Well it is their reality. It's more like most people live in a different, crueller reality than them.

This quote is partially apt to your idea:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw

I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.

My pet theory is that billionaire weirdness and AI psychosis have the same root cause: talk too much to sychophants and the human mind starts to go off the rails.

Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.

A memento stultitiae if you will? Someone to follow you around and remind you of your foolishness.

I wonder how often someone in his orbit tells him he is wrong?

Shit, I post my idiot ideas to HN and people tell me my ideas are wacky and I'm a dumbass. For free!

You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?

Of course a conversation about Peter Thiel and the Vatican has someone finding a way to mention Elon

The book Zero to One is legitimately good.

His actions helping Hulk Hogan against Gawker were also thoroughly deserved.

I wonder if he has any positive memories. All these billionaires are so detached from regular life that they don’t experience what humans normally do. It’s why they’re mostly sociopaths.

That’s pretty much what happened in the books. More accurately he lost all hope for the world after being fed visions by Sauron to manipulate him. Hey wait…

One way to view AI-induced psychosis, is that it's just giving regular people access to the kind of sycophancy powerful people always had.

This is what concerns me. The VP is a protege of a billionaire who wants to end democracy.

Couldn't this antichrist stuff be his sane/rational strategy to manipulate the powerful but religious rightwing people under his sway? Is there evidence to assume he himself is on the verge of some kind of psychosis and not fully in control of his faculties?

> This guy is obviously on drugs half of the time, his wealth shields him from reality and the yes-men around him let his crazy anti-humanist ideas fester in his mind and turn into religious psychosis. No need for AI here.

You just described a good dozen or so VC/Tech Bros

The strain(s) of Christianity we have today are in large part the result of chance and power plays, it's a fascinating history.

More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.

A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).

A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.

He is going around talking about biblical prophecies and the antichrist so regardless of whether you consider thiel a Christian or whether he considers himself a Christian the comment you are responding to is entirely accurate in saying he is interested "only in the hate and doom parts of [Christianity]".

Thiel is a heretic.

But he is a wanker. Does that help?

He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlett that is the final mile of the enlightenment. Those guys all have that same shellshocked face and the same mission: to get humanity stable, progress is every step towards a sort of global "home for the handicapped and prone to selfdestruct" everything else is just soothing sounds.

Christianity is supported because it has shown itself to be the only culture capable to produce working institutions and a rule of law. He is all for that, as the alternative is basically permawar with nukes.

Every step taken, every plan, every endavour is part of a scenario tree with fallbacks towards that goal. Selfsurveilance, a hardened education system (ai), if you start to look at the world from that angle a ton of what they do, starts to make way more sense. Also from that point of view, money itself constantly looses value, as the scenario falls down the three. Its capabilities increasing the odds that are valuable. The last billionaire gets a potato for all of it.

His anti-christ is the loop deformation damage of humanity, a species stuck in a low tech environment, unable to ever regain complexity even if history throws it a mounttain of ressources. Look at he middle east for understanding.

This guy belongs in an institution, not in control of an entire power apparatus.

And what makes you think that's nonsense?

It's disappointing but unsurprising how little the HN crowd is able to engage with these sorts of abstract discussions. I swear it's got much worse here over the years for anything other than arguing about kernels and AI.

Thiel is painting with words as the Book of Revelations itself does, so trying to interpret all this literally will of course sound like nonsense. Revelations describes Jesus as a "lamb with seven eyes and seven horns", which like the rest of the book is meant symbolically.

So Thiel doesn't literally believe Greta Thunberg or the Pope have horns and a forked tail. The last link sums it up correctly:

> In Thiel’s apocalyptic vision, the Antichrist isn’t a horned beast so much as a seductive movement bent on halting human progress.

At his exclusive lectures in San Francisco, Thiel argued that the ultimate end-times tyrant would come as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” using doomsday fears to seize global control over technology.

He railed against “legionnaires of the Antichrist” in today’s world — a cast that, in his view, includes environmentalists, international agencies and regulators who urge caution on AI or climate change.

If you think progress is the highest form of salvation from human's naturally fallen state, then those who want to halt progress would be the opposite of that. Hence the anti-christ.

The biblical/Christian spin on this argument probably helps him attract attention to these ideas but the idea that leftism is anti-progress is hardly new - anyone observing the way the Soviets approached technological development could have argued that - so the religious framing might just obfuscate things rather than bring clarity. Especially as the Book of Revelations is one of the most symbolically obfuscated books of the Bible and reads like it was written in a kind of code meant only to be understood by Christians at the time it was written.

