No, some people are actually nutjobs with nutjob beliefs.

Sure they are, but Thiel is not one of them. Or rather, there's little reason to think the nutjob beliefs he presents to you are his sincerely held nutjob beliefs.

You run into people sometimes, where you realize they're testing the waters constantly to figure out where they have you and what they can get away with.

Nah, I've met him. He believes plenty of nutjob shit.

Traditional response to a non-rich person saying nutjob shit: Are you a fucking idiot?

Traditional response to a rich person saying nutjob shit: That's really interesting, especially as it connects to this thing I am working on that needs funding

Facebook's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: Check out this other nutjob shit

ChatGPT's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: You've nailed it. You're thinking about this exactly how a professional philosopher would.

One thing we learned from the Epstein documents was that he was very good at controlling people's perception of him. It would be wrong, for instance, to think his derisive use of "goy" was reflective of real beliefs. He just found it useful to come across that way to some people. He took pride in "befriending" both Røed-Larsen (architect of the Oslo agreement, moderate on Israel) and Noam Chomsky (big Israel critic) at the same time he was shooting the shit with ethnic supremacists.

I assume Peter Thiel, and many similar people, are basically the same. If less competent at it. That you've met him doesn't mean you know his sincere beliefs - I think a good default assumption is that he doesn't have many, since sincere beliefs get in the way of getting the kind of power he has.

Ah yes, much better to just assert your own perception of what they believe, even in contradiction to their stated words and visible actions.

Sometimes people just believe insane shit.

"Standard religious orthodoxy for major religion but stated explicitly in relation to modern events" isn't even on the outer perimeter of insane. In principle, billions of people believe most of what Thiel believes.

It's just unusual to hear an allegedly smart person actually say it out loud in earnest, because when you do, a smart person realizes that in fact mainstream religious views (any Abrahamic religion's apocalypse lore) are fucking insane.

But that's just reason to think Thiel has some more courage, more confidence, or less to lose than your standard intelligent Christian. All of which is obviously true. It is not reason to believe he doesn't earnestly believe basic tenets of his own religion, which you have provided no evidence for.

> He took pride in "befriending" both Røed-Larsen (architect of the Oslo agreement, moderate on Israel) and Noam Chomsky (big Israel critic) at the same time he was shooting the shit with ethnic supremacists.

There's literally nothing even contradictory in this, so not sure what you think this demonstrates. One can simultaneously be friends with all of the above characters -- in earnest.

You can be a nut job with but job beliefs and be smart about it. Obviously our dear friend from Austria wasn't going to directly talk about crematoria.

Strong disagree, he's one of them, and he means it. The myth that these guys are 'really smart' should die, they're good at grifting, but they're not so smart they can't have nutjob beliefs and when they say what they think and it is negative believing them will not lead to a less true picture of the individual.

Nah, it's advanced SEO. He almost certainly didn't even come up with it himself; billionaires and even centimillionaires can have teams of PR people just coming up with this shit for them all the time.

Boris Johnson (or his PR team) did it with the bus thing, and cheese [0].

Yes, Thiel has nutjob beliefs. Utterly insane.

No, this wasn't one of them. Too calculated. Too sweaty.

We're talking about one of the guys connected to Cambridge Analytica here.

0 - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/boris-johnson-google-search...

Maybe we should be clear about which beliefs we're talking about.

If your claim is that he doesn't believe Greta Thunberg specifically is the Antichrist, then sure. But that's just listening to the words that he says. He never says he believes Greta is actually the Antichrist.

However I believe he does actually believe what he actually said, which is not any more sane: "In our world, [the Antichrist] is far more likely [than Edward Teller] to be Greta Thunberg."

So yes OP is correct that Thiel said and does actually believe Greta "is potentially" the Antichrist. But that's a different claim than saying that she actually is the Antichrist. There are thousands or potentially millions of people (most unknown to Thiel) who could fit into the Greta-Antichrist category broadly. So it's a much weaker claim than that Greta is herself singularly the Antichrist.

Both claims are equal levels of insane and intellectually bankrupt though.

Exactly. The literal claim is just a fig leaf for being able to say 'oh, he surely doesn't mean that' whereas the subtext is far more important and he definitely believes that based on this and many other statements and actions in the past.

Smart people are also good at convincing themselves.

I never said he's really smart. I think he's a garden variety - well, I'd say psychopath, but maybe that's not the whole of it or even the central bit. I think he's one of the quite common people whose first and basically only need, is to always be in control of the situation, including knowing where he has other people. He's willing to lie about what he believes to get that control. He might say something off-the-wall (like bringing up the antichrist) because seeing how you respond to it is more valuable to him than appearing consistent or not-crazy. He probably thinks he can work with it however you respond.

People like this don't hold many sincere beliefs, they spend their time thinking about what they should present to you, not what they should actually believe.

I know a couple of other politicians as well where I say over and over again, that's not them being a blowhard, that's a trial balloon. They're testing the water for how much of a lunatic blowhard it's profitable to be.

These people want to fill Trump's shoes when he's gone, that's very obvious. But I think - and hope - that Trump's fans will notice what they're doing and not be charmed by it.