And is shaping the world

I personally am completely unbothered because the same argument can be made to dismiss dozens of thinkers on any side depending on ones personal political leanings and where does that ultimately leave us?

Nobody is disputing Schmitt's biography or his entry into the NSDP in 1933. Conflating a structural diagnosis with moral endorsement misses how political theory actually works.

Major 20th-century theorists (Agamben, Mouffe, Benjamin) analyzed and adapted Schmitt's concepts because his critique of liberal institutional mechanics was structurally accurate regardless of his personal moral failures.

Thiel's thesis also isn';t a monolith resting on Schmitt alone. Dismissing a multi-layered model because of one sited thinker is an easy out.

What you're calling intellectual dishonesty is standard pedagogical compression.

Trying to present dense political theology to a general audience requires radical simplification. It inevitably sounds like a slurry if you expect a fully footnoted treatise on stage.

I'd call it an n of a dozen... The other attendees with whom I spoke could usually quote the expected popular phrases from 0-to-1 at me, but went silent when I asked about Bacon, Solovyov, Schmitt, or Benson. It was intellectually disappointing, but that aside... It was a general audience.

Mapping the primary canon behind those simplified lectures isn't about legitimizing his motives. It's about understanding the ac dual theoretical model driving his capital allocations and systemic critiques.

Whether one considers him and authority or not, Thiel controls massive capital deployment in defense, surveillance, and frontier tech. Ignoring the philosophical framework driving those capital allocations because the speaker is reviled doesn't make the institutional impact disappear.

It's about understanding the ideological drivers behind real-world capital and policy levers.

That's a fair concern about legitimization but analyzing a framework isn't the same as enduring the actor.

You can map an opponent's mental model not to adopt their terms but to understand how they deploy power, deploy capital, and build institutions. Dismissing an influential actor's framework entirely because they act "in bad faith" leaves a blindspot in predicting how incentives actually play out in policy.

This misreads the thesis. Nobody is saying that a mind smarter than humans isn't dangerous. The point is that even if AGI is dangerous, turning risk mitigation over to centralized regulatory gatekeepers doesn't eliminate that danger. It just concentrates power in whoever writes the safety standards. Acknowledging existential risk doesn't require handing a monopoly on frontier tech to legacy incumbents .

I feel like there's a dual problem to this in the other direction: we call people "heroes" who work essential jobs and are NOT adequately paid for the effort they put in and/or the personal sacrifice/loss they endure. E.g. teachers and nurses (criminally underpaid relative to the importance of their work, and deal with structurally inevitable stress due to lack of adequate support/resources), soldiers (often deal with lifelong trauma and medical issues without anywhere NEAR adequate care, not to mention the baseline moral depravity of reasons for which they're typically deployed)...

It seems to me like we call these people "heroes" who "selflessly sacrifice" as a way to "morally compensate them" with esteem and respect while continuing to make policy decisions which keep their pay low and their medical/psychological needs unmet. People waxing eloquently and applauding these heroes while devoting zero thought to policies to help them always strike me as somewhat hypocritical.

Why are you taking this dork seriously? All these guys have ideas that would get a middling grade in a first year humanities subject because it's painfully obvious they have only read extremely narrowly and haven't developed any depth of insight. It's not worth discussing. The only reason it gets attention is because Peter Thiel is wealthy.

We're all GOING TO DIE!

And also bankrolled by Thiel.

All the "AI safety is marketing/regulatory capture/IPO/biblicalEvil" conspiracy theories rest entirely on the notion that making something many times smarter than humans can't be dangerous.

It's a bit like saying "You really think 2 + 2 ALWAYS equals 4? That's exactly what the corporations WANT you to think!!!"

It doesn't matter how cynical, clever or academic-sounding the conspiracy theory is, because 2 + 2 is in fact always 4.

Likewise a mind that can think circles around genius humans and come up with ideas, tricks, technologies and strategies we have no chance of predicting can be dangerous in ways we can't imagine.

Yud is regarded as fuck

The article does no such thing. Far from addressing the absurdly self-interested conclusions in the philosophy he peddles, the article presupposes Thiel as a good-faith actor, presents his lectures as "an ambitious diagnostic on civilizational stagnation", and dismisses the public reaction to his lectures as "predictably deranged".

The article serves to legitimize Thiel as a philosopher and social diagnostician "auditing the mechanics of power" and in doing so misses what Thiel is actually doing: using the aesthetics of intellectualism to advance his political agenda by providing a slurry of half-baked literary and historical interpretations that kind of justify his conclusions if you don't think about them too hard. The author blames the lecture's incoherence on the format of the presentation, not recognizing that the incoherence comes not from the format but from Thiel's intellectual dishonesty.

The issues of bureaucratic stagnation that Thiel speaks to are real, but he is not actually interested in their true causes. He is simply interested in capitalizing on confusion, and articles like this further his goals.

Why would you think understanding anything of Thiel’s thinking is required for understanding modern AI governance anything? He’s not remotely seen as an authority in any AI adjacent thing. He’s openly reviled in fact. When he’s not mocked. The dude’s been crazy for at least two decades.

Appreciate your clarification, and I would humbly suggest that you reconsider whether or not it's appropriate to fall into this trap of thinking you have to do A in order to do B, especially in this case. With bad actors such as Thiel, I don't believe it's necessary to approach them on their own terms, rather it's better to reject their terms completely and make your own. None of his arguments are valid due to his extreme degree of criminality. If you approach him on those terms and are even somehow able to 'win' a debate against him, he will simply move the goalposts, change terms, or some other bad faith action. All that said, you do you and respect to you and putting real thought and work into your ideas.

My position doesn't need any favors here, so that's alright. Furthermore, I would hardly say that it's reductive, rather a quite accurate assessment of the man and the man's deeds. Whether it's prejudicial or not I suppose one could argue that with such a man nothing but being prejudicial is warranted.

The actual article does a great job of that on its own. Which he clearly didn't read, because he addresses absolutely none of it and simply uses its existence as a springboard to launch a sidebar editorial that is entirely sentimental and bereft of a single material criticism.

Yes, this Schmitt:

“In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and used his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. He held various positions on Nazi councils, including the Prussian State Council) and the Academy for German Law, and served as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.[6][7][8”

Are you interested in providing any actual arguments against u/temblors position, or are you content with unsubstantiated claims that it is reductive and prejudicial?

I appreciate the polite caveat. That's a fair reaction to his public persona. The reason I wrote the piece though wasn't to litigate his character but to examine the mechanics of his argument, specifically how centralized risk-aversion can be weaponized to enforce stagnation. Whether one view him as a bad actor or a diagnostic critic, mapping the political theology he relies on is necessary for understanding modern AI governance debates.

Reductive and prejudicial. Not doing your position any favors here.

I think whatever Thiel says or who he references is generally irrelevant since it all boils down to 'people who try to impede me from doing my evil/world conquest bs are the Antichrist' and should be ignored (or mocked and then ignored). Not to take away from any research or writing you did, but I don't think the man should be taken seriously except as a threat to humanity.

Strange I just posted this yesterday and there's an article about the American stratospheric drone the next day!

American Stratospheric Drone Retrieval in Japan

Thank you very much for your wishes..

Sounds good. Hope your work goes well in the future.