A few months ago I asked if it was splitsville for tech zillionaire Peter Thiel and chess champion Garry Kasparov, after seeing this quote from Kasparov in April:
Trump sells the myth of American success instead of the real thing. . . . It’s tempting to rally behind him-but we should resist. Because the New York values Trump represents are the very worst kind. . . . He may have business experience, but unless the United States plans on going bankrupt, it’s experience we don’t need.
and this news item from May:
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and a director at Facebook, is now a Trump delegate in San Francisco, according to a Monday filing.
Based on this recent interview, I suspect the bromance is fully over.
I guess we can forget about Kasparov and Thiel ever finishing that book.
P.S. Commenter Ajg at above-linked post gets credit for the title of this post.
I know several people (including me) who really don’t like Trump, but are kind of relieved that someone like Peter Thiel is helping steer the campaign after the fact. Not to mention the potential FDA pick came from Thiel, and that guy is one of the few cabinet members that many anti-Trump economists even like (also part of bay area rationalists I think). Also I heard Thiel is trying to get aging/death classified officially as a disease. So who knows.
Is this the same Peter Thiel that is no fan of democracy?
Err, you like the the potential FDA candidate? Weird, I like my prescription medicines to more or less work. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/12/08/donald_trump_is_considering_one_of_peter_thiel_s_associates_to_run_the_fda.html
I think most academic work trying to do cost-benefit on the FDA is showing too much regulation (that doesn’t mean zero regulation is ideal!). You have to consider the lives that are lost due to prohibitive entrance testing costs, or long wait times for trials, not just the ones that will kill people directly. Big Pharma also has incentives to lobby for more prohibitive entrance costs, to eliminate smaller pharma companies which is probably why costs keep going up. Gotta maximize those QALYs, not a left/right thing I promise :)
See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/is-the-fda-too-conservative-or-too-aggressive.html
I do believe that the cat summarizes my feelings towards chess.