This is a strange story. I am not expecting it to be that coherent because it has been strung together from a bunch of old (pre-election) comments I made on Hacker News. I’ll at least give a brief introduction that it concerns the ideas of two unusual men. The first is Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley capitalist. Thiel is well known in the Valley for being a contrarian and a highly successful investor.
Of course billionaires with extensive business or political networks are not that unusual. What really makes Thiel unusual is his ideas. He believes something that almost nobody in America believes, not in New York, not in Washington, and certainly not in the Bay Area. He thinks that technology has ceased to exist. If you’ve copies of Wired Magazine, you’ll understand this makes him a heretic in the Vatican.
Thiel believes that technological progress has plateaued in the early 70s, with the lone exception of computation. This is the Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.
The second unusual man is Gene Wolfe. Wolfe wrote a science fantasy book, which is a kind of combination of science fiction and fantasy genres.
This book was called The Book of the New Sun. This book was very strange and is hard to describe adequately. It is set in a future which has regressed after countless millennia, where the Earth circles a dying star. But! It struck a chord as I read it, I began to make sense of Thiel’s ideas which I originally scoffed at as being obviously preposterous.
Recently Thiel did something that put his comrades in Silicon Valley, even close friends, in a state of horror. He began to advocate for Donald Trump.
Silicon Valley is at home with contrarianism, but this was a step too far for many. California is a deep blue state. Trump is Sauron!
This blog post is an attempt to describe why Thiel did that. I might be very wrong. But I don’t think I’m far off the mark. I’ve read Thiel’s books, watched his presentations, and while I cannot claim to know the man personally, I feel I understand where this is going.
I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.
If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding. It does not get picked up on because I believe it takes slow-thinking, it takes some reflection to absorb what is being suggested. Reading old books helps. I think somebody said once “the past is a foreign land, they do things differently there”, and that intuition is of use here. Darwin, Gibbons, Girard, Spengler and many others, the basic theme is ‘this basic reality you think you have? Well, it ain’t so. Here is a deeper level’. In present day parlance this is called ‘redpilling’ by reactionaries but that should not put you off this, this is an old way to give knowledge by undermining former assumptions (the Christians call this ‘revelation’ I believe) and not the sole providence of a single political sect.
I see a disturbing picture emerging I call the Wolfian World after Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. If there is a shortcut to understanding, then that book is it. Ancient institutions are crumbling due to age and corruption. The frame of reference the narrator has is bizarrely warped as things familiar are perceived with alien eyes. The past is without context. The accretion of crud is literally geological. The spirit of renewal, has evaporated. The keyholders are creatures of mimicry going through the motions. Many parts are vestigial limbs and do not know it. The peripheral shrinks literally and spiritually as the World turns inward, navel gazing instead of looking to new frontiers. Enemies, ancient and modern, are at the gates. What is more, the gates are abandoned, forgotten because the peoples who manned them no longer understood their purpose and left their posts generations ago. It is unclear who is controlled and who are the controllers. In a cinematic work with some shared themes, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, humanity experiences not just empty future prospects but also a diminished expectation of the past. We did not really go to the moon in that future, that is very telling of human nature’s chronocentricism — They cannot even imagine their past, let alone their future.
In short; our World is becoming like the Wolfian World. It is likely that we are on the threshold of sliding into a new Dark Age. In order to fight back one would need to utterly readjust his thinking and expectations of the future. The people who prepare (e.g. Sam Altman) for a systems collapse, are appreciating the possibility but those kind of actions are mostly in microcosm, a self preservation instinct. A sudden shock is more immediate and so more energizing for an individual to take action, but the more likely option is actually a long steady stagnation punctuated with the occasional shock.
Thiel believes our civilization has Alzheimers.
I repeat; if you want a shortcut to Thiel’s worldview in my personal opinion the best way to see that is to read The Book of the New Sun. The suggestion you might find weird, but go with me on this, is to listen to the Voyager Recordings — Symphonies of the Planets while you’re reading it. It is hard to escape our inherent chronocentricism. When demands are made of our presence from moment to moment, it becomes much harder to appreciate anything outside of that. If it feels ‘weird’ then good, it is supposed to, you have to get out of your comfort zone. If you want to read more I’ve written about it at length in my history on HN dozens of times, some samples are included below. There is a list of statistics, attributes and artifacts a mile long that cannot be explained in any other way than we have been plateauing. We ought to anticipate that the future will be much stranger than the present, and not in a good way.
