Being a good gambler does not make you a good person.
Warren Buffet has insight on what it's like to be rich, and insights on how to win at capitalism. That does not qualify him to speak about progress in general. Peter Thiel may be good at reading what trends will make him money, but I don't believe that makes him qualified to say what would make the world better (i.e. progress).
If you agree with the premise that people will spend money for what will make them better off instead of worse (following their own judgements criteria, which can't be dismissed, as flawed as they may be, this is the principle behind democracy), then getting rich by winning at capitalism means this person aggregated the population preferences better than other persons.
This means they became rich as a consequence of everyone being made better off. So I would personally value their insights.
For example, I may not believe that having pizzas or french fries delivered still fresh and hot to my home by having them cooked inside a car means "progress", but if enough people are ready to pay for that, it is progress. We are all better off based on the majority opinion.
Reality is the ultimate judge. What makes people better off will earn money, freely given away by these people ("Shut up and take my money!")
1. The cutting of research into a vaccine for the original sars coronavirus. I think a lot of us would be happier if we had that basic research done right now. Clear failure of market-based solutions / forward thinking. Same vein: lack of real change on global warming.
2. Social media companies optimizing their algorithms to make people unhappy, so they spend more time on the site.
Basically, no I do not accept your original premise.
For 1: most people do not care about diseases that do not matter. Most people consider the common cold normal and acceptable. I was very sad such research never went very far, for I believe viruses are way more deadly that we think: as we know now that the EBV can cause many bad things long term, there is no reason to think other viruses can do the same. The fact that these 2 separate diseases are called the "kissing disease" (EBV) and the "common cold" (coronaviruses) gives a fake sense of safety. SARS was the perfect scare to get research started!
HOWEVER, most people do not care about viruses, and problems in general besides imminent danger. If you too care, realize we are in the minority. Before covid19, most people though the wearing of masks when one has a cold in asia was overkill. Even now, in the midst of a pandemic, the wearing of masks is a hard sell. I fully expect all basic precaution like transparent plastic sheets in front of the checkout to be gone as soon as the pandemic is over, because we are in the minority.
For most people, the experience of directly seeing the person doing their checkout is preferable to the alternatives. It makes them happier. It is not hard to expand that to other issues: even for a virus like Ebola, research doesn't get much money. Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care.
2. Have you noticed how people play various games like Zynga, which accomplishes nothing? Just like videogames in general: unless you are being paid for playing (professional player), you are getting nothing out of it, except maybe better reflexes - but you could achieve the same result in much less time. Social networks are the same. What am I accomplishing here? Nothing. You could even say, as I often talk to people who reject my premises, HN makes me unhappy. Yet I post here?
So you must consider that what we consider make people, you or me unhappy is an oversimplification. We must gain something else out of this - maybe a dopamine hit?
Social networks are all in competition with eachother. You will prefer the one that gives you the best overall experience, the largest dopamine hit with the lowest unhappiness.
This social network increase overall happiness. There may be more than one: facebook for regular people, HN for hackers, Twitch for gamers, etc.
It's hard to overcome the fallacy of composition (the tendancy to extrapolate from our own experience to the population level): what makes us happy make make 50% of the people miserable, and vice-versa.
> Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care.
You are right in both of these descriptions. What we want (are willing to spend money on) and what is going to make us happiest, are different things. And capitalism rewards finding things that we will spend money on. Not things that will make us happier.
But can you imagine a world where we didn’t make billionaires out of people for making us unhappy? For destroying the environment through resource extraction? Imagine we took all that money and funded and rewarded the scientists who had the forethought to develop a coronavirus vaccine. We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now.
Since capitalism rewards the opposite of that, the only way we get to that world or closer to it is by abandoning capitalism as the gold standard for social organization. One small step towards that is to stop idolizing billionaires like Thiel
> We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now.
Or maybe not, just like how the FDA fumbled the test development while forbidding private alternatives to avoid losing face.
I can imagine such a word, were graft and power decides what project gets the money, instead of the population aggregated preferences through the free market.
I seriously believe we would all be worse off. It is not about justifying our own preferences, but thinking about all of mankind. If the vast majority of the world population believes "destroying the environment through resource extraction" is needed to elevate their standard our living to ours, we have to gracefully accept they are our equals, and to collectively deal the problem later on.
I think you should consider that what we want and what is going to make us happier is generally the same. There are rare exceptions, and we take offense that capitalism rewards them too, but they remain exceptions.
But Peter Thiel specifically did none of these things. He initially got rich via PayPal, which simplified safe online payments, which is clearly something people wanted at that time and not particularly immoral. You might say it was progress.
Is Facebook purely harmful though, or is there also progress made in connecting people together?
And in any case Thiel doesn’t need to have a 100% perfectly “focused-on-your-definition-of-progress-only” track record to be worth listening to. Just apply that standard consistently and see how many people can fulfill it.
OTOH, building something like PayPal alone will make a lot of other people interested in what you’ve got to say. You cannot deny that someone who achieves such a feat when no one else does (besides Elon Musk) has some special insight. But the fact that you do deny that seems like it’s rooted in some form of subjective dislike.
Edit: just read your reply to sibling comment, confirmed my suspicion here.
Warren Buffet has insight on what it's like to be rich, and insights on how to win at capitalism. That does not qualify him to speak about progress in general. Peter Thiel may be good at reading what trends will make him money, but I don't believe that makes him qualified to say what would make the world better (i.e. progress).