I think we've seen Thiel do this before, indirectly fund opposition to organizations he doesn't like when he can't attack them directly. He's also funded lots of politicians that work quite hard to restrict rights at every level of government, including, frankly, that are rather adamantly against equal rights for gay people. He's a great representation that some people will align themselves with anyone to further their own personal agenda, without respect for how it might affect others. He's personally been outspoken about the "dangers" of multiculturalism, gender and ethnic diversity, although I will give him credit for apologizing about his rape comments.
I'm not saying this because I disagree with him politically, I just think he's not a great example of what kind of leaders we want moving forward, and given his behavior in the past, I wouldn't put this past him.
He's quite clear about multiculturalism and diversity - he is criticizing the premise that pushing the people "who look different, but think alike" is not as productive as progressives think. He wants the diversity of ideas, regardless of ethnicities and skin colors.
Yeah, I'm not necessarily a fan of Thiel, but there's an unjustified hysteria growing about him that seems like the left's version of Soros hysteria. Any time I see Thiel mentioned, people seem to want to twist his words into a generic evil regressive.
Have you seen the documentary "Nobody Speak: Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Trials of a Free Press" on Netflix? Granted documentaries are generally biased, it shows some of Thiel's actions that could be construed as somewhat evil.
I mean, if you think you can get max diversity of ideas without also pulling people from different cultures, you’ve been around way too many white men.
The crux is that a different color of skin doesn't mean different culture. Esp. those companies hiring from a selected set of universities will often come to realise that most employees think alike, independent of where their parents or grandparents were from.
I'd go as far and say that you can get more diversity with an all-white/all-black (or any other color of skin) workforce that come from very different backgrounds and went to a wide set of universities than having a perfectly mixed (as in skin color) set of employees that all grew up in the Bay Area and went to Stanford.
That’s true. Skin color is especially meaningful in the US, where privilege, opportunity, education, and many other aspects of life fall mainly along racial lines. In america, race is inextricably tied to skin color. I’m a little disappointed people have such issue acknowledging this. Once you do, you will acknowledge that the success criteria is a defacto racial criteria. Does this mean anyone is trying to be racist? Not necessarily. Is it racist? Yes. Should you care about it? Well, I suppose it’s a little antiquated to care about your country these days. But you should probably give a fuck about why there aren’t a lot of black people at google, because it says a lot about the US and about google—basically, corporations have no qualms about moving into an area, forcing people from their homes, and then not sharing in the profits.
And it says a hell of a lot about Thiel—there’s basically no evidence he isn’t a complete psychopath.
You can. But this line of argumentation is usually used as an excuse to justify a total lack of diversity. If we lived in a world where people didn't routinely abuse these kinds of arguments that way, then it'd be a fair argument to make, but as it stands odds are firmly in favor of assuming that people using this argument probably has an agenda that has nothing to do with wanting diversity of thought.
Diversity of ideas (and good ideas specifically) comes from education, reading a lot, listening to smart people, thinking, and maybe a bit from genetics.
You're concentrating too much on the skin color. We should push smart people, we should create the culture of smart, so people want to become smart.
It also comes from different life experiences. If I’d made a period product based soley on what I’d been taught at school about women, it would definitely have been a business failure (as I found out by talking to a woman about my idea). You don’t have any way to know how different somebody’s life experiences have been until you ask them, but they’re more likely to be different if the sample set includes more gender, ethnic, nationality, sexuality, and religious diversity.
Concrete example, the number of times Americans assume I have a SSN. Or, on a trip to Kenya, my host assumed I’d know how to say grace before a meal. Or how I came to Berlin and assumed that finding a flat would be as easy as it was in the UK.
Edit: Just realised one obvious group I blindly forgot — poor people have very different experiences than rich people. $2/day absolute poverty, $10/day “you’re doing well by Kenyan standards”, $100/day Harlem average (chosen because it’s what non-Americans think of as a poor bit of America). All different from each other, all different lives from us, even if we don’t call ourselves rich.
Yes but you can hire a lot of people with different skin color that all went to the same university, grew up in the same rich neighbourhood and will have no diversity of ideas.
A group of people with one gender and color of skin from the same country (to be less US centric) will often have little diversity in their ideas. But just by making sure to have x% of non-white employees you won't necessarily reach that either.
You can still end up with a single way of thinking, but it’s less likely. Think of it as rolling D20s instead of D6s, where each number represents a given mode of thought.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I've worked in companies where diversity was seen as important but where people also liked hiring from the Universities they went to. You really don't get any diversity of thoughts with that. But those experiences are from the UK, maybe in the US color of skin says more about your character than the university you went to.
