[maram]

“Garry Tan is a moral canary in a coal mine. When people hate on Garry Tan, they out themselves as either evil or stupid, because in fact Garry is as close to a 100% good guy as you get”. —Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1460931338131890180 ————

Congratulations Garry! Your blogs were my inspirations when I was running my startup. I always remember this line:

“The ideal startup team involves really two major roles — builder, and hustler. I used to say it took three roles (designer, engineer, hustler).....In reality, I think designer / engineer can be abstracted to builder”.

[systemvoltage]

Being a good guy probably ranks the least IMO for leading VC. You need to be extremely shrewd and calculative, have a great bullshit detector, need to have solid intuition based on scant data, good general knowledge, well versed in various industries and areas of study, pragmatic and brutally honest. I am probably missing a few more. Speaking generally, nothing against Garry.

[devwastaken]

Do both. There's nothing preventing you from looking at the numbers, the pitch, and saying "no." In terms of being "good". You can be honest and kind the same as how one can be honest and mean.

[stakkur]

I have no strong opinion of Tan, but calling a person who happily worked for (and profited from) Palantir a 'moral canary in a coal mine' seems a bit of a stretch.

[LewisVerstappen]

Tan worked at Palantir prior to 2007, so if you’re blaming him for Palantir’s work with ICE then…

> they out themselves as either evil or stupid

[Aeolun]

I dunno, but Palantir has always been a little bit…

I mean, it’s kinda in the name.

[hackernewds]

Not really

[Apocryphon]

By the time of the LoTR timeframe, when have the palantiri ever been used for good? Seems like malevolently misleading things happen even to the evil characters after they use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr#Characteristics

[stakkur]

Based only on your comment, I'm guessing you're unaware of Palantir's work with intelligence agencies even when Tan was there. Also, Thiel's mission from the start was this kind of work.

I served in the Marine Corps. I've had some exposure to Palantir's 'offerings'. It's a fucking nightmare of a company, morally and ethically, and it always has been.

[maram]

Not to defend Thiel, but don’t you think that his exist from Facebook (after 17 years) because of the stance they took at the beginning of the pandemic is worthy of some attention?

Specially, that Facebook suffocated voices of Trump’s advisors who opposed the lockdown.

“Social media, particularly Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, was actively suffocating voices, including mine, that dissented from the accepted COVID narrative. By August, Facebook told the Washington Post they had taken down seven million posts “for spreading coronavirus misinformation.” Meanwhile, Wikipedia crafted smears and distortions of my background and then locked it to edits”. —Dr. Scott Atlas, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America

[systemvoltage]

I've studied Thiel, he's just not mainstream left. If you want to listen to him with good faith, I enjoyed this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s

Doesn't come across evil to me unless by evil you mean just not mainstream left, which might be the correct in the valley.

[sterlind]

I tried to watch that interview. It's just dry, boring, slow and abstract (to me) but I'll grant you it wasn't what I was expecting.

My issue with Thiel is his hypocrisy: he warns about surveillance AI and how it's evil, which is just rich, since he founded Palantir and holds shares of Clearview.

[systemvoltage]

Someone asked him directly this question and he addressed it in quite a lot of detail, something along the lines of two morally good ideas of extreme transparency and extreme privacy. I don't agree with him though, I personally stand strictly on the conservative/classical-liberal side that there is no compromise that's acceptable with regards to 4th amendment.

[_ugfj]

Not "mainstream left"? I guess the right, what was once the far right but today is just the right is indeed not "mainstream left". Make no mistake where he stands: he was one of the largest donors of Trump, served on his transitional team and has once written "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

[systemvoltage]

There were hundreds of doners to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign, let alone 2016 campaign. If not directly, then through other superPACS including FAANG companies [1].

https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/donald-tr...

If your viewpoint is so myopically constrained by a single data point, I don't know what to say.

I find intellectuals from all corners of political spectrum to be interesting. Usually, when people dismiss intellectuals not for their arguments, but by some ostensible thinly veiled morality or the media zeitgeist; it is already an indicator that something interesting is out there. Anyways, all I am saying is that Peter is not evil in any stretch of the definition as the media portrays him. He is just not your typical conformist thinker.

[1] They only paused after Jan 6th, they were happily donating to both parties: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-corporate-go...

[hellomyguys]

Peter Thiel's in-house philosopher Curtis Yarvin is a monarchist. So yes, I guess you're correct he isn't mainstream left...

[wpietri]

A counterpoint to consider: "The Enigma of Peter Thiel": https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-enigma-of-peter-thiel

[purple_ferret]

Yeah but that was before he had the type of money to buy the moral high ground

[preommr]

> The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment).

???

kind off topic, but I am curious what other people in SF think about this statement. I don't live there, but I find it surprising and dubious that the extreme anything is also "the establishment", not saying it's not possible but seems unlikely to me.

[wpietri]

20 years in SF, and I can promise you that the extreme left is not the establishment here. As an example, we had a relatively progressive prosecutor who tried occasionally to hold cops to account. After an acrimonious campaign, he was just recalled with extensive support from a chunk of the establishment. His replacement, selected by the mayor, volunteered as an active proponent in the recall. Except that it came out later that she received $100k in "consulting" fees from a billionaire via a sister organization to the recall campaign: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/reports-sf-da-brooke-jen...

San Francisco gets a lot of press as being radical, but the government strikes me as pretty middle-of-the-road and wealth-focused. i can't think of a policy here that would be out of place in any other sensibly run city in the US. And we're definitely to the right of places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. And that goes back a long way; CA's current governor was a centrist mayor here back in the day.

[achileas]

And Tan was a major backer of that recall

[vxNsr]

My guess is: the administration controlling North Korea would be considered by many to be extreme (left, right, you pick) but in North Korea they are the establishment.

So too in SF, outside of cali they would be considered extreme (left, right, you pick) but in SF they are the establishment.

Not passing judgment on whether that’s right or wrong just saying that’s what that line could mean.

[hackernewds]

? where do you get this?

[preommr]

It's from the twitter thread by paul graham that the OC linked. It was a response to someone asking who dislikes Garry Tan, to which Paul Graham replied:

"The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment)"[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/stevemushero/status/1461013669114892288