I like how the economist just doesn’t reply. I think it’s healthy to know when to walk away from a too “smart” for their own good person in conversation.

That’s absolutely wild. Yud has never struck me as the kind of guy with enough charisma to have someone give him money.

That New Yorker article is here: https://archive.ph/1XDZx

In 2005, Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial-intelligence researcher, met Thiel at a dinner given by the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology think tank in Palo Alto. They argued about whether someone could have an anti-knack for playing the stock market—whether “reverse stupidity” could be a form of intelligence. Yudkowsky said, “I remember all my conversations with Peter as very pleasant, far-ranging experiences that I would be more tempted to analogize to a real-world I.Q. test than to anything else.”

A bit later is a description of a Thiel-hosted dinner party Yudkowsky attended, where Yudkowsky and others were disgusted by the suggestion that they might be in a sort of ideological bubble and would benefit from some broad liberal arts education:

Thiel’s guests seemed as out of place in this candlelit formality as their host. There was David Sacks, Thiel’s friend from Stanford and the co-author of “The Diversity Myth,” and Luke Nosek, the biotech specialist at Founders Fund, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, the artificial-intelligence researcher. Yudkowsky, an autodidact who never went past the eighth grade, is the author of a thousand-page online “fanfic” text called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” which recasts the original story in an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method. Then there was Patri Friedman, the founder of the Seasteading Institute. An elfin man with cropped black hair and a thin line of beard, he was dressed in the eccentrically antic manner of Raskolnikov. He lived in Silicon Valley, in an “intentional community” as a free-love libertarian, about which he regularly blogged and tweeted: “Polyamory/competitive govt parallel: more choice/competition yields more challenge, change, growth. Whatever lasts is tougher.”

The two subjects of conversation were the superiority of entrepreneurship and the worthlessness of higher education. Nosek argued that the best entrepreneurs devoted their lives to a single idea. Founders Fund backed these visionaries and kept them in charge of their own companies, protecting them from the meddling of other venture capitalists, who were prone to replacing them with plodding executives.

Thiel picked up the theme. There were four places in America where ambitious young people traditionally went, he said: New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. The first three were used up; Wall Street lost its allure after the financial crisis. Only Silicon Valley still attracted young people with big dreams—though their ideas had sometimes already been snuffed out by higher education. The Thiel Fellowships would help ambitious young talents change the world before they could be numbed by the establishment.

I suggested that there was something to be gained from staying in school, reading great works of literature and philosophy, and arguing about ideas with people who have different views. After all, this had been the education of Peter Thiel. In “The Diversity Myth,” he and Sacks wrote, “The antidote to the multiculture is civilization.” I didn’t disagree. Wasn’t the world of libertarian entrepreneurs one more self-enclosed cell of identity politics?

Around the table, the response was swift and negative. Yudkowsky reported that he was having a “visceral reaction” to what I’d said about great books. Nosek was visibly upset: in high school, in Illinois, he had failed an English class because the teacher had said that he couldn’t write. If something like the Thiel Fellowships had existed, he and others like him could have been spared a lot of pain.

Thiel was smiling at the turn the conversation had taken. Then he pushed back his chair. “Most dinners go on too long or not long enough,” he said.

Big problem is that these people will not speak to journos.

I totally forgot about that. Thanks for posting!!