Henry Farrell on "The political economy of billionaire derangement"

Henry Farrell, The political economy of billionaire derangement, Programmable Mutter, July 15, 2026.

He opens with two somewhat different quotes about billionaires, Tyler Cowen more or less in favor of them and Tim O’Reilly deeply skeptical of them. He suggests we breed them together:

To be clear: this hybrid would be notably different to Tim’s argument, and likely actively objectionable to Tyler. I alone am to blame. But surprisingly, there is inadvertent support for some of its key elements from Peter Thiel, who is a surprisingly valuable chronicler of the conditions that give rise to billionaire derangement, as well as a living example of it (the Antichrist is here!).2 Here, I’m drawing both on lectures that Thiel gave at Stanford, as summarized by his amanuensis Blake Masters, and the resulting co-authored book, Zero To One. These sources have a lot to say about the connections between entrepreneurship, kingship, and personal eccentricity.

The conclusion I draw is that the forces that Tim identifies, combined with specific aspects of the political economy of Silicon Valley, help explain the derangement of certain Silicon Valley billionaires and their epigones. Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.

Not too long ago, many people, including Tyler, hoped that the advance of classical liberalism would go hand-in-hand with the growing power of tech billionaires, advancing both causes at once. Now, politically influential tech billionaires have visibly lost contact both with reality and with anything that could plausibly be described as classical liberal values. See the screen shotted quote above. Rather than making snide asides about billionaire derangement syndrome, it might be time for such people to confront what actual billionaire derangement means for the ideological straddle that they have relied on for so long. That is even more so, in a world where markets as well as market-makers are being devoured by the passions.

To summarize the particulars of my theory: Thiel’s lectures and book provide good, if incomplete evidence that the princely passions described by Hirschman didn’t disappear, but went underground. Commerce and power were fused into a new ideology of entrepreneurial virtù that became highly influential among the founder community in Silicon Valley. This combined with Silicon Valley’s (and popular culture’s) tendency to connect genius with eccentricity, not simply selecting people who seemed strange, but compounding their strangeness through self-reinforcing feedback loops. Finally, this all happened in an intimate social environment of founders and funders. Billionaires know each other and measure themselves and their success against those they consider peers, in a dense entangled clique that commingles high degrees of mutual influence with rivalries and jealousies.

Farrell then goes on to quote Thiel’s book at some length, analyzing while going along. And so:

In short then, Thiel - both as reported by Masters and in collaboration with him - suggests that Silicon Valley is a place where being a founder is tantamount to being a king. You have a greater chance of succeeding if you are weird, and if you succeed, your weirdness will likely feed upon itself in feedback loops of positive reinforcement. Finally, it is a closely interconnected social system where the key people are conjoined in a dense tangible clique. They observe each other all the time, and are observed by others for cues of what you need to do to become a made man. [...]

SpaceX perhaps marks a culmination of the kingly ideal, a moment in which, as Tim puts it, someone like Musk can “raise enormous amounts of capital while freeing himself from any restraints from those who provide it, so that he can spend the proceeds on Mars, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence or whatever next satisfies his ambition.” But it is also the moment in which someone who is visibly profoundly disturbed has briefly become the world’s first trillionaire. And it is one in which others want to copy him.

And then a bow to Keynes’s “animal spirits” in the market place:

I’ll finish by noting that this is just one aspect of a greater change. Deranged billionaires like Musk and Thiel are both partly responsible for this transformation, and notable symptoms of it. Still, they are not the whole of it. The reason that the SpaceX IPO temporarily succeeded, even though the numbers make no sense whatsoever, is that investment markets too are ruled by vibes. Tyler’s co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, devoted years of his life to making the case for prediction markets, arguing that they would distill market wisdom into a more general source of knowledge on a multitude of topics. Now they are here, but all too often it’s spirits, not wisdom, that they seem to be distilling. Even more so for crypto. Matt Levine makes a joke about “Bleebzorx Tokens” to explain the worthlessness of memecoins, and someone else invents Bleebzorx Tokens to make a tidy profit.

There’s more at the link.

Peter Thiel contra Pope Leo

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir, called Pope Leo “a Chinese communist agent” for writing that AI must be used to “truly benefit the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

Who do you trust? Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 7, 2026

Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the Pope – Yikes!

