Ha!

Before reading the post, and not knowing how Thiel gave his performance, I 
would have said (and still think) that, for Thiel, the Antichrist is a role 
model.  An economist I worked with for a long time used to talk about Moby Dick 
with a wistful expression, clearly viewing Captain Ahab as the hero.

Eric


> On Aug 27, 2026, at 2:48, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> It's been awhile since we talked about the flaws of steelmanning ... a 
> sub-category of the fallacy fallacy, I think. This post was fantastic. The 
> OP's gymnastics blew me away.
> 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1vynnza/why_would_peter_thiel_be_interested_in_the/
> 
> I think it's wrong. But it's really good ... degenerate in a way ... an 
> expression of schematic thought. How many ways can the free variables in a 
> schematic sentence be filled in such that the sentence (and the language that 
> houses it) can remain consistent?
> 
> I was again piqued by "anacyclosis" and the stability of types of government. 
> In a recent Zoom, a colleague DMed me asking when all this peri-Trump 
> nonsense was going to end (especially the perversion of institutions like the 
> NIH). My answer was to keep their shoulder to the wheel, that hard/steady 
> work reliably wins the competition against bullshit. But I'm not hundy on 
> that, of course, because I'm a dyed in the wool skeptic. Diversity 
> facilitates resilience. And I'm either running out of ways to understand 
> diversity. Or it's steadily decreasing in every domain I'm aware of, from 
> music to bugs in the yard. Even *when* there's diversity in political 
> opinions, most of my friends hide behind litmus tests of some kind or another.
> 
> E.g. when discussing certain forbidden words, my woke friends insistently 
> claimed they would NEVER use one of the words. I spent about 2 hours trying 
> to repeat "Never say never" over and over again in a variety of different 
> ways. They came away convinced i'm some kind of crypto-nazi or somesuch. 
> That's fine. I'll take the reputational hit. But then, literally, about a 
> week later, one of the friends in that argument confessed to having an 
> affair. And our argument about never say never happened *right before* his SO 
> found out about it. They recalled a time prior to the affair where they 
> thought they were immune to such temptations. Now they realize how unstable 
> they were before the affair. If you think you're incapable of evolving into 
> some thing (e.g. pro-genocide or whatever), you should think again. The only 
> thing that has any chance of preventing such is diversity of thought.
> 
> Anyway, this paper might be interesting to some of us, here:
> 
> Political science meets physical science: The shared concept of stability
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fdoi.org%2f10.1093%2fpnasnexus%2fpgad401&c=E,1,mJ7jmavPHm3x7M3BBETHh77x668skOey-Ymopuj16rccQ8qfzFfRMcaHJQgydOw9nFXm6TfgCrUdJJWXs30RYZmlnW4uLjPufRzOWWsWK6XkNl0,&typo=1
> 
> Would be more interesting if the authors are not related. But I haven't 
> looked 'em up.
> 
> -- 
> 8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
> ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
> 
> 
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