alt Hacker NewsUnlike a lot of the posters here, I find Thiel interesting.
I agree with his idea that humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years, and I'm glad we're out of it. I wish we were building more stuff faster (housing, nuclear, renewables, electric cars, etc). I don't consider myself a "transhumanist" but I do think that humanity should orient itself towards overcoming what have been our fundamental limitations (scarcity, death, etc). Ultimately, that could lead to some form of transhumanism albeit in the far, far future.
Thiel's "antichrist" spiel is the idea that fear related to existential risks (climate, nuclear, AI, etc) will make people too timid, and lead to a one-world government that de-prioritizes progress and economic freedom, resulting in longterm stagnation. I'm not especially worried about that, but I do think that excessive timidity is a real problem. I don't mind that Europe increasingly doesn't care about economic growth and has made it harder to invent/build/create, but I don't want the whole world to be like that.
If you disagree with this broad view, think about it more concretely. Take the example of nuclear reactors. If we had been steadily building nuclear reactors for the past 70 years, they would be smaller, safer, more efficient, energy would be more plentiful, and climate change would be less of an issue. Ultimately it was excessive fear that led to the decline of nuclear energy. So, if you find the "antichrist" stuff bizarre and off-putting, at least consider the basic point: excessive fear is a real obstacle towards the goal of fundamentally bettering the human condition.
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Yeah I reject the point. People aren’t excessively fearful of global warming. Clearly people aren’t scared enough, or they wouldn’t be building 1GW data centers powered by gas turbines
Do you think that someone who could spend the average person's entire lifetime income without a second thought might have a blind spot when it comes to obstacles blocking humanity's betterment?
Thinking about it more concretely, nuclear shows no credible signs of becoming smaller and cheaper, just a lot of handwaving and hopium about how it might, one day, maybe, perhaps.
Meanwhile we could have gone hard on renewables from the 60s onwards, and the tech actually has a solid objective record of becoming cheaper and more efficient.
One person's timidity is another person's realism.
Tech in itself is never a solution to political problems. And scarcity, etc, are fundamentally political problems.
The problem specifically is creating a political system that keeps narcissists and sociopaths far from power. All of the main isms suffer from this problem, and the consequences of failing to deal with it are consistently, predictably, catastrophically horrific.
I dunno. You can hear the same spiel on any city bus in the us, but the guy giving it isn’t rich.
How come the whole “world government” thing doesn’t set off tiny alarm bell for you? It’s the politics version of reading a math paper that suddenly starts talking about P=NP; you might be dealing with a crank. Is it not important to you that most other people going on about one world governments eventually turn out to just mean “the Jews”?
And why are we supposed to wade through Thiel’s screeds? To learn that nuclear power is good and that people are scared of things?! Is he the only or the best place to learn that? Is that even all that novel?
> humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years
Can you please expand on this claim? The past 20 years have seen hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “progress” here.