Post #1 100 days ago
The Western economy (developed countries generally), outside of Silicon Valley and a small number of bright spots, is not really growing.
First let us dispense with certain lies that nearly everybody believes.
The statistics about growth you always hear in the news or from politicians are fraudulent. All economic growth ultimately derives from technology — more output for less input or doing more with less. In the 1930s the growth statistics looked very bad but were actually better than they appeared because a host of new technologies were invented — artificial rubber, secondary oil recovery. Measuring this sort of thing is meaningless because every new invention is only discovered once. How the invention of the steam engine and vulcanized rubber impacts on the price network is unknown until it actually happens and the two inventions contribution to economic growth cannot be compared until they enter the price network egro…
The growth stats were always at best a guess at the underlying reality.
The real economy has not grown significantly since the early 70s. People who correctly point to the massive increase in computational power as marvelous should contrast that with with real energy prices in the same period. That is what the hoi polloi feel, and they are more correct about that than a supertanker packed with econometricians and politicians. This is why the hated Trump is so beloved, notice how the campaign slogan isn’t ‘Make America Greater’, it is ‘Make American Great Again’. This admission of a failure is fascinating (for a politician) and utterly ignored by the press.
Post #2 93 days ago — in response to one of Hans Rosling’s famous Gapminder videos
Hans’s charts show convergence of undeveloped countries towards the West’s standard of living. Globalization basically.
This is a optimistic story but notice how the two largest wars in history are mere blips. Only China’s Maoist revolutions show up as periods of significant radical decline.
Do not let the apparent stability of the gapminder presentation give you the impression our society is on an ever upward trend. That belief is one we need to snap out of and fast.
Major questions need to be asked of the past. There are serious holes in the hypothesis that everything is getting better and better.
Why is it half a century since men walked on the moon. Almost 50 years. That is a long time! Blah blah ‘politics’ doesn’t cut it.
Why aren’t new effective medicines being invented and why is the cost of production in drug manufacture doubling every nine years while the costs of discovery (genome sequencing and x-ray crystallography) have radically declined.
Why are the majority of people in Western society’s not getting richer over the last two-four decades? The diversity of things to spend on has increased without a real increase in the quantity of money in the bank account and wallet.
Why did African decolonization result in epic (and ignored) failure? Today’s states are poorer by most metrics than they used to be half a century ago. Take a look at photographs of Egypt, South Africa and Zimbabwe from that time period. The difference is undeniable.
Why aren’t prices declining for basic materials in house construction? During the housing boom up to 2008 (materials should have been expensive) basic materials were cheaper than they are now. It seems like nobody is talking about basic supply & demand being inverted. You cannot explain this with economies of scale or price rigging cartels, there are limits to those things. Prices have doubled for basic materials while demand radically dropped in the interim (at least in my country, about 5k builds last year in the capital). Does anybody understand what the fuck happened here? A new build today must be > 300k as a result. We’ll have an epidemic of homelessness if this continues for much longer.
Post #3 66 days ago — on the intergenerational social contract
You probably already know this but that is something Niall Ferguson in his Reith lectures several years ago referred to as the breakdown of Burke’s Social Contract, that inter-generational warfare will ultimately turn young people to the right wing whether they like it or not (four years after that claim, we witness the surge of alt-right, chan culture going from random to the right, the ever broader resonance of neoreactionary thinking). At some point I think these social critiques of their parent’s religion (constantly reliving the 60s rebellion against their own parents) convert to something about political economy and this all goes supernova. I don’t think Trump is that point, this is a trend that is just beginning. I think the implosion of social democracy is on the way. Briefly, it is an end to migrants, healthcare and pensions (and military subsidies for us Euros). Instead resurgent tribalism, provoked and maintained by the Net and a total pull down of all those leftist memes about equality, oh the humanity, colonialism and so on. Basically from the perspective of the NYT it is the End Times. Hello and welcome back to the Victorian Era (2.0)!
