from Hacker News

The Libertarian Futurism of Peter Thiel (2011)

by romefort on 5/11/15, 7:36 AM with 66 comments

• by et2o on 5/11/15, 4:31 PM

  It seems like Silicon Valley is full of people who love espousing their noble ideas but got rich via (as Thiel admits) at best socially neutral things like Facebook and Paypal.

  As for the anti-aging research: Fund the NIH. Basic science like that needed in aging research isn't going to come on a startup timescale. Thiel makes a big deal about encouraging people to leave universities, but the smartest PhD students are generally not the ones leaving academia.

• by vegancap on 5/11/15, 2:27 PM

  Don't get me wrong, I really like Peter Thiel, but it's hard to consider him 'Libertarian', whilst selling advanced snooping software to the U.S. government.

• by DickingAround on 5/11/15, 3:26 PM

  I have to say, the writing style of this article is an immense time-waster. Even skimming it doesn't get to the point quickly because the history of Thiel (large in size but mostly unimportant) is inter-mixed with the ideas he's espousing (small in size but really the part we care about).

  What ever happened to 'summary' then 'summary with more depth' then 'summary with even more depth'?