I can see the logic of talking to the people who believe they will live forever, once you start wondering "what if people could actually live forever?"

Thanks. Most sites including that one require a subscription but I found a very rough, apparently auto-generated transcript available here:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010244372/peter-...

It unfortunately doesn't include niceties like attributing who said what, but it's enough to get the gist.

Edit: This isn't a transcript of his lectures. It's a podcast where he talks about some of his general ideas, with this idea of the antichrist appearing only briefly at the end.

Annoyingly, it seems someone recorded these lectures and leaked the audio to left wing papers, who then of course didn't publish transcripts but only their own personal interpretations of them, telling readers what to think. How very on-brand.

He's probably interested in getting an angle on the whole thing since he knows Christians will get more nervous as tech develops, and they still have a lot of power in this world. Primitive takes on new tech developments can be detrimental to humankind at large. Talking in the abstract of course, I'm not sticking up for any of his points, I don't even really know them to be honest.

As for the other party, probably curious on what he has to say, considering he's up to speed with today's tech and future perspectives on it.

If tech really finds a way for humans to proceed further in a different form that will be a major headache with religious people. One simple argument for changing form is that the Sun will eventually scorch Earth so we do have an expiry date. And there's no way we're making it out of here in this current form, this is developed for the conditions of this planet, forcing it in other environments will eventually wipe us out. So logically we'll have to change form if we want to make it outside of this planet.

In this sense, religious people can condemn humanity to basically death if they block tech developments, thinking some god will "save" us, and by "save" I mean let wipe.

So not as clear cut. You might hate the guy but he's not dumb, I think he knows what he's doing, or at least trying to do. But I have no clue on the "how", so I cannot talk about what he wants to do, specifically, with humans.

Not completely true, the bible mention "antichrists" as in many and a particular "The Antichrist". The Antichrist is supposed to be the apex of the hubris.

If you like, we could compare a single Thiel adulthood to individual randomly chosen lives of popes. The average pope has a lot more blood on their hands. Both are bad, but one has caused more harm to humanity no matter which way you slice it. To argue that a single heretic is worse than the whole catholic church rings pretty silly to me. The best would be if they were to both destroy each other, but let's be real and acknowledge that Peter Thiel is going to die and become irrelevant long before the catholic church, which may very well continue on for another two thousand years for all we know.

I think it's a reasonable argument that we should be more concerned with the organization that has the better part of a two thousand year track record of murdering people, but in either case I did just accuse both of them of being antichrists. Anyway, Greta is my queen.

Which one is going to give me less downvotes? :D

> Any proposed link between any antichrists and the book of Revelation was created in the past few hundred years.

Actually, the idea of an end times Antichrist has been around for much of Christianity's history.

Irenaeus of Lyon synthesized the beast of Revelation (which is what most people conflate with "The Antichrist"), Daniel's imagery, and Paul's "man of lawlessness" (2 Thess. 2) into a composite end-times figure back around 180 CE in his work "Against Heresies". Additionally, Hippolytus of Rome also wrote an entire treatise, "On Christ and Antichrist", back in early 200 CE, that also explored that relevant symbolism in the Old and New Testaments.

For context, both Irenaeus and Hippolytus are considered among the most important of the early Church Fathers.

Hence the eye roll. Peter Thiel is Silicon Valley like, say, Trump or Biden is white people.

Technically, I think the blade did most of the brain damage to Louis XVI.

I don’t think the church would consider the broad contours of Darby heretical. It’s not heretical to talk about many antichrists plus one final Antichrist.

This is about the most accurate description of many of the "thought leaders" in the tech industry I've ever read.

As someone put it, “it turns out 4d chess is topologically isomorphic to checkers.”

The article on the website is written by the Pope's envoy on AI matters.

I think calling that "the Vatican's article" is fair.

Perhaps one unifying principle behind all the iterations of the Catholic church as social mores changed over time and its influence waxed and waned and was coopted by secular kingdoms, is that every single one of them might have written an article entitled "should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake", if someone had taken the time to explain Peter Thiel to them in terms they might understand. And concluded "yes, probably".

The "nowadays" Catholic church, for better or worse, is also very, very different from the Catholic church that existed before "nowadays". They don't even engage in holy wars anymore, as just one example, that's up to other governments nowadays.

One could also say that a two millenia old institution has evolved alongside the rest of humanity.