous and most lucrative investment (he was the first outside investor in Facebook, and credits Girardian ideas for helping him see the potential value) seems ethically disastrous! And not just from the commonly-held liberal-ish perspective that social media is bad for people’s mental health and/or seems partly responsible for today’s unruly populist politics. From a Girardian perspective it seems even worse!! Facebook/instagram/twitter/etc are literally the embodiment of mimetic desire, hugely accelerating the pace and intensity of the scapegoat process (cancel culture, wokeness, etc—the very things Thiel despises!) and hastening a catastrophic Girardian war of all against all as people become too similar in their desires and patterns of thinking (the kind of groupthink that is such anathema to him!).
Palantir also seems like a dicey, high-stakes situation where its ultimate impact could be strongly positive or strongly negative, very hard to figure out which.
If you take seriously either of these donations, they directly contradict your claim that he is worried about stable totalitarianism and certainly personal liberty
I would say it seems like there are three potential benefits that Thiel might see for his support for Blake / Masters:
Grim neoreactionary visions of steering the future of the country by doing unlawful, potentially coup-like stuff at some point in the future. (I think this is a terrible idea.)
A kind of vague, vibes-based sense that we need to support conservatives in order to shake up the stagnant liberal establishment and “change the conversation” and shift the culture. (I think this is a dumb idea that has backfired so far.)
The normal concept of trying to support people who agree with you on various policies, in the hopes they pass those policies—maybe now, or maybe only after 2028 on the off chance that Vance becomes president later. (I don’t know much about the details here, but at least this plan isn’t totally insane?)
Neoreaction: In this comment I try to map out the convoluted logic by which how Thiel might be reconciling his libertarian beliefs like “I am worried about totalitarianism” with neoreactionary ideas like “maybe I should help overthrow the American government”. (Spoilers: I really don’t think his logic adds up; any kind of attempt at a neoreactionary power-grab strikes me as extremely bad in expectation.) I truly do think this is at least some part of Thiel’s motivation here. But I don’t think that his support for Vance (or Blake Masters) was entirely or mostly motivated by neoreaction. There are obviously a lot of reasons to try and get one of your buddies to become senators! If EA had any shot at getting one of “our guys” to be the next Dem vice president, I’m sure we’d be trying hard to do that!
“Shifting the conversation”: In general, I think Thiel’s support for Trump in 2016 was a dumb idea that backfired and made the world worse (and not just by Dem lights—Thiel himself now seems to regret his involvement). He sometimes seems so angry at the stagnation created by the dominant liberal international order, that he assumes if we just shake things up enough, people will wake up and the national conversation will suddenly shift away from culture-war distractions to more important issues. But IMO this hasn’t happened at all. (Sure, Dems are maybe pivoting to “abundance” away from wokeness, which is awesome. But meanwhile, the entire Republican party has forgotten about “fiscal responsibility”, etc, and fallen into a protectionist / culture-war vortex. And most of all, the way Trump’s antics constantly saturate the news media seems like the exact opposite of a healthy national pivot towards sanity.) Nevertheless, maybe Thiel hasn’t learned his lesson here, so a misguided desire to generally oppose Dems even at the cost of supporting Trump probably forms some continuing part of his motivation.
Just trying to actually get desired policies (potentially after 2028): I’d be able to say more about this if I knew more about Vance and Masters’ politics. But I’m not actually an obsessive follower of JD Vance Thought (in part because he just seems to lie all the time) like I am with Thiel. But, idk, some thoughts on this, which seems like it probably makes up the bulk of the motivation:
Vance does seems to just lie all the time, misdirecting people and distracting from one issue by bringing up another in a totally scope-insensitive way. (Albeit this lying takes a kind of highbrow, intellectual, right-wing-substacker form, rather than Trump’s stream-of-consciousness narcissistic confabulation style.) He’ll say stuff like “nothing in this budget matters at all, don’t worry about the deficit or the benefit cuts or etc—everything will be swamped by the importance of [some tiny amount of increased border enforcement funding]”.
The guy literally wrote a whole book about all the ways Trump is dumb and bad, and now has to constantly live a lie to flatter Trump’s whims, and is apparently pulling that trick off successfully! This makes me feel like “hmm, this guy is the sort of smart machiavellian type dude who might have totally different actual politics than what he externally espouses”. So, who knows, maybe he is secretly 100% on board with all of Thiel’s transhumanist libertarian stuff, in which case Thiel’s support would be easily explained!
