Peter Thiel on 'Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti Classical Liberalism' | Oxford Union

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Peter Thiel is an American technology entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and has funded companies like LinkedIn and Yelp. Thiel also started the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking via funding non-profit research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading.

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[visakanv]

my notes to self for future reference

1:20 peter starts, antonym of diversity is university... quadruple negative... classical liberalism...

3:00 stanford background – debating western canon, western civilization, jesse jackson,
rigoberta menchu, "i had completed her victimization",

7:00 university is about progress... technocratic defense, manhattan project, apollo space program,

9:15 bob laughlin, nobel prize physics, delusion of academic freedom. darwinism, intelligence, genetics... he was convinced that research was fraudulent. he got defunded. hermaneutic suspicion – if something is this taboo, this forbidden, you have to ask some questions

10:49 general thesis: there's something about science and tech that's not progressing as quickly. specialization makes it hard to evaluate. sub-specialists propagandize. we seem stuck... when you have fields that include "science" that's inferiority complex, because you don't need to say physical science, chemical science. computer science somehow worked

13:00 story of general stagnation. younger generation low economic expectation. doesn't fit with kurzweilian panglossian sit back and watch the future unfold. what's up with that

14:25 how NYT wrote about manhattan project – free market libertarian type people, didnt believe that science should be run by military, but military was able to invent the device in 3.5 short years instead of what might've been 50 years. everything is now stalled out beyond belief.

why did it stall out? what happened? what went wrong? my PC answer is, why questions are overdetermined. too much regulation (FDA in biotech). blame education? govt funding? zombie central left establishment. "Science and tech are too dangerous" – what looks like a bug, no more progress, is a feature. we should be happy that STEM is not progressing, because STEM is a giant trap that humanity is building for itself. x-risk. original version re: nukes. charles manson, what did he see on LSD? world is coming to an end, dostoyevsky, everything is permitted.

18:00 there is some dangerous dual use... every tool is also a weapon. why can't we have ticker tape parades for individuals. scientists who developed the MRNA vaccine. cultural existentian fear. orwellian term, gain of function research. if you can manipulate DNA... terrific destructive weapons

19:50 tech is a strange word. started in computers. AI, AGI. 20 years ago, narrative was still generally positive-utopian. misgivings about rockets, nuclear, etc people didn't have about AI initially. Singularity Institute... accelerationist utopian pov. 2015, didn't feel like people were pushing AI thing as fast as before. devolved into escapist burning man camp. shifted from transhumanism to luddite. Apr2022, yudkowsky... "death with dignity strategy". (that was an aprils fool post, lol)

23:00 greta and autistic children's crusade. none of the solutions involve more technologies. not fusion reactors, not better anti-ballistic systems. most of these people are insufficiently apocalyptic.

25:00 bostrom... mouthpiest of the zeitgeist... 2019, 'vulnerable world hypothesis', runaway nanotech, bioweapons. 1. restrict tech dev. 2. minimize diversity(?), 3. establish effective world police, 4, effective world governance. basically totalitarianism.

27:00 we should not hide. global totalitarian state is also an x-risk. always needs to be fought. the slogan of the antichrist is peace and safety. we're told there's nothing worse than armageddon, but maybe there is.

end of speech, Q&A next...

[BibinBCherian]

Youtube has to be one of the greatest resources ever. And without ads is better than any pay TV by far.

[ProductionWorks]

"I probably say more than I should, and less than I have the mind to."

-With regards to a question on if he has regrets over what he's said in his past and what he believes now.

[iqfoot]

Both the host's and the audience's questions all have a tone of "Peter, why do you say such controversial things." You can tell they are in Britain/a university

[MADMAX]

That darn loose mic was triggering Peter's OCD non stop... and mine too 😅

[Industries]

Love the intelligent insight Thiel brings to these panels/forums. I also love that he has a mild air of anxiety about him at all times: he has the courage to be uncertain in his beliefs.

[tyler-iyjk]

I would love to know how he squares his anti-surveillance takes like @31:59 with his ownership/founding of Palantir... Is it just PR smokescreen?

[iqfoot]

I like how Peter shows up to Oxford and tells them Universities suck

[williambranch]

In a fully interconnected global system, a single failure can take the whole system down. This is why distributed systems are superior. Even in a distributed system, given a finite mean-time-between failure for each component, if the system is sufficiently complex, it will spend more time broken down than running. With software involved, it is even worse ... since programming is an art not a science.

[aaaaaaaaaaghghghg]

Simply, Thiel is right, and I think his thesis is correct. Those who discard him based on his politics etc haven't really listened to what he's been arguing for years. We are in a stagnant era based on fear.

[paulzubrys]

I was waiting for him to say something truly profound. The talk ended and I’m still waiting.