That certainly happens, but you will also find that companies - in the UK too - that insists on e.g. hiring from a select set of universities will tend to also have problems ensuring racial diversity for example. Because it's exceedingly rare that they'll have a representative distribution when hiring from a selective set of universities.
E.g. my ex works in HR for a bank that has a diversity board tasked with improving diversity. Problem: The bank prefers to hire from a certain set of universities that is dominated by students from private education backgrounds, which are predominantly upper middle class and above, which means they're predominantly white.
The numbers are such that with the universities in question they can not match the overall ethnic mix of the UK while recruiting staff with the degrees they want from those universities.
Yet suggesting that one hires by merit rather than by which university they're educated at is totally taboo to even suggest, though it'd almost certainly instantly improve their diversity and raise overall skill levels.
Companies where diversity is actually seen as important will quickly realize that they need to revise hiring policies. And one of the ways to revise it in most areas is to actually hire by merit, rather than by university "brand".
Multiculturalism should be the means, but not the ends. The goal is to find max diversity of ideas, if you can achieve that by pulling in people from different cultures, fine, just don't make it your goal. After all, people from different cultures can think the same.
True enough, but all too often "diversity" is implemented as hiring people exclusively from the international middle-class culture, which is in many respects a far more homogeneous group than "white men".
You can't get the max diversity of ideas while only pulling people from a small number of cultures, however cultures and viewpoints aren't merely an effect of race and so you also cannot achieve diversity of ideas by just diversifying race.
This is all smoke-and-mirrors though. In 2017 when people argue for or against idea diversity, they're almost always just fighting a trojan war for or against redistribution of resources from 'privileged' to 'oppressed' (or if you're right-wing: from 'deserving' to 'undeserving'.)
The point is to remember that we should ultimately be caring about diversity of ideas instead of diversity of inconsequential artefacts of human beings. Focussing solely on the latter without the former is not any better than racism, and ultimately a negative sum game for everyone involved.
The PayPal culture Thiel took pride in was so keen on "diversity of ideas" that Levchin once boasted about not hiring an engineer on the basis that in his spare time he liked to "shoot some hoops" which didn't sound like something someone in the white nerd monoculture they'd created would do...
Cultural diversity is the end result of an egalitarian society that doesn't place any particular culture above others. imo it is a goal to strive for.
Unlike humans, ideas are not created equal - some must be bitterly fought against. The "Diversity of ideas" meme is the "embrace, extend, extinguish" of political ideas, you can basically use it to promote any idea that's unpopular.
>Cultural diversity is the end result of an egalitarian society that doesn't place any particular culture above others.
Is it?
It's a priori possible that certain cultures tend to hold certain values that contribute to their success in initially-diverse societies, and as such will be over-represented down the road.
I don't know if this is actually the case; the point is rather to show that your position -- which is common in those who explicitly support mulitculturalist policy -- begs the question. In practice, it amounts to a proclamation of faith.
Seems clear you are eluding to his endorsement and $1m contribution to the Trump campaign.
We share different views - I am happy to disagree with you because I think Peter Thiel is to be commended for conducting business in line with his own philosophical & political views: this is perhaps the entire goal of business.
From my perspective, he clearly sees the need for change in this world and works diligently to see that his vision can come about via the best possible tool that one has to do that: business.
Just so happens he has the means to move a lot of capital around so his vision can more easily come about - here's rooting for him and his libertarian visions to come true.
No, I'm pretty sure he's referring to the whole Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan trial thing, which was one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press in recent history. Whether you believe Gawker deserved it or not, he used Terry Bollea (Hogan) as a prop to push his own agenda.
>the whole Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan trial thing, which was one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press in recent history
What a disingenuous load of nonsense.
If you film people having sex with their permission, then you are a pornographer and subject to certain restrictions as to how you may publish your works.
If you film people having sex WITHOUT their permission or knowledge and post the videos online then you are a criminal and, in a just world, a benefactor would come to the aid of your victims and finance whatever legal proceedings necessary to drive your operation out of business.
Crying "freedom of the press" to defend sex criminals is absolutely reprehensible, as was Gawker's behavior both in this case and its repeated outing of homosexuals.
If Thiel sued over Gawker's outing of Thiel being gay, that would be okay. If Hogan sued and won on his own, that would also be okay.
What's not okay is using one's own immense wealth to fund litigation against a media outlet you do not like over issues unrelated to the reason you dislike them. There's no question this tips the balance of power.