NEW: JD Vance credits Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel with catalyzing his conversion to Catholicism.

Thiel has since branded Pope Leo XIV the “woke American pope” and cast him as a tool of the Antichrist.

He told Vance to ignore the pope on matters of morality and pray…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) June 26, 2026

Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, OpenAI & countercultures past & present

Claude 4.6 Medium summarizes a dialog I had with Gemini that started with an inquiry about 

1) Eliezer Yudkowsky, his early ideas, & his early following, 
2) then to his interactions with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman that got OpenAI started, 
3) to my own sojourn on LessWrong and 
4) concluded with the connection between 1960s counterculture and contemporary Silicon Valley computer culture.

For some reason Claude pretended to summarize the conversation in my voice.

* * * * *

A Conversation with Gemini About Eliezer Yudkowsky Bill Benzon, new-savanna.blogspot.com, June 24, 2026

I recently had an extended exchange with Gemini (accessed through the Google search interface) about Eliezer Yudkowsky — a figure I've been thinking about in the context of AI culture more broadly. What follows is a summary of where the conversation went.

It began with a query about Yudkowsky's 2007 paper Levels of Organization in General Intelligence (LOGI), which argues that recursive self-improvement could allow an AI to rapidly cycle through levels of cognitive architecture in ways that would break traditional training and testing boundaries. Gemini gave a competent account of the paper's significance for AI alignment theory.

I then offered my own assessment: reading LOGI years ago, I concluded it was the kind of work produced by a brilliant college sophomore who had figured out everything and decided to write it up. The sort of student you'd want to guide and nurture — but of course, that never happened with Yudkowsky, who is entirely self-educated. Gemini agreed this was a common reaction, and traced the characteristic features of his writing — grand scope, idiosyncratic jargon, overconfidence — to the absence of the standard academic filters that would normally shape a thinker. Without a thesis advisor to push back, he co-founded his own institutions (MIRI, LessWrong), creating an insulated subculture where he became the mentor rather than the student.

I offered a specific passage from LOGI as an example of what goes wrong. Yudkowsky dismisses semantic networks as "completely bankrupt" on the grounds that they're simple enough to write on paper. Gemini correctly identified this as a classic category error: confusing the notation with the mechanism. The diagram on the whiteboard is inert; what matters is the graph-traversal algorithms, the spreading activation, the interpreter running the data structure. Ironically, Yudkowsky later wrote extensively about the Map-Territory Fallacy — but as I put it to Gemini, he is constantly mistaking a map for the territory. His entire worldview treats clean theoretical proofs as if they dictate messy engineering realities.

From there the conversation turned to how Yudkowsky managed to build such a large following despite these intellectual weaknesses. Gemini confirmed that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, his 660,000-word fanfiction, was openly designed as a recruiting tool — drawing technically minded young people into the Rationalist and AI safety ecosystems. Countless engineers and founders who later populated early AI labs first encountered his ideas through that story.

The crowning irony: Yudkowsky's warnings about AI helped convince Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman that humanity needed a counterweight to closed corporate AI efforts — which led directly to the founding of OpenAI in 2015. Once OpenAI pivoted to the empirical, data-driven methodology of large language models, they completely bypassed the deductive logic "maps" Yudkowsky had spent decades drawing. Sam Altman acknowledged Yudkowsky's role in a 2023 tweet, noting that he had arguably done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else, and adding that he might someday deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

I told Gemini that wouldn't be necessary. I also shared my own experience: I joined LessWrong around the time ChatGPT launched, initially as an anthropological participant-observer, but stayed for the conversation, which I found genuinely useful. There are very smart people there. But the insularity was unmistakable — and I described one telling episode: someone on the forum was trying to spread Rationalism in Japan and struggling. I pointed out that Japanese popular culture, from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy through the Ghost in the Shell franchise, has a long history of viewing robots and AI as fundamentally benevolent — an expression of Shinto techno-animism, in which kami can reside in machines as naturally as in rivers. They simply didn't know about this cultural background. Gemini observed that the Western doomer ethos is rooted in a Frankenstein complex with Judeo-Christian substrata: creating life is hubris, and the creation must turn on its master. The Japanese paradigm operates from entirely different premises. The LessWrong response to my observation? They noted it and moved on.

