Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation • Hacker News Board

Re: Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

#181

Post by kennywinker » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

1996 wrote: post #179

kennywinker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So explain: 1. The cutting of research into a vaccine for the original sars coronavirus. I think a lot of us would be happier if we had that basic research done right now. Clear failure of market-based solutions / forward thinking. Same vein: lack of real change on global warming. 2. Social media companies optimizing their algorithms to make people unhappy, so they spend more time on the site. Basically, no I do not…

For 1: most people do not care about diseases that do not matter. Most people consider the common cold normal and acceptable. I was very sad such research never went very far, for I believe viruses are way more deadly that we think: as we know now that the EBV can cause many bad things long term, there is no reason to think other viruses can do the same. The fact that these 2 separate diseases are called the "kissing…

> Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care.

You are right in both of these descriptions. What we want (are willing to spend money on) and what is going to make us happiest, are different things. And capitalism rewards finding things that we will spend money on. Not things that will make us happier.

But can you imagine a world where we didn’t make billionaires out of people for making us unhappy? For destroying the environment through resource extraction? Imagine we took all that money and funded and rewarded the scientists who had the forethought to develop a coronavirus vaccine. We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now.

Since capitalism rewards the opposite of that, the only way we get to that world or closer to it is by abandoning capitalism as the gold standard for social organization. One small step towards that is to stop idolizing billionaires like Thiel

Re: Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

#182

Post by read_if_gay_ » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #180

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Peter Thiel specifically did none of these things. He initially got rich via PayPal, which simplified safe online payments, which is clearly something people wanted at that time and not particularly immoral. You might say it was progress.

A decent portion of his wealth came from his early investment in facebook. Literally the second example I gave of capitalism rewarding harm.

Is Facebook purely harmful though, or is there also progress made in connecting people together?

And in any case Thiel doesn’t need to have a 100% perfectly “focused-on-your-definition-of-progress-only” track record to be worth listening to. Just apply that standard consistently and see how many people can fulfill it.

OTOH, building something like PayPal alone will make a lot of other people interested in what you’ve got to say. You cannot deny that someone who achieves such a feat when no one else does (besides Elon Musk) has some special insight. But the fact that you do deny that seems like it’s rooted in some form of subjective dislike.

Edit: just read your reply to sibling comment, confirmed my suspicion here.

Re: Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

#183

Post by 1996 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #181

1996 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1: most people do not care about diseases that do not matter. Most people consider the common cold normal and acceptable. I was very sad such research never went very far, for I believe viruses are way more deadly that we think: as we know now that the EBV can cause many bad things long term, there is no reason to think other viruses can do the same. The fact that these 2 separate diseases are called the "kissing…

> Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care. You are right in both of these descriptions. What we want (are willing to spend money on) and what is going to make us happiest, are different things. And capitalism rewards finding things that we will spend money on. Not things that will make us happier. But can you imagine a world where we didn’t make billionaires out of people for making us unha…

> We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now.

Or maybe not, just like how the FDA fumbled the test development while forbidding private alternatives to avoid losing face.

I can imagine such a word, were graft and power decides what project gets the money, instead of the population aggregated preferences through the free market.

I seriously believe we would all be worse off. It is not about justifying our own preferences, but thinking about all of mankind. If the vast majority of the world population believes "destroying the environment through resource extraction" is needed to elevate their standard our living to ours, we have to gracefully accept they are our equals, and to collectively deal the problem later on.

I think you should consider that what we want and what is going to make us happier is generally the same. There are rare exceptions, and we take offense that capitalism rewards them too, but they remain exceptions.

Re: Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

#184

Post by fuzzfactor » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 11:02 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #166

novok wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is their take, but you gotta admit, something happened in the early 1970s.

They use the exact year of the oil crisis on their title. There was nothing financial about that one, it's entirely on the real part of the economy. Yes, something happened on the early 70's. But that article is a biased gathering of disconnected evidence surrounded by a story that was set independently of any of that evidence and doesn't even make sense. It is still useful to point people to the problem, but it woul…

All the work done by wage earners when the US dollar was backed by gold alone was more valuable than the gold itself.

Even after the federal gold confiscation of the 1930's, maybe more so eventually because of increased productivity.

The vast majority of that wealth not only remained in the US, but was leveraged toward greater production in the US.

This led to increasing prosperity, and back when the system was half a century closer to being of the people, by the people, and for the people, prosperity was truly felt by the vast majority of people more than what you get today.

Half the charts on the site were fully predictable the day they turned the dollar into fiat currency.

As the value of the dollar declined, the work done by the wage earners became worth less than the gold their dollars were worth, and far less than when still backed just a few years earlier. Even though they were doing the same jobs for the same pay in US dollars so it didn't seem so bad at the time.

This was a serious reversal.

US consumers were manipulated from participants in a producer economy, into targets of an extractive economy.

At the maximum rate the _market_ could bear.

Re: Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

#185

Post by tatrajim » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 1:25 AM UTC

1996 wrote: post #98

tatrajim wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And note, too, that the rule change made decades ago in the US, banning universities from imposing a mandatory retirement age on faculty members has had a devastating impact on the development of younger scholars and the funding of new ideas, including my own field. This is in stark contrast to places like South Korea, where mandatory retirement at 65 years for faculty at state universities has kept the pipeline of s…

> open and flowing Open and flowing, but to the US. A high quality researcher, nobel price winner (etc.) does not have its intrinsic value turn to 0 once the clock reaches 65y. As we innovate more than SK, I welcome their generous gift of talented researchers.

> As we innovate more than SK

Not in my field, where superannuated faculty members in the late 70s rehash ideas from their postdoc days. Nobel laureates are few, but every tenured faculty member can hang on forever. The pace in SK and the research authority given younger scholars is invigorating to those few outsiders who sample it.