HN Explorer

If you could ask Peter Thiel one question, what would it be?

3 points by yawpitch ↗ HN
In the coming days there’s a chance I’ll be able to ask Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, funder of Facebook, quickest ever New Zealand citizen, and defender of Hulk Hogan’s virtue a single question, directly.

Now I’ve got a speech impediment and literally may not even be able to ask, plus I’ve got my own thoughts, but I’d be interested in hearing thoughts on what to ask one extremely controversial billionaire about their thinking.

9 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread
DamonHD
Are other human beings important and equal? B^>
vinnyvichy
I always found something mysterious and paradoxical about 1) Peter's characterization of China as a (definite?) pessimist. 2)Peter's quip that democracy is incompatible with freedom.

For 1), I'm guessing his characterization is based on "macroeconomic" observations of China's historically high savings rate and the aversion of East Asian businesses to taking on debt. For 2) I'm guessing that he's talking about mob rule, media monoculturization and overzealous regulation , all of which an be said to be enabled by democracy.

My question is thus this: given that the younger people in china are importing western views of debt, and that immigration/leftist dominance may lead to a more neurotic climate in the west, does he imagine that there will be a flip of the global optimism/pessimism division? Ie the west becoming more pessimistic than the east.

Personally, I think the flip is more likely due to the decline (in the west) of and correspondent evolution of technical education (in the east), since it's probably easier to find technological secrets than social zero-days (in the long run).. yes yes, I understand education too is a doubled-edged sword, but in STEM it's much easier to realize your elders are mistaken AND not be similarly mistaken yourself.

082349872349872
I once worked for a company solving mutual suspicion for cloud computing — in the 1980s.

In STEM the trick is to realise your elders are mistaken at the right moment, not too late, but also not too soon. One must have a coup d'oeil for the à-propos.

Lagniappe: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/KCR9FD/friedrich-wilhelm-von-seydl...

vinnyvichy
Yielding for a moment while I ruminate on the above, there was a short article in Russian about Kolmogorov which quoths him "ships passing in the dark". (I can't really read Russian -- or find it now -- but a friend once translated it for me in the preAI days. Maybe you can dig it out.)) It could have been written by Arnol'd. Otherwise, you might even run into Arnol'd's family, I hear they favour the French countryside.

EDIT: are you referring to a particular battle of the Silesian Wars? I see light cavalry in KuK livery but cannot identify the exact unit without image search.

EDIT: ahh its von Seydlitz but he's Prussian, Rossbach against the French..

vinnyvichy
At Kranowitz he capitulated. Interesting.

RE: mutual suspicion: precryptographic techniques, presumably?

082349872349872
There's at least one other anecdote of one of his captivities, so presumably he capitulated when his position was untenable, and otherwise attempted to solely occupy tenable ones.

Just barely precryptographic: my work was still single-system, but cryptography was later brought in for the distributed case, and at the time Ralph Merkle was already talking about publishing root blocks via the New York Times' classified section, in order to be hardcopy or microfilm archived in many, many libraries.

082349872349872
No particular battle, more von Seydlitz' general attitude (and aptitude) regarding timing: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (note especially the unusual connection to Whitehead!)

Von Seydlitz' MO was apparently to smoke a pipe until the propitious moment, at which point he would fling it up into the air to signal the attack. In this picture the trumpeter transduces his visual signal to an audible one, but in principle the limited speed of sound means that a visual signal is likely to produce (assuming the squadrons are paying attention? maybe there's an audible/gossiped "ready" signal?) a cleaner initial charge even for fronts as small as 300m.

not1ofU
How come Palintir didnt flag Epstein?
yawpitch
> How come Palintir didnt flag Epstein?

I already know the answer to this one: cause it sure as hell wasn’t going to flag Clinton, Dershowitz, or Andrew of the House of Windsor.