Sometimes (like deficit vs border funding, or his anti-Trump book vs his current stance) it’s obvious that he’s knowingly lying. But other times he seems genuinely confused and scope-insensitive. Like, maybe one week he’s all on about how falling fertility rates is a huge crisis and #1 priority. Then another week he’s crashing the Paris AI summit and explaining how America is ditching safetyism and going full-steam ahead since AI is the #1 priority. (Oh yeah, but also he claims to have read AI 2027 and to be worried about many of the risks...) Then it’s back to cheerleading for deportations and border control, since somehow stopping immigrants is the #1 priority. (He at least knows it’s Trump’s #1 best polling issue...) Sometimes all this jumping-around seems to happen within a single interview conversation, in a way that makes me think “okay, maybe this guy is not so coherent”.
All the lying makes it hard to tell where Vance really stands on various issues. He seems like he was pushing to be less involved in fighting against Houthis and Iran? (Although lost those internal debates.) Does he actually care about immigration, or is that fake? What does he really think about tarriffs and various budget battles?
Potential Thiel-flavored wins coming out of the white house:
Zvi says that “America’s AI Action Plan is Pretty Good”; whose doing is that? Not Trump. Probably not Elon. If this was in part due to Vance, then this is probably the biggest Vance-related payoff Thiel has gotten so far.
The long-threatened semiconductor tariff might be much weaker than expected; probably this was the work of Nvidia lobbyists or something, but again, maybe Vance had a finger on the scale here?
Congress has also gotten really pro-nuclear-power really quickly, although again this is probably at the behest of AI-industry lobbyists, not Vance.
But it might especially help to have a cheerleader in the executive branch when you are trying to overhaul the government with AI technology, eg via big new Palantir contracts or providing chatGPT to federal workers.
Thiel seems to be a fan of cryptocurrency; the republicans have done a lot of pro-crypto stuff, although maybe they would have done all this anyways without Vance.
Hard to tell where Thiel stands on geopolitical issues, but I would guess he’s in the camp of people who are like “ditch russia/ukraine and ignore iran/israel, but be aggressive on containing china”. Vance seems to be a dove on Iran and the Houthis, and his perrenial europe-bashing is presumably seen as helpful as regards Russia, trying to convince europe that they can’t always rely on the USA to back them up, and therefore need to handle Russia themselves.
Tragically, RFK is in charge of all the health agencies and is doing a bunch of terrible, stupid stuff. But Marty Makary at the FDA and Jim O’Neill at the HHS are Thiel allies and have been scurrying around amidst the RFK wreckage, doing all kinds of cool stuff—trying to expedite pharma manufacturing build-outs, building AI tools to accelerate FDA approval processes, launching a big new ARPA-H research program for developing neural interfaces, et cetera. This doesn’t have anything to do with Vance, but definitely represents return-on-investment for Thiel’s broader influence strategy. (One of the few arguable bright spots for the tech right, alongside AI policy, since Elon’s DOGE effort has been such a disaster, NASA lost an actually-very-promising Elon-aligned administrator, Trump generally has been a mess, etc.)
Bracketing the ill effects of generally continuing to support Trump (which are maybe kind of a sunk cost for Thiel at this point), the above wins seem easily worth the $30m or so spent on Vance and Masters’ various campaigns.
And then of course there’s always the chance he becomes president in 2028, or otherwise influences the future of a hopefully-post-Trump republican party, and therefore gets a freer hand to implement whatever his actual politics are.
I’m not sure how the current wins (some of them, like crypto deregulation or abandoning Ukraine or crashing the Paris AI summit, are only wins from Thiel’s perspective, not mine) weighs up against bad things Vance has done (in the sense of bad-above-replacement of the other vice-presidential contenders like Marco Rubio) -- compared to more normal republicans, Vance seems potentially more willing to flatter Trump’s idiocy on stuff like tariffs, or trying to annex Greenland, or riling people up with populist anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I am a biased center left dem though
I am a centrist dem too, if you can believe it! I’m a big fan of Slow Boring, and in recent months I have also really enjoyed watching Richard Hannania slowly convert from a zealous alt-right anti-woke crusader into a zealous neoliberal anti-Trump dem and shrimp-welfare-enjoyer. But I like to hear a lot of very different perspectives about life (I think it’s very unclear what’s going on in the world, and getting lots of different perspectives helps for piecing together the big picture and properly understanding / prioritizing things), which causes me to be really interested in a handful of “thoughtful conservatives”. There are only a few of them, especially when they keep eventually converting to neoliberalism / georgism / EA / etc, so each one gets lots of attention...