All this is a symptom rather than a cause. Generational rebellion is quite normal after all. A total reinterpretation of history requires more of an explanation. That is what happens when the foundations come into question. Egalitarianism and universal thinking (as personified by Thomas Friedman) tends to flourish in times of peace and wealth, aristocracy when peace and wealth are in question. This is good news for Silicon Valley actually. And DARPA.
That means the cause is a lack of true economic growth. All economic growth must ultimately source from technological progress. The relationship between the technological world -> economic world -> social world -> political world is complicated but it exists, it is the bedrock of all.
Notice how money is free at 0% interest. Notice serious drops in oil price. Notice hordes of well educated students with no money. Notice lack of inflation. Notice the pervasive underemployment. The economy has lost its mojo. All those signs should traditionally have led to explosive economic growth, startup formation but they ain’t. The economy has lost its mojo in some structural way and the levers at the Fed and ECB aren’t responding except with the sound of grinding gears.
Post #4 51 days ago — on the migration issue
Looking at this exclusively from an economic perspective is a strategic mistake. The Irish say it puts the cart before the horse.
Migration does not merely bring units of labour or transfers of capital. In fact that is the most benign aspect of this subject. Nobody has a problem with his fellow man looking for his next opportunity, not even the most rabid nationalists I know, and doubtless as NRX I know more than most.
The central problem is something that at first appears to have nothing to do with migration. Namely; how is wealth actually created?
There are many answers to this question. Nearly all the obvious ones are wrong. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that almost every aid program, every economic structuring program in developing countries has repeatedly failed.
I suggest that we don’t actually know the answer. Perhaps we do not have all the correct axioms. Perhaps extrapolating from having the correct axioms is just infeasible. We do not know why nations rise or fall. There are just people who pretend to.
What we do know is history and the present.
In history we know 4 centuries ago English and the Dutch began growing at quite a different trajectory to the others. They were gradually followed by most European states.
In the present the most powerful nations on earth are the result of that outgrowth, with the Asian Giants only coming onstream very recently roughly a half century ago.
I believe there are two things to take note here.
1. Whatever economic growth is, it doesn’t transmit itself parsimoniously via word of mouth. We also know it has nothing to do with education, unbelievable though that may seem, there is ample evidence for this. North Korea is quite literate. The Communists were in general quite well read even as they fucked their countries into the ground. There are many African schools filled with enthusiastic learners (and disappointment when the economy proffers no value to much of this learning).
2. Economic growth is very discriminating. Based on culture. I think of culture as a collective idea network. There is a Occidental culture, there is an Oriental culture. The Occidental one grokked economic growth first, followed by the Japanese, Singporeans, Koreans, Taiwanese and then the Chinese with their SEZ. With the exception of the Japanese, that was very slow… suggesting that there is something… not simple… going on. The Asians after all are often very talented individuals. This is something about the collective.
Plainly the cultures that did not grok economic growth at all are the Africans and the Middle Easterners ex Israel. That may be starting to change with Iran but it is early days yet. Having oil is like winning a lottery ticket, the native economies are extremely impoverished and w/o oil…
Plainly the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ is rot. Economic growth is not native to white people and certainly not a particular religion. Despite that, the cultural explanation makes most sense in light of the economic disparities.
The interesting thing is that we know it is culture because of colonization. We know it is in the particular people but not necessarily in the genetics or their education.
If you have large numbers of migrants from MENA, places that have not grokked economic growth, then they are bringing a dysfunction with them. They may be carrying a silent burden, a deadly memetic anti-matter, and don’t even know it.
The individuals may be nice. Non-terrorists. Non-religious even. Friendly and civic minded neighbors. None of that matters if their network, which does not produce economic growth interferes with our network that does.
This is the great fear that afflicts nationalists instinctively.
Because again, if culture is what drives economic growth, and signs points to yes, then absorbing another culture which does not will lead to lots of little zero sum games, culminating in crime, terrorism and finally in broad conflict. You see it happening in France today, it is gradually but surely turning into a horror show.
That is the problem I never see addressed by migration discussions. No, not race, not genes, but the network problem.
Economists by the way know all of this. They just choose to call what I’m talking about ‘institutions’. They really are spineless. What are institutions but groups of people acting in a certain way, namely; a culture.
Post #5 45 days ago — on cargo cults and science
There is an American cartoon show called The Venture Bros, of which the main theme is actually American science and Cargo Cults.
