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2026-02-05

minor edits by 2026-05-06

My views on Peter Thiel

Disclaimer

• Quick Note

My views on Peter Thiel's work

• No opinion on Paypal
  • I find it interesting that after Thiel and Musk disagreed at Paypal, Thiel has been consistently pro-AI, whereas Musk has been anti-AI for most of the time.
• Weakly negative opinion on Palantir
  • I think Palantir is a good example of might makes right, incentives shape morality. Because Palantir pays its employees lots of money, society respects them, regardless of how this money is made.

My views on Peter Thiel's stated beliefs

• Agreements
  • Society is more open to regulating tech now as compared to WW2, see for example the ban on nuclear fission for energy or excavation purposes, or the ban on supersonic aircraft, or the taboo on human genetic engineering, or the ban on human cloning. Watching nuclear bombs explode was the main trigger in people's minds.
  • Energy density went up from coal to oil to uranium. Now it is going down from uranium to natural gas to solar and wind.
  • Thiel thinks Yudkowsky's anti-AI arguments are highly persuasive.
  • Voltaire said religions are created to maintain power. Durkheim said religions happen first, and then they are used by leaders to maintain power. Thiel and I agree with Durkheim on this point.
  • Big Tech companies subsidise woke religion, in a similar way Saudi Aramco subsidises whatever muslim interpretation MbS wants to spread
  • Thiel thinks imitation is an important part of what makes humans special as compared to other species. Also why Thiel likes Rene Girard. I agree with Thiel but find it suspicious he doesn't mention language or toolmaking as other important parts of this discussion.
  • Thiel likes Rene Girard's theories. Rene Girard's theory of scapegoating says that every society needs scapegoats who can be blamed and punished for everything that is wrong in society. He says Egyptian pharoahs and Jesus are examples. I agree scapegoats are common. When an accident happens, often the analysis is to find out who to blame, not what to fix to prevent a next time.
  • Internet was supposed to make you part of society no matter where you go, but all internet companies even more ended up in one city, which is San Francisco.
• Not sure
  • A lot of environmental and climate change protests were driven by guilt of citizens of the US-allied geopolitical sphere, that they could use more energy per capita than everyone else. I need to see his evidence or world model that predicted this, more closely.
  • MKULTRA, CIA psychedelic torture program, may have resulted in LSD becoming popular at Stanford and Harvard. I need to see his evidence.
• Disagreements
  • Thiel thinks we are not getting ASI in next 5 years. I disagree. See also: My AI timelines as of 2025-12-14
  • Thiel thinks the CCP surveillance AI vision and the Bostrom/Yudkowsky paperclip maximising vision both don't play out. Instead we got an AI that could crack the turing test but not do either of these. Thiel thinks this is evidence against ASI coming afterwards. I disagree. I think the CCP vision is being built right now (see also: drone swarms) and the Yudkowsky vision is coming next. I agree that some people (including my past self) overestimated the degree to which automated surveillance alone (as opposed to also having automated miliatary, automated economy, etc) can be used to increase stability (halflife?) of your dictatorship.
  • Thiel thinks low fertility countries tend to stay low fertility because the population votes for the tax collected to be spent on elderly healthcare, not subsidies for new parents. I disagree. I think people are more influenced by social pressure than economic pressure, when deciding whether to have kids or not. I think one persuasive leader can very quickly change the opinion of the entire country on whether they should have kids. I no longer endorse this para I wrote. I still think the whole fertility crisis thing is overblown as a problem. But also, my exact counter to Thiel here is too simplistic. Yes, most people are sheep and driven by social pressure. Yes, one persuasive leader can, atleast in theory, change the opinion of entire country or the world on whether to have kids. But, being a persuasive leader is really hard, and addressing people's actual materially-related suffering is one of the biggest ways to be persuasive. It is not easy to be a persuasive leader with a message that is both pro-kids and pro-technological progress, in a society with low historical rate of progress and a large elderly populace that just wants to die in peace (or luxury). It is however easier to be a persuasive leader that just supports more wealth redistribution to the elderly, and keep the elderly as your voter base.
  • Thiel likes Rene Girard's theories. Rene Girard's theory of memetic desire says that people copy each other's desires, then fight for those scarce resources, and end up in conflict. I only weakly agree. I think conflicts over scarce resources are instrumentally convergent regardless of what both competing people hold as their true desires. I am not actually sure if Thiel and I disagree at all here. I'm pretty sure Thiel agrees with the literal sentence "Conflicts over scarce resources are instrumentally convergent regardless of what both competing people hold as their true desires." This can be true, and you can also believe that many people, even ambitious people in positions of power, ultimately have stupid memetically-copied "true desires." I should shift this claim from "disagreements" to "not sure."