He opposes totalitarianism, and yet by his actions Palantir is reasonably the most authoritarian, pro-surveillance company in the West? He is skeptical of institutions and governments, yet funded and propped up the sitting Vice President? Give me a break, please.
I worry that trying to find coherence in Thiel is lending way too much credence to a guy who is essentially just confabulating as he goes (but this is one of the best efforts to do so that I’ve seen!). His true philosophy is what he does, not what he says.
If EAs decide to oppose Thiel, I think it would be mistaken to try to reason with his followers as if they are plain ideologues; we should focus on breaking his power bases by withstanding his authoritarian impulses and building popular alternatives.
Fwiw my (admittedly vibes-based) sense is that Palantir was a deliberate push to fill the niche of ‘surveillance company’ in a way that had guardrails and civil liberties protected.
Do you think it achieved that at some point? How about today?
I think it’s important to note that Thiel’s worldview is pretty bleak—he literally describes his goal as steering us towards a mythical Greek monster! He just thinks that the alternatives are even worse.
In EA lingo, I would say he has complex cluelessness: he sees very strong reasons for both doing a thing and doing the opposite of that thing.
I expect that there are Straussian readings of him that I am not understanding but for the most part he seems to just sincerely have very unusual views. E.g. I think Trump/Vance have done more than most presidents to dismantle the global order (e.g. through tariffs), and it doesn’t seem surprising to me that Thiel supports them (even though I suspect he dislikes many other things they do).
wrote this elsewhere but while I agree that he sincerely has unusual views, I question the strength and commitment he has to these views. I asked 03 to aggregate his total donations and it looks like he has given about 80m away, with almost half to republican politicians (i’m guessing this is wrong but couldn’t find anything better).
For someone with probably >10b net worth this seems like a weak signal to me that he doesn’t really care about anything.
Agreed that it is weird that a guy who seems to care so much about influencing world events (politics, technology, etc) has given away such a small percentage of his fortune as philanthropic + political donations.
But I would note that since Thiel’s interests are less altruistic and more tech-focused, a bigger part of his influencing-the-world portfolio can happen via investing in the kinds of companies and technologies he wants to create, or simply paying them for services. Some prominent examples of this strategy are founding Paypal (which was originally going to try and be a kind of libertarian proto-crypto alternate currency, before they realized that wasn’t possible), founding Palantir (allegedly to help defend western values against both terrorism and civil-rights infringement) and funding Anduril (presumably to help defend western values against a rising China). A funnier example is his misadventures trying to consume the blood of the youth in a dark gamble for escape from death, via blood transfusions from a company called Ambrosia. Thiel probably never needed to “donate” to any of these companies.
(But even then, yeah, it does seem a little too miserly...)
agreed.
but it’s hard to say if he did this because he was actually value aligned or because he thought these things would be good investments. Uncharitably, he might be verbally in agreement with the philosophy described here but it could be the case that he is either lying or cognitively biased to believe in the ideas he also thinks are good investments.
His two biggest donations to date seem to be 13m to vance and 15m to masters. If you take seriously either of these donations, they directly contradict your claim that he is worried about stable totalitarianism and certainly personal liberty ( I am a biased center left dem though) . I don’t take these seriously though, my read is that these are investments in political puppets.
Yeah. Thiel is often, like, so many layers deep into metaphor and irony in his analysis, that it’s hard to believe he keeps everything straight inside his head. Some of his investments have a pretty plausible story about how they’re value-aligned, but notably his most famous and most lucrative investment (he was the first outside investor in Facebook, and credits Girardian ideas for helping him see the potential value) seems ethically disastrous! And not just from the commonly-held liberal-ish perspective that social media is bad for people’s mental health and/or seems partly responsible for today’s unruly populist politics. From a Girardian perspective it seems even worse!! Facebook/instagram/twitter/etc are literally the embodiment of mimetic desire, hugely accelerating the pace and intensity of the scapegoat process (cancel culture, wokeness, etc—the very things Thiel despises!) and hastening a catastrophic Girardian war of all against all as people become too similar in their desires and patterns of thinking (the kind of groupthink that is such anathema to him!).