After a while I tired of the place. One small anecdote captures the texture of the experience: I frequently link out to other things I've written, and one LessWrong post linked to an essay-review I'd done of Benny Shannon's book on ayahuasca. I noticed a significant spike of traffic to my Academia page coming from LessWrong and pointing to that essay — which tells you something about the undercurrent of interest in altered states of consciousness running alongside the dry decision theory. They approach psychedelics with an engineer's curiosity: the brain as a computer, phenomenology as data.

The conversation ended with what I think is the most useful historical frame. LessWrong is, in structure and function, a counterculture — but centered on computers and AI, with Yudkowsky as guru rather than Timothy Leary. And there's a genuine genealogical link through San Francisco and transhumanism: Stewart Brand bridging the Merry Pranksters to personal computing, the Extropians of the 1990s who wanted to transcend the body via nanotechnology and cryonics rather than LSD, and then Yudkowsky emerging from that same Bay Area Transhumanist mailing-list culture. Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture maps this lineage. The counterculture became the vanguard — but corporate reality, as I noted to Gemini, has not submitted. Bill Gates and his successors were never absorbed by the counterculture. Peter Thiel, who was an early funder of MIRI, has since publicly labeled Yudkowsky a Luddite and positioned AI safety concerns as obstacles to American technological dominance. The "well-run alternative universe" of LessWrong lost all leverage once scaling deep learning required billions of dollars in silicon, electricity, and data centers. The colorful intellectual vanguard warmed society up to the idea of AGI; then the massive engine of global capitalism took the steering wheel.

The subculture keeps its cozy, insular forum to debate the semantics of the map. The corporate empires plow ahead across the territory.

Ishmael Reed takes on the Tech Bros

David Streitfeld, Elon Musk and Friends in the Den of Oakland’s Literary Lion, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

Fourth paragraph:

Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.

Later:

Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. “King Ludd’s Revenge” is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.

“Instead of a straight narrative, I improvise,” the 88-year-old writer said. “It’s like Louis Armstrong singing ‘Stardust.’ He doesn’t do it the way it’s written.”

Oakland is poorer, Blacker and more maligned than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the Bay. Having the trial here happened at random — Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and the company they founded together, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to the federal court in Oakland — but feels a little like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend to mundane Earth to settle a dispute.

Mr. Reed, an Oakland resident who has celebrated and defended the city for decades, may be the only one in town noticing who’s here. “Everybody’s focused on the N.B.A. playoffs,” he explained.

“King Ludd’s Revenge” takes its title from the legendary leader of the workers’ revolt in England in the early 19th century. With the ascent of A.I., the Luddites have come back into fashion. The play begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who backed President Trump in 2016, bursts into the room. “I think I’ve identified the leader of the Anti-Christ Syndicate,” he says.

Mr. Musk: “Who might that be?”

Mr. Thiel: “Greta Thunberg.”

Mr. Musk: “That girl who leads the environmental movement? That’s ridiculous. The Bible says the Anti-Christ is a beast with seven heads.”

Mr. Thiel: “She’s the most prominent head, don’t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, woke, one-world state, Barack Obama and the 19th Amendment. This is the Beast that decelerated our progress. This is why there has been no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s.”

Adolf Hitler, on a two-day pass from Hell, shows up next. The play is a work in progress.

Near the end:

Mr. Musk claims 240 million followers on X, his social media platform, and has a fortune approaching $1 trillion. Mr. Reed’s primary publisher is now in Canada. His biggest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. The street used to have several drug dens; now it is upper middle class.

“I’m a Black guy living in North Oakland, writing about titans — people who live on Mount Olympus,” he said. He listened to some of the trial on an audio feed. He thought of Shakespeare, specifically “Titus Andronicus.”

“That play is about revenge,” Mr. Reed said. “And cannibalism. These tech people want to devour each other.”

Mr. Altman may be the guy in control of the most significant A.I. company, but Mr. Reed finds him rather flat as dramatic material.

Mr. Musk is different.

“I don’t find him amusing in real life, but he’s amusing in my play,” Mr. Reed said. “I started this because I read that 14 million people will possibly die because Elon Musk ended U.S.A.I.D. It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to accomplish that.” Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.