[jashdholani]

"In the beginning is the deed."

[renewagain]

Don't know much about Mr. Thiel, but I do remember at least one positive contribution he made to the world...

He rid us of the cancer known as "Gawker" and for that, I appreciate and applaud him. 👏👏

[michaeldulaney]

Very interesting. However, I think the real problem is that although we have increased our knowledge exponentially in the past centuries, we have become no wiser than we were thousands of years ago.

[reedjohnny]

One of the most intelligent people alive today.

[phonkphonk]

Peter Thiel is the man. Wish he got better questions and perhaps a better moderator. The questions asked seemed like they weren't really listening to what he was saying or even knew he who was.

[understandingwealth]

Peter mentions that "why questions" are usually overdetermined. Maybe the explanation for "why questions" being overdetermined is that that is the appearance of separate events before a root cause has been found. Maybe physical phenomena used to be an area for overdetermined explanations until simple rules were conjectured and found to explain many seemingly unrelated aspects of the world.

[victorosyka]

Nice speech ) I summarized this as the following:

- I am for anti-anti-liberalism - that is, doubly for liberalism, free Western world and universities. Since the late 80s of my studies at Stanford, I have been thinking about the path of Western civilization, inadvertently participated in the victimization of Rigoberta Menchu (human rights activist and feminist from Guatemala) - my [niche] article was reprinted by the WSJ, and after 4 years she was given a Nobel Prize for protecting the rights of indigenous peoples

- Universities are bureaucratized and conservative. Now they will issue the same thing as in the 80s? (yes, probably even in the 19th century - talk about Shakespeare). But you are still moving string theory and other STEM/natural sciences. Francis Bacon also said: the role of universities is to initiate the important questions. What is progress for mankind? Manhattan project, Apollo project etc. Physicist Bob Laughlin, after the Nobel Prize, decided to challenge other areas (evolution, genetics, intelligence) and came to the conclusion that this is an increasingly big scam on taxpayer dollars, and he was fired for an attempt on a taboo. But does that mean there is something wrong? Science is cut into narrow spheres (string theory is understood by 100 people) and there is more corruption than in the humanities, because they evaluate themselves

- Outside of computer science (as I call it: world of bits) there has been a big stagnation for 40 years - there are no breakthroughs in the world of atoms. We dreamed of a singularity according to Kurzweil, but in fact, for the first time in centuries in the US and UK, a generation expects a life worse than their parents. Libertarians don't like it, but it was the military who made the atomic bomb in just 3.5 years

- The reasons for stagnation are different, in my opinion - this is the perception rooted in the establishment that technologies are allegedly dangerous, they call it existential risks, the roots are from 1945 (they made a nuclear bomb), and it was projected onto biotech (that's why the authors of mRNA vaccines are not made stars - it's unpleasant to remember Wuhan). 20 years ago in computer science the narrative about AI was positive, not terrifying, but we turned into Luddism, we became like escapist camps at Burning Man therefore we must die with dignity. Climate, I generally keep quiet - is this some kind of crusade of autistic Greta Thunberg? Technological progress, in fact, is slowed down as much as possible ))), what kind of zeitgeist is this?

- Nick Bostrom from here at Oxford says we need to: 1) limit progress, 2) anti-diversity, 3) enforce restrictive policies to the extreme, 4) create an effective world government. He doesn't say the word "totalitarian", but he absolutely implies it.
And
- I am a liberal, and this is absolutely cruel: even if the existential risks turn out to be false, will a single authoritarian state still be built in the world?! This is already some sort of arrival of the Antichrist. It seems to me that instead of Armageddon, turning to the Antichrist is too much. What about the liberal institutions of the last 200 years that have brought us to the current level of development? Global totalitarian state is also existential risk

- The problem of narrow specialization (grew out of the successes of the industrial revolution) is also that the public was thrown out of the discussion of questions of what to do according to progress, why, how. This is the main problem of stagnation

- I am for the acceleration of science, for tech, I am even for AI. Political questions pop up everywhere: if crypto is libertarian (by the way, I don’t believe that crypto should be libertarian now), then AI is communism, in the style of China (give AI all control over everything)

- Since the 60s, the level of satisfaction of societies has not been growing precisely because there is not much progress outside the Internet and computers. We will not build the civilization of the future this way. If our Luddites continue and win, then we will all lose in favor of China - both AI, and the exploration of the Moon, in general, everything. What is this program of self-destruction of the Western world? We need “Back to the future”

[FacelessOnes]

100% in agreement.

Hope the end of neo progressivism and neo-liberalism affectively ends in our society as well to foster innovation and true progression for our society.

[nitanor]

“ The highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools makes people dumb, and Medicare makes people sick“ - does anyone know who said that originally? Or is a Thiel original?