What are "the really good ideas" that Peter Thiel says are too dangerous to mention?

James_Miller

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.

TYLER COWEN: Peter, tell me something that’s true that everyone agrees with you on.

Full interview. HT Quora.

What are some good answers and your guess as to his answer? Please exclude issues relating to race and gender.

Notice how Thiel mentions his idea about the importance of monopoly right before he alludes to something edgier. That's a bit odd, as talking about monopoly as a goal isn't very edgy at all.
Thiel is a libertarian. Libertarians often complain that government is able to misbehave because it is monopolistic.
Remember that Thiel is a known supporter of Seasteading--he initially funded Patri Friedman's Seasteading Institute.
Thiel has also been known to criticize democracy.
Thiel is a known Straussian.

My guess would be that Thiel's edgy idea has to do with something like Charter Cities (often criticized as a form of colonialism/imperialism) or new country projects.

In a totally different direction, I've long wondered whether NASA might be suppressing promising designs for advanced propulsion systems fearing their potential for extremely risky weaponization.

I doubt Thiel is thinking of this in particular however.

EDIT: Since some people below seem confused, I'm not saying I think think it is likely that NASA is really suppressing anything, I'm just saying that I have wondered about it in the past.

In a totally different direction, I've long wondered whether NASA might be suppressing promising designs for advanced propulsion systems fearing their potential for extremely risky weaponization.

As someone who has worked at NASA, I can tell you that is simply impossible. NASA and keeping secrets don't mix.

0ChristianKl11y

What do you mean with "suppressing"? Keep them as a secret and only manufacture the weapons for the US military?

6[anonymous]11y

Regarding NASA and research suppression, I have an extremely difficult time understanding what could draw you to that conclusion. All manner of space based weaponry has been looked into by governments and found not terribly useful or practical. The energy you can bring along on a spacecraft is likewise very limited by mass constraints. The history of successes and failures in propulsion technology does not need a human cause; the universe itself may be to blame as may economic or practicality or political issues. EDIT: a few figures to give some idea of scale. The Saturn V rocket carried a total chemical energy of ~2.5 kilotons of TNT full on the launchpad. A small subset of that winds up in the kinetic energy of motion. The Dawn probe can manage ~10 km/s by leaving its ion engine on for years on end and using electricity to shove fuel out the back extremely rapidly, producing a total kinetic energy change equivalent to ~14 tons of TNT (and not carrying the necessary energy in its fuel, merely using the sun to accelerate an inert gas electrically, and imparting much more kinetic energy to its fuel than to the spacecraft itself). Imagining a nuclear reactor driving a VASIMR or somesuch, if you used it up accelerating something for months you would create a projectile with a kinetic energy of impact a small fraction of that which you could get by using the core to make a nuclear bomb instead.