It is a separate problem that legal fees in the US are so exorbitant as to render even millionaires helpless in confrontations with abusive corporations. By all means, there should have been no need for a wealthy benefactor in the first pace. Unfortunately, there was.
Mr. Thiel may have acted due to an alignment of selfish motivations, but he provided a public service, nonetheless.
Both sides were adequately funded and the victim won on the merits of the case. Surely you're not suggesting it preferable that Gawker's sex crime go largely unpunished due to their victims being unable to afford a legal team of equal calibre?
> It is a separate problem that legal fees in the US are so exorbitant
Not at all, the cost of obtaining justice is the central issue here. If obtaining justice lies only with those with immense wealth, they can selectively choose to apply or not apply it, which is inherently unjust.
Regarding "tips the balance of power", Gawker's whole M.O. was to publish appaling shit when they knew their lawyers were better funded than their victims.
Context is everything, isn't it? If I said that the North Bay fires were one of the biggest tragedies in recent memory, you wouldn't chastise me for not mentioning the Rohingya pogroms, would you?
Sure, in light of Trump's constant barrage of attacks on the press, Gawker's demise might look small (even deserved, to a point), until you realize this sets a precedent for "if you are a billionaire, you can kill whatever outlet you want." Scary, considering there's a number of billionaires with rather ass-backwards agendas, like say the Merced family supporting white supremacist rags.
Not deeply familiar with the case, thank-you for highlighting that - perhaps I will take the time one day to read about it but in the meantime I won't reserve judgment on him based on a few HN commenters (and I don't expect others to do the same based on what I say).
It's easy to make a convincing sounding assessment about something but it's another to really know the truth unless you were directly there in person or are intimately familiar with every available detail about the particular situation.
No, I'm pretty sure he's referring to the whole Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan trial thing, which was one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press in recent history.
How is what Thiel did any different from what a nonprofit like the EFF or ACLU does every day? They identify legal cases they feel are important, and offer material assistance to the side they agree with.
(Not attempting to defend either Thiel or Gawker, just honestly curious.)
Well, EFF or ACLU support a broad number of cases every year that align with their mission statements. Thiel's involvement may be similarly principled and nondiscriminatory, but since his involvement was just on one case against an entity he dislikes, it is much easier to believe he just supported whatever legal action that let him use the judicial system as a weapon against them.
Another major difference is the concentration of power. EFF and ACLU are supported by thousands of volunteers and donors and must be accountable to them. Thiel is one person. The ability for an organization to attack a media company is significantly less of a threat than the ability of a single person to attack them.
I'm not nearly as worried about Facebook as Google. I don't really use Facebook, and it isn't that hard of a service to drop. On the other hand, switching to non-Google search/maps/email is painful, particularly given the benefits of integration these services provide.
> He's also funded lots of politicians that work quite
> hard to restrict rights at every level of government,
> including, frankly, that are rather adamantly against
> equal rights for gay people.
I don't really understand this. Isn't he gay? He doesn't seem an idiot to me so perhaps he doesn't see his actions in the same light as you do.
In a society where access to everything from justice to healthcare is wealth-driven, being rich will always be a stronger identity than any other. He might be gay, but he's rich and gay, which means he is not effected by essentially any anti-gay policy you could reasonably pass in the US. Even if being gay was banned, nobody is coming for the billionaires or their lovers anytime soon!
If you assume that his primary motivation is the acquisition of wealth and power, and that that gives him much more freedom than any gay rights bill could, it makes more sense. Of course it also makes him a prick.
To really hammer this point home, read the story of Sarah Rector, a black girl who had come across such extreme oil wealth that the town legally declared her white.
BTW I don't understand how fully-diverse, equally-represented companies haven't taken advantage of their unfair advantage and taken over the world yet :)
Well, that can be difficult if your diverse, equally-represented employees were not able to enjoy e.g. the education and upbringing of some non-diverse under-represented institutions and homes...
So you're saying that hiring diverse, equally-represented employees is actually a risk for my company in terms of employee throughput and capabilities? It starts to sound as a disadvantage...
I'm saying that if we want a more diverse workforce, we need to address more than just hiring practices. But yes, companies might need external incentives at the moment to prevent it from being a disadvantage.
So you're saying that the perceived "competitive advantage of diversity" is only an empty slogan, and diversity is actually a disadvantage in the real world?
I'm saying that it might not always weigh up against the disadvantage the diverse workforce have accrued over the years, and that that will likely remain the case unless we're doing something about that. (Which is often being done.)
And hence, that some sort of external motivation may be needed to make it weigh up against that at present, which would eventually lead to it simply being a competitive advantage.
