The kinds of things which an upper-class American is prone to believe (which would not garner him favour with other members of society), I suppose. I mean, I'm not expecting him to be secretly yearning for a Communist workers' paradise. Also he is an entrepreneur with transhumanist sympathies, therefore a forward-thinking guy, so probably the internet crusaders from the opposite camp aren't bashing his ideas yet -- because they haven't yet conceived of them; you can count on people like him to think in an original way -- but probably will be in 20 years from now.
HOWEVER. I take issue with the thing you're attempting to do with this post. Obviously none of us are Thiel himself; obviously the attempt to guess what Thiel meant is a classic case of grasping at straws; whatever the community can come up with probably isn't even in the same ballpark as Thiel's secret heresies. Besides, if I were him, I'd personally be bothered by some random people's attempts to guess at beliefs I don't want to make public, for reasons relating to the telephone game that ensues and the risk of other people from other websites misinterpreting those positions as my own. Alas, that is but my own take on this, because I'm not Peter Thiel. Obviously.
I regard this kind of challenge as inflammatory. Even though I remember having made a case for more political discussion on LessWrong, time and again I get reminded how awfully LessWrongers handle political topics, and how badly I had overestimated people's aptitude at not causing political discussions to degenerate into flame wars. This is worse than the average political discussion. This is an open invitation for people to fill in the blanks with their pet thoughtcrimes, as long as they consider themselves roughly on the same side of the political spectrum as Thiel. It's going to attract the worst sort of people, and it can harm participants, onlookers, and Thiel himself.
You're a smart guy, you don't need me to tell you that we cannot run an accurate simulation of Thiel, and I know from your article publication history that you're not doing this for inquisitorial purposes, which leaves the intention of drawing attention to his "really good ideas". However, the man himself (ostensibly) wants the opposite. Which he is in full right to do. So how about we leave him be and refrain from making wild guesses as to what he meant?
I don't know about inflammatory, but it's pretty clearly a waste of time. We're more likely to find out what is true by looking for that rather than guessing about what Thiel is thinking.
TYLER COWEN: Peter, tell me something that’s true that everyone agrees with you on.
PETER THIEL: Well there are lots of things that are true that everyone agrees with me on. I think for example even this idea that the university system is somewhat screwed up and somewhat broken at this point....You know, the ideas that are really controversial are the ones I don’t even want to tell you. I want to be more careful than that. I gave you these halfway, in-between ideas that are a little bit edgier.
But I will also go a little bit out on a limb: I think the monopoly idea, that the goal of every successful business is to have a monopoly, that’s on the border of what I want to say. But the really good ideas are way more dangerous than that.
Full interview. HT Quora.
What are some good answers and your guess as to his answer? Please exclude issues relating to race and gender.