Here’s a quote on the subject I made formerly, it is more about technology than science but there are parallel themes.
The cartoon series The Venture Bros symbolizes the Stagnation Hypothesis. If you don’t want to watch the entire series to understand the point, just take a look at the episode: Season 3 Episode 2: The Doctor Is Sin (the intro even features Dr T. Venture offering jobs to migrant laborers for which they are absurdly under qualified and very low wages. This, in light of the frequent complaints of worker scarcity in the midst of stagnant wages is quite poignant).
In the series the grandfather (deceased) was able to do all kinds of amazing innovations, space stations, underwater laboratories, biospheres, rolling walkways, new fabrics, all kinds of new machines. The next generation symbolized by Dr T. Venture was unable to compete with all this amazing success and began to act as a hanger-on, a me-too, acting as if he knew what was going on but in actuality understanding nearly none of it and therefore became reliant on sexing up what is really ancient technology to make himself look good to investors and his own self image. His sons, the next iteration of Ventures are permanent children, living in a technology wonderland they effectively treat as magical surroundings. Not only do they not understand the technology of their grandfather, but they don’t understand there is anything to understand, despite the fact that as clones they are actually technological artifacts themselves.
Unfortunately this supposed comedy show is a reasonable interpretation of the last few generations.
If you exclude computation (electronics/robots/AI/internet) then there just aren’t very many parts of the economy that are genuinely growing. This has been going on since the early 70s.
This has been obfuscated by the accounting of the economy.
The government and central banks have an incentive to produce numbers that sound rosy because they noticed long ago that if the people in the economy felt like things were going well, that they were more likely to spend, invest and work. There is a self fulfilling prophesy nature to it all.
The source of wealth or ‘more stuff’ is the ability to produce more stuff for less cost. Lower the inputs, up the outputs. Technology is a key element in making that happen.
The problem is that (ex-computation) new innovations are far less likely to affect the average person. Name a single invention outside computers of the last several decades. I do not mean a hypothetical abstraction in a laboratory somewhere.
When people find themselves coming up with close to nothing they resort to saying: well, maybe new innovation is bound up inside classical things we have but cannot see inside of (we are at the Dr T. Venture stage here).
It is certainly true that minor improvements accumulate into a quality of their own over time. That is Toyota’s business model. The insides of the cars experience consistent iterative improvement. There are similar analogs in other industries.
But. And this is the key point. That utterly fails to explain why new innovations aren’t reaching the common person. If we really were experiencing a boom in innovation and invention we would expect to see thousands of new fields and sub-fields opening up. What new materials technology do you have inside your home that did not exist in 1970? What forms of transport? There are literally dozens of major areas that have not seen any major innovation and they have stopped being labeled ‘technology’ as a result.
Post #6 40 days ago — on using the appropriate benchmarks
I don’t deny that quality of life improvements exist since the 70s.
The proposition I make is that wage growth halted for the average (median average) American in the 70s. The same phenomenon spreads to other Westernized countries too later on, most dramatically evident in the island of Japan which has spent 30 years keeping up maintenance.
Alongside this I proposed (here or elsewhere on HN) that we were and are yet presently living in a stagnant period. The thesis is well laid out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4
Stagnation is not a plateau or a halt to growth, but a slowdown in the rate of change. So there is some change, just not much relative to former periods. The economist Robert Gordon has written a life’s work on the subject. He may be wrong, but it is not a stupid idea.
The items you mention are examples of incremental improvements in existing technology. This is not unimportant, it is at least half the battle since what is the point of high technology if nobody can access its utility.
However my worry, and that of Levchin, Page, Gordon, Musk and Thiel is that we are not seeing breakthrough technologies able to scale up and this is a very troubling sign for the future.
Energy production and storage, space travel (Musks’s entire rationale is reasoned on the Stagnation Hypothesis), biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, central coordination, many important areas in our society are in some form of decay, diminishing returns are evident. Lots of PR and press releases but no impacts. Investors have gone bust in many of these areas, esp. in biotech, nanotech and cleantech. If everything is improving that shouldn’t be happening.
Again, the benchmark is not no change. The benchmark is the past history of those areas. You can pick bright spots in each industry and high achievements but we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats.