Palantir also seems like a dicey, high-stakes situation where its ultimate impact could be strongly positive or strongly negative, very hard to figure out which.
I would say it seems like there are three potential benefits that Thiel might see for his support for Blake / Masters:
Grim neoreactionary visions of steering the future of the country by doing unlawful, potentially coup-like stuff at some point in the future. (I think this is a terrible idea.)
A kind of vague, vibes-based sense that we need to support conservatives in order to shake up the stagnant liberal establishment and “change the conversation” and shift the culture. (I think this is a dumb idea that has backfired so far.)
The normal concept of trying to support people who agree with you on various policies, in the hopes they pass those policies—maybe now, or maybe only after 2028 on the off chance that Vance becomes president later. (I don’t know much about the details here, but at least this plan isn’t totally insane?)
Neoreaction: In this comment I try to map out the convoluted logic by which how Thiel might be reconciling his libertarian beliefs like “I am worried about totalitarianism” with neoreactionary ideas like “maybe I should help overthrow the American government”. (Spoilers: I really don’t think his logic adds up; any kind of attempt at a neoreactionary power-grab strikes me as extremely bad in expectation.) I truly do think this is at least some part of Thiel’s motivation here. But I don’t think that his support for Vance (or Blake Masters) was entirely or mostly motivated by neoreaction. There are obviously a lot of reasons to try and get one of your buddies to become senators! If EA had any shot at getting one of “our guys” to be the next Dem vice president, I’m sure we’d be trying hard to do that!
“Shifting the conversation”: In general, I think Thiel’s support for Trump in 2016 was a dumb idea that backfired and made the world worse (and not just by Dem lights—Thiel himself now seems to regret his involvement). He sometimes seems so angry at the stagnation created by the dominant liberal international order, that he assumes if we just shake things up enough, people will wake up and the national conversation will suddenly shift away from culture-war distractions to more important issues. But IMO this hasn’t happened at all. (Sure, Dems are maybe pivoting to “abundance” away from wokeness, which is awesome. But meanwhile, the entire Republican party has forgotten about “fiscal responsibility”, etc, and fallen into a protectionist / culture-war vortex. And most of all, the way Trump’s antics constantly saturate the news media seems like the exact opposite of a healthy national pivot towards sanity.) Nevertheless, maybe Thiel hasn’t learned his lesson here, so a misguided desire to generally oppose Dems even at the cost of supporting Trump probably forms some continuing part of his motivation.
Just trying to actually get desired policies (potentially after 2028): I’d be able to say more about this if I knew more about Vance and Masters’ politics. But I’m not actually an obsessive follower of JD Vance Thought (in part because he just seems to lie all the time) like I am with Thiel. But, idk, some thoughts on this, which seems like it probably makes up the bulk of the motivation:
Vance does seems to just lie all the time, misdirecting people and distracting from one issue by bringing up another in a totally scope-insensitive way. (Albeit this lying takes a kind of highbrow, intellectual, right-wing-substacker form, rather than Trump’s stream-of-consciousness narcissistic confabulation style.) He’ll say stuff like “nothing in this budget matters at all, don’t worry about the deficit or the benefit cuts or etc—everything will be swamped by the importance of [some tiny amount of increased border enforcement funding]”.
The guy literally wrote a whole book about all the ways Trump is dumb and bad, and now has to constantly live a lie to flatter Trump’s whims, and is apparently pulling that trick off successfully! This makes me feel like “hmm, this guy is the sort of smart machiavellian type dude who might have totally different actual politics than what he externally espouses”. So, who knows, maybe he is secretly 100% on board with all of Thiel’s transhumanist libertarian stuff, in which case Thiel’s support would be easily explained!