Update (2026-05-06)

• I am actually positively surprised by how much I agree with Peter Thiel's worldview. My only serious departure from his worldview that I've written above is that I agree with Yudkowsky more than him, on the whole ASI question. (I'm not sure what are Thiel's views on human genetic engineering, it is possible we have a disagreement there too, I don't know.)
• It is also funny that he decided to work with govts to build relatively more violent technologies, and I am considering doing the same. In his case, drones and surveillance, in my case hacking and espionage.
• Deep down, we both believe that the people are stupid and violence is the only way to rule them. (There is nuance here regarding what type of violence, and I am oversimplifying it.) He seems a lot more accepting of this though, he is quite accepting of the fact that people are stupid. Whereas I am still atleast in a little bit of distress over this, like, "come on, you can do better than this.", I want to shout at normies about this.
• We both understand that the masses will never understand us, but a few rare intellectuals here and there will, and hence sharing our views publicly is worth it, to connect with these people.
• We both wish we had free time to just bunch of armchair philosophy, although in practice you do need to do more boring yet hard things like getting into business or politics, if you want any actual power. Thiel clearly worked super hard at Paypal, he granted himself free time in other phases of life, both before this stretch, and after actually becoming a billionaire. He obviously doesn't run day-to-day operation of either Palantir or Founder's Fund or similar. See also: Thiel Capital's long list of subsidiary VC firms.

Note to self

• Investigate Thiel's worldview more at some point, given how much you agree with him.
• Like, I have investigated Ravikant's and PG's worldviews in depth, but not Thiel's as much. He seems to deliberately avoid talking about the morality of running Palantir, and I find this incredibly annoying. I see why this might be a rational move from his position, but still. Ugh.
• Paywall - holy fuck this is annoying, to do later, maybe just pay for it. This is part 2, in part 1 they basically end with Thiel saying everything is rational and christianity is about rational unwillingness to sacrifice others, Peterson sticks to his stance that christinity is about irrational self-sacrifice. Clearly sacrificing yourself and sacrificing other scapegoats to save yourself are two entirely different things.
  • (update 2026-05-06) I watched it, and holy fuck. I am actually quite sympathetic to Thiel's critique that if you let go of individualist libertarian free market even a little bit in terms of cultural values, then culture will immediately snowball into supporting some sort of dictatorship, as that is a natural attractor.
  • I don't see as it that black and white, I think it is possible to have a middle ground position (support democracy and capitalism, but also support a ban on ASI) and I think there's a significant probability your anti-ASI leader won't turn out a dictator, it is a bit of a gamble. Not every country that escaped british rule via mass movement turned into a dictatorship, although some countries certainly did.
  • But okay, imagine I lived inside Thiel's worldview where the only options are to support libertarianism and take your gamble with ASI, or to support communist dictatorship. Which one would I pick? This is actually quite a hard choice. 40% probability of superintelligence created within libertarian environment (this includes ASI extinction and ASI dictatorship odds) versus 100% probability of non-ASI communist dictatorship. I haven't made up my mind on this question yet. See also: Maybe I should not allow with communists?
• Also investigate relationship between being gay, and violence. I used to joke around that Altman and Thiel are powerful because they're gay, but now I'm not sure it's entirely just a joke. A lot of the most violent people (Alex Karp, Allen Dulles, etc) seem to explicitly deprioritise longterm marriages or kids. I should read more about whether I am seeing things or whether this correlation is statistically meaningful.

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