And so it goes. There's much more at the link.

Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Does Peter Thiel Think He's GOD? [Pope Leo XIV and AI]

You Tube:

Jon Favreau is joined by Christopher Hale to discuss Pope Leo XIV's warnings against A.I.

Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? Offline with Jon Favreau is a place where you can take a break from doom-scrolling and tune in to smarter, lighter conversations about the impact of technology & the internet on our collective culture. Intimate interviews between Pod Save America host Jon Favreau and notable guests like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Margaret Atwood, and Megan Rapinoe spark curiosity and introspection around the various ways our extremely online existence shapes everything from the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. Together we’ll figure out how to live happier, healthier lives, both on and offline.

At some point they mention Ross Douthat's NYTimes interview with Peter Thiel and how there's a moment where Thiel wasn't sure whether humanity was worth saving. Here's that moment"

Douthat: But the world of A.I. is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative — whatever word you want to call it — view of the technology than you’re expressing here. And you mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn’t anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.

Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

Thiel: Um, yeah.

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel: But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

And then orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so ——

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.

Jesus in the Valley

I don't recall just when I first learned about Peter Thiel, or how. Perhaps it was over at Marginal Revolution, a blog that Tyler Cowen runs along with his friend and colleague, Alex Tabarrok. Cowen is a big fan of Thiel's, regards him as one of the premier, if under-appreciated, public intellectuals of our time. I've been following Marginal Revolution for years. Thiel comes up often enough, so it's plausible that that's where I learned out about Thiel.

Anyhow, when I learned about Thiel, I also learned that, not only was he a Christian, but that he was something of a fan/student/disciple (?) of René Girard, the literary critic and philosopher. Now, Girard I've known about for years, since my freshman year at Johns Hopkins. During freshman orientation a number of lectures had been made available to us. They were on a variety of subjects, all given at the same time. We had to pick one, or, I assume, none at all. I picked one on something called "cultural relativity." Just why I picked that one, I do not know. But I did, and it was given Girard. Strangest thing I'd ever heard – that was my impression. Later on I took a number of courses given by Dick Macksey. He had Girard as a guest lecturer. That's when I learned about mimetic desire and sacrifice, Girard's major themes.

But I digress. This post isn't about me or Girard. It's an excerpt from an article in The New York Times, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley, by Emma Goldberg. Here's the opening paragraphs:

Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God.

The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar bumps, mimosas and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing kingmaker, delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness and Jesus Christ. The guests were enthralled.

“The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian,’” recalled Michelle Stephens, Mr. Stephens’s wife. “‘He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?’”

That reaction — eyebrows raised, curiosity genuine — gave Ms. Stephens an idea: Gather influential people, including in Silicon Valley, to talk about Christian belief. Last year, she started a nonprofit called ACTS 17 Collective, which holds events where the bigwigs of the tech and entertainment industries discuss their faith. For those seeking not just spiritually but also professionally, it’s a chance to get close to industry demigods.

Mr. Thiel was the featured speaker at the first ACTS 17 event last May, at the San Francisco home of Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator. He talked about how Christian theology informs his politics and which of the Ten Commandments he finds most meaningful. (The first and last: Worship God, and don’t covet what others have.) A D.J. added ambience, mixing worship beats for the more than 200 attendees. [...]

The name ACTS 17 is an acronym (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), but it also refers to the biblical chapter in which Paul the Apostle crisscrosses Athens and Thessaloniki to spread the Gospel among Greek “kings and queens of culture,” as Ms. Stephens puts it, the eminent and affluent demographic that she aims to minister to today. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive Christian calling, she acknowledged.

“We were always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized,” Ms. Stephens said. “I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to chasing the elusive — fortune, breakthroughs, power — but God has not tended to rank high on the list.

Frankly, and judging from the big-money hijinks surrounding AI these days and the shenanigans Musk is up to in Washington – Musk has worked with Thiel and claims to be a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” – serving "the meek, the lowly, the marginalized" is not high on the list of things that Silicon Valley cares about. Goldberg's article gets around to that. She has more to say about Thiel as well, and the Girard connection. It's a good read.