It could be a requirement.

Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.

> Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?

I suspect that you may have it backward in a way. The majority of people are raised religious from childhood. There are a lot of people with various religious beliefs that may seem strange to you, but you don't hear from most of them, because they're not famous.

AFAICT "self-made" billionaires are typically narcissists who have no beliefs or principles, because becoming a billionaire requires a great deal of ruthlessness. Thus, it's likely rare for someone to become a billionaire with preexisting beliefs intact. In that respect, Thiel is the exception, not the rule.

Consider Tim Cook, who was raised in a conservative Christian area and seems to have retained those beliefs to an extent. Curiously, both Cook and Thiel are gay, which brings a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially with Thiel's support for anti-gay Republicans. I heard Cook say once that he thinks God made him gay, which I guess is what he tells himself, that it's some kind of test, or he's some kind of messenger for God. In any case, both his religion and his sexuality predated his billionaire status.

I used to think this was a universal law but then there's Warren Buffett, who's rich but doesn't seem stupid. Of course he's not a tech billionaire.

And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.

A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.

He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.

I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.

I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.

Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.

I also think his thesis about the antichrist is actually probably not all that wrong, although overstated. (In a nutshell, that defensive degrowth might be net worse than the prognosis of the actual diseases caused by growth. Citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as the two main figures.)

The core issue with him, in my view, are his openly anti-democratic beliefs, as well as this interesting trend one sometimes sees of the "autocratic libertarians" and sometimes even "monarchist anarchists". He's close with Curtis Yarvin, etc.

He's a giga-libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.

There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".

> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).

That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".

Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.

"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.

A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."

He does not care about you, at all. He does not care that you, or anyone you care about becomes a casualty in the consequences of his act.

In my view, oligarchs in general should be scorned. No republic should suffer private princes in my opinion, the mere fact of being someone who can influence policy outside of the democratic apparatus simply by being extremely wealthy is dangerous to the democratic apparatus. Thiel is a particularly egregious example in my view, because he makes no effort to hide the oligarchical nature of his influence on a democratic society. He even personally disdains democracy, seeing it as incompatible with liberty.

I also think he is fundamentally mistaken about the nature of liberty too. Since antiquity an enduring view of liberty has been the condition of non-domination; that is to say you are free when you are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of an external actor to go about your life. Even a maximally benevolent oligarch is inherently dangerous to liberty in this traditional framing of the concept. Destroying the domineering aspects of the state so he can instead dominate people in a private capacity is an ideology in the service of oppression, not liberty in my view.

why would you want someone to repeat the parent comment

you cant be a catholic if you are for abortion. stop being dense.

your religion is a nest of child rapists why dont you talk about that?

A quote I heard recently: “You may not live what you profess, but you will live what you believe”

He is evangelical Protestant, not Catholic.

One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.

Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.

He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.

When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)

My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.

At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.

Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.

AI = Anti Ictus.

It was there all this time. I need Dan Brown's email ASAP.

> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything

Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.

Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!

Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!

Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!

Etc.

Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.

I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.

Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us.