Sometimes (like deficit vs border funding, or his anti-Trump book vs his current stance) it’s obvious that he’s knowingly lying. But other times he seems genuinely confused and scope-insensitive. Like, maybe one week he’s all on about how falling fertility rates is a huge crisis and #1 priority. Then another week he’s crashing the Paris AI summit and explaining how America is ditching safetyism and going full-steam ahead since AI is the #1 priority. (Oh yeah, but also he claims to have read AI 2027 and to be worried about many of the risks...) Then it’s back to cheerleading for deportations and border control, since somehow stopping immigrants is the #1 priority. (He at least knows it’s Trump’s #1 best polling issue...) Sometimes all this jumping-around seems to happen within a single interview conversation, in a way that makes me think “okay, maybe this guy is not so coherent”.
All the lying makes it hard to tell where Vance really stands on various issues. He seems like he was pushing to be less involved in fighting against Houthis and Iran? (Although lost those internal debates.) Does he actually care about immigration, or is that fake? What does he really think about tarriffs and various budget battles?
Potential Thiel-flavored wins coming out of the white house:
Zvi says that “America’s AI Action Plan is Pretty Good”; whose doing is that? Not Trump. Probably not Elon. If this was in part due to Vance, then this is probably the biggest Vance-related payoff Thiel has gotten so far.
The long-threatened semiconductor tariff might be much weaker than expected; probably this was the work of Nvidia lobbyists or something, but again, maybe Vance had a finger on the scale here?
Congress has also gotten really pro-nuclear-power really quickly, although again this is probably at the behest of AI-industry lobbyists, not Vance.
But it might especially help to have a cheerleader in the executive branch when you are trying to overhaul the government with AI technology, eg via big new Palantir contracts or providing chatGPT to federal workers.
Thiel seems to be a fan of cryptocurrency; the republicans have done a lot of pro-crypto stuff, although maybe they would have done all this anyways without Vance.
Hard to tell where Thiel stands on geopolitical issues, but I would guess he’s in the camp of people who are like “ditch russia/ukraine and ignore iran/israel, but be aggressive on containing china”. Vance seems to be a dove on Iran and the Houthis, and his perrenial europe-bashing is presumably seen as helpful as regards Russia, trying to convince europe that they can’t always rely on the USA to back them up, and therefore need to handle Russia themselves.
Tragically, RFK is in charge of all the health agencies and is doing a bunch of terrible, stupid stuff. But Marty Makary at the FDA and Jim O’Neill at the HHS are Thiel allies and have been scurrying around amidst the RFK wreckage, doing all kinds of cool stuff—trying to expedite pharma manufacturing build-outs, building AI tools to accelerate FDA approval processes, launching a big new ARPA-H research program for developing neural interfaces, et cetera. This doesn’t have anything to do with Vance, but definitely represents return-on-investment for Thiel’s broader influence strategy. (One of the few arguable bright spots for the tech right, alongside AI policy, since Elon’s DOGE effort has been such a disaster, NASA lost an actually-very-promising Elon-aligned administrator, Trump generally has been a mess, etc.)
Bracketing the ill effects of generally continuing to support Trump (which are maybe kind of a sunk cost for Thiel at this point), the above wins seem easily worth the $30m or so spent on Vance and Masters’ various campaigns.
And then of course there’s always the chance he becomes president in 2028, or otherwise influences the future of a hopefully-post-Trump republican party, and therefore gets a freer hand to implement whatever his actual politics are.
I’m not sure how the current wins (some of them, like crypto deregulation or abandoning Ukraine or crashing the Paris AI summit, are only wins from Thiel’s perspective, not mine) weighs up against bad things Vance has done (in the sense of bad-above-replacement of the other vice-presidential contenders like Marco Rubio) -- compared to more normal republicans, Vance seems potentially more willing to flatter Trump’s idiocy on stuff like tariffs, or trying to annex Greenland, or riling people up with populist anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I am a centrist dem too, if you can believe it! I’m a big fan of Slow Boring, and in recent months I have also really enjoyed watching Richard Hannania slowly convert from a zealous alt-right anti-woke crusader into a zealous neoliberal anti-Trump dem and shrimp-welfare-enjoyer. But I like to hear a lot of very different perspectives about life (I think it’s very unclear what’s going on in the world, and getting lots of different perspectives helps for piecing together the big picture and properly understanding / prioritizing things), which causes me to be really interested in a handful of “thoughtful conservatives”. There are only a few of them, especially when they keep eventually converting to neoliberalism / georgism / EA / etc, so each one gets lots of attention...