Netflix recently added a documentary called ""Nobody Speak: Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Trials of a Free Press" which also reveals some insight into Thiel's funding.
> But two months after the verdict, it was revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel was responsible for financing Hogan's case against Gawker. It was also revealed that the major motivation for Thiel to do that was less because he was sympathetic to what Hogan was going through and more that he wanted Denton and Gawker to feel his wrath after the site ran a story in 2007 outing him as being gay.
IIRC, they tried to make a first amendment argument about ... releasing someones sex tape without their consent. Oh, and, of course, calling that "journalism."
Okay, sure. If I gave a more charitable spoiler, it might be: The documentary expresses that society requires an independent free press. That's their main point. Trying to make that point through the Gawker case is, IMHO, completely divorced from reality.
> the "dangers" of multiculturalism, gender and ethnic diversity
I don't know if "dangers" is your word or his, but it's been shown (a priori and a posteriori) that multiculturalism and ethnic diversity erodes trust and causes social strive.
This is opposed to cultural pluralism, where a dominant culture exists and tolerates additional values that don't erode or threaten the dominant culture.
The reason I comment is because I sense once again an attempt to shame Thiel for his views rather than parse them for merit. During last year's election we had a similar form of hysteria in these threads because Thiel dared to exercise his right to donate to a cause he supports.
Really wish this 'shame as an argument' tactic would cease.
> Fearon and Laitin looked at 127 civil wars from 1945 to 1999, most often in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. They found that regardless of how ethnically mixed a country is, the likelihood of a civil war decreases as countries get richer. The richest states are almost impervious to civil strife, no matter how multiethnic they might be — think for instance of Belgium, where Flemings and Walloons show almost no inclination to fight it out. And while the poorest countries have the most civil wars, Fearon and Laitin discovered that, oddly enough, it is actually the more homogeneous ones among them that are most likely to descend into violence.
Even the following paragraph, where another researcher challenges the Fearon and Laitin study and claims mixed groups are more prone to conflict, says that effect diminishes when the single largest group is less than 45% of the population.
(I’ve been looking at the risks of civil war recently because Brexit, on that risk to the UK I have no firm conclusions).
If you wanted to illustrate that, you should not have written “shown (a priori and a posteriori) that multiculturalism and ethnic diversity erodes trust and causes social strive.”
And your unquoted "proof" is gathered exactly how? You state something as a standing fact without giving us the ability to check the stated facts (and underlying methodologies) ourselves.
So it seems to me that people using arguing strategies like you just seem to have done are eroding "trust" in a rational discussion more then anything else. Tactics like these are well below what I personally would classify as honorable discussion.
Calm down. I'll happily provide proof, I simply didn't want to overload my initial response with quotes and links:
> Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
I have read that. He concedes the study is valid and the problems real and difficult. Then he adds his own opinion that nevertheless it's worth it.
> In the short term, he writes, there are clearly challenges, but over the long haul, he argues that diversity has a range of benefits for a society, and that the fragmentation and distrust can be overcome. It’s not an easy process, but in the end it’s “well worth the effort.”
“well worth the effort”. That's pretty subjective. I'm sure many would like to avoid "fragmentation and distrust" in the first place.
I mean, this stuff is intuitive for anybody with a sense of history.
To be clear I'm not arguing against diversity per se. I raise these points to encourage us (as a society) to discuss - and not emote - these issues honestly.
> I mean, this stuff is intuitive for anybody with a sense of history
Intuitive has nothing to do with fact, plenty of factors might heavily influence what one considers "intuitive". For a lot of people the necessity of the death penalty is "intuitive", yet for many societies, it's an absolute no-brainer that such practices are medieval.
So again, unless there is a corpus of studies, all pointing in the same direction, with all the environmental factors completely eliminated using double-blind or other proper scientific methods, we cannot really conclude anything.
Great! So when will we stop parading this nonsensical "diversity is our strength" mantra, or at least stop stigmatizing those that point out - as you have - that we cannot really conclude anything?
It has as much merit - and perhaps less, given the studies - as saying "diversity is not our strength".
This is an unfalsifiable position to take. So long as your opinion isn't common, you can claim this as proof that diverse populations lack the power to promote it.
> I mean, this stuff is intuitive for anybody with a sense of history.
Sure it's intuitive - that so long as "diverse" populations in a society have no power, the majority in power can happily sit and ignore the societal problems said people are facing. Once said populations actually get into a position where they have some degree of power, the majority will do anything they can to keep them down in an attempt to keep their artificially inflated standing in society.