This can be difficult to believe if you live in a modern western city, but if you go to the peripheral of our world you can visibly see it rotting away. This is because it is not the center of the system that fails first, it is the peripheral.
In a period of rapid true growth you see whole new fields of development opening up from what used to be small niche fields (like computation used to be).
It is not about having faith in the future or technology, it is that we have to come up with business plans and ideas that make things happen or it is entirely plausible they never will happen. Believe me, I want a better future as well, I’m not trying to drag you down because I have a cynical personality or something like that.
Post #7 (on a slightly cryptic statement by Sam Altman that HN readers were curious about)
The logic behind it, I think game theory, is simple and does not just apply to democracy but any system of corporate or state government.
It goes like this:
Suppose there exist 2 parties to a conflict of interest. I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time.
Then it is possible for 1 party to play ball with the other party, but IFF there is a different, separate conflict of interest where the trade can be reversed.
So I win A, but only if I allow you to win B. ‘the next time’
This logic only can work if we allow each other to be winners.
Suppose our economic incentive was to ‘defect’ in game theory parlance, and defect always. Why would this be so?
Perhaps because we’re in a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. Perhaps I must win or I will die, in which case my non-cooperation with you is non-negotiable.
“I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time.”
Sam Altman, and Thiel, believe technology solves this by turning a potential rival good into non-rival goods. Or put more simply; if everybody can have stuff they are happy.
There can be exceptions to this logic, like a mother choosing her child’s survival over her own in a pregnancy gone wrong. But in a world without growth, without those potential negotiations ‘violence’ becomes selected for.
The important realization is not the trivial ‘more stuff makes people happy’. It does, but the real reason why growth is a big deal is that in the long run it selects for outcomes which don’t lead to deadlock leading to violence.
Where I part company with Sam, is the belief that democracy is worth saving. It is worth saving representation, each entity’s self interest in a system must be recognized yes, but not democracy. Ironically equal voting must lead to unequal outcomes. Right from the initial premise it does not hold up against physical reality. Like genetics, circumstance, and all of history. There are other systems in G-space that have the potential to be much better at governing. That includes systems in which people would feel much more represented than they do in our current system. Equality of votes is like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I mean even the NSDAP had policies on the environment and health most people agree with in the present. What does that say about our ability to select?
The relationship is close to axiomatic in game theory and democracy when looked at in the cold light of day is a pretty dim worldview to start with.
Post #8 (17 days ago) — on the boasts of academia and the reality in innovation
Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why we are requiring such skills?
The truth is that being a good politician has an inverse relationship with being a geek.
Peter Thiel has been pointing this out for many years. He asks, do we really have scientists anymore? Or are they really bureaucrats and politicians pretending to be scientists?
I am convinced it is the latter. I think we have whole universities filled with cargo cult science.
This relates neatly with some awkward facts about the modern education system.
For all the extraordinary efforts and feats of intellectual prowess it is also extraordinary how little they practically achieve. The number of breakthroughs has dramatically declined. Once you get past the PR bullshit and backslapping there is very little actually happening in many places in the ‘innovation economy’.
Take nanotech. I am not aware of any advances that make their appearance in a consumer’s home. I can think only of a handful of niche applications like expensive hydrophobic coatings. If the advances were occurring in the factories we should be seeing more refined low cost goods on a massive scale. Is that actually happening? I don’t know that it is. We’ve been promised a lot and been waiting for long time.
Take biotech. Nothing. Just nothing. I think the last biotechnology I interacted with was a yogurt. Can anybody name a single biotech invention or innovation that actually exists in people’s houses? In the 50s and 60s we had the Green Revolution, that counts. However the price of food has been rising considerably for several years now. There is certainly no food product that I consume that has become much cheaper.
The discovery of DNA is at least half a century ago. Despite much fanfare about CRISPR, why should we be sure that this time biologists are bringing home the bacon? Is anybody willing to bet that in ten years time there will be GM cool pets, much cheaper food, much cheaper quality wood for building from GM trees? I would not take that bet.
What about energy? Willing to bet your energy bills get much lower in the future?
Maybe a whole lot of people are totally full of shit. The basic metric of progress is that things get cheaper, but they’re not, so it isn’t happening. If you’re not willing to bet that prices decrease then maybe your confidence in the future of invention/innovation is misplaced.