The solution to that is, in my opinion, pretty obviously not to take the view that giving people the power to do something about the structural problems that they face in society is a bad thing.
>And your unquoted "proof" is gathered exactly how? You state something as a standing fact without giving us the ability to check the stated facts (and underlying methodologies) ourselves.
Discussion also implies trust. People don't have to bring evidence for everything they say, especially when other people can very easily look up relevant information online.
This whole comment thread is (ironically) a succinct illustration of the original point: it's difficult to evaluate claims about "multiculturalism" on merit, because people get touchy.
The absolute irony of a post on an account whose handle is "facts are sacred" that just declares that "multiculturalism and ethnic diversity erodes trust and causes social strive" without providing any form of justification, proof, actual study about the subject, without thinking about the pre-existing bias that might exist in society to make that all of that difficult on a daily basis. Weak sauce.
This is exactly how ethnic nationalism in America becomes normalized. Reminds me of the kid who protested in Charlottesville explaining that he wasn't a racist, he just really hated mass immigration and the ensuing diversity after 1965 (which was when immigration became accessible to non Europeans..).
This is an actual slippery slope. Proposing drastic cuts to legal immigration would have gotten laughed out of the mainstream Republican party in the Reagan-Bush-Dole-Bush era.
Canada would disagree with you. One in five people living in Canada was born in another country [1]. Canada is officially a multicultural country [2]. Yet, there is a lot more trust and a lot less social strife than in the U.S., to use a comparison with the article you quote from the U.S.
> I sense once again an attempt to shame Thiel for his views
You say that like there is some sort of hidden agenda. Personally I think there is nothing even remotely wrong with shaming Thiel for his deeply intolerant views. In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance [0].
Just because an individual opines on something doesn't somehow turn it into a sudden irrefutable fact. And that wiki article is completely devoid of examples aside from giving a number of other views on the topic - in which literally every single one disagrees with him. It's no different than arguing that the key to solving violence is violence. Wrapping a layer of specious logic around it makes it no more reasonable a suggestion.
It's interesting too in that I think everybody can see that violence inherently breeds violence, yet many remain blind to the fact that intolerance too breeds intolerance. We have two ends of political extremism today. The many things they have in common include the fact that they both are completely intolerant of the other side as they consider the other side completely intolerant. And as the mutual extremism grows, so too does the self righteous intolerance. That's going to end well...
It's interesting too in that I think everybody can see that violence inherently breeds violence
On the contrary, we created an official group tasked with dealing out violence (the police) because it's generally accepted (whether it's true or not) that some violence must be met with violence.
The police obviously are not tasked out with dealing violence. They stop violence and are certainly capable of defending themselves when necessary. In the US this line between defense and aggression is becoming blurred, but that's more of a deterioration of a society than the actual role of police.
And that blurring supports the point. As police face more regular violence, they themselves tend to become more violent, leading to even more violence against them, and vice versa. In countries where the police face no violence, they often are not even armed. Take for instance Iceland which may have an even greater percent of their population armed than the US (our per capita ownership rate is so high because many gun owners own many guns) - yet their police are unarmed. 2013 was a sad year for Iceland. It was the first year that their police fired a gun at a civilian, ever [1].
It always leads to sort of 'which came first the chicken or the egg' type question, but the point is absolutely clear that intolerance breeds intolerance in much the same way that violence breeds violence. And it's quite sad watching people fall into this. People don't seem to understand that nearly all the evil in this world is and has been done by people who felt they were the 'good guys.' "No no, it's different this time. We really are the good guys! History will prove us right!" Said everybody, ever.
The police is tasked with physically restraining and imprisoning certain people. That's violence, whether they do it with a gun or not. Litla-Hraun is not an hotel.
Considerations about the aggressiveness of the US police force specifically are certainly an important topic, but wholly irrelevant here. I'm not from the US, nor was their brand of policing on my mind when commented.
Right they meet even violent offenders with "physical restraint" so long as they are not met with violence. And "physical restraint" is little more than asking a person to turn around and cuffing them, and in some cases - that's not even involved.
We could discuss the ethics of imprisonment, and I expect we'd agree. But you certainly can't claim that police's task is to deal out violence - particularly preemptive.
You have a funny concept of violence if abduction and imprisonment under threat of physical force don't count. I guess the robber that steals at knifepoint is also non-violent if he doesn't actually plunge it when the victim complies?
I'm not saying this because I disagree with him politically, I just think he's not a great example of what kind of leaders we want moving forward, and given his behavior in the past, I wouldn't put this past him.