A few weekends ago I saw The Informant! It starts off entertainingly enough about an oddball executive spying/entrapping on behalf of the Feds against his agribusiness employer. The second half of the movie takes an unexpected shift in focus as you find out how much of his narration and the character he made for himself is a lie. A few days later I saw this post at Mind Hacks linking tohere on the inventor of the (quite wrong) “disease model” of addiction, who apparently faked his doctorate. That got me to start writing this post, but I didn’t have time to finish until some more impostors popped up. Before then I was already planning on mentioning serial-bullshitter and liberal hero William O. Douglas, particularly well known for getting a grave in Arlington without the service record to merit it. Two new scandals involve the Army again, with some faker attaining NCO rank through a made-up military history. You are more likely to have heard of Linda MacMahon’s opponent for the Connecticute Senate, who had been making claims about service in Vietnam when he actually made all the right moves to avoid said service. Then of course there is the undocumented studier at Harvard. The old story of the retired illiterate teacher will always have a special place in my memory though. Only the best for the children, who are our future.
Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” spent a surprisingly large amount of space on con-men. I guess he had a fascination with them and how they take on a role especially subversive relative to the everyday two-facedness Goffman thought we all take part in. I wanted to provide a good quote, but my pdf of an early version of the book isn’t searchable. In searching for a good quote I came up with this, which isn’t quite on topic but interesting anyway.
Some other people in the news for getting fired are Jonathan Katz and Dennis Blair (surprise no mention is made of Chas Freeman in reference to the latter). Michael Bellisles, who was previously fired for fakery, is now back with a new book and being promoted as victim of a “swiftboating”.
May 21, 2010 at 10:19 pm
“The old story of the retired illiterate teacher . . . ”
What’s that? Illiterate? With a degree in education? How could that be?
Re: Jonathan Katz: It’s not getting fired if you weren’t being paid to begin with.
May 22, 2010 at 3:35 am
War veteran phonies pop up all the time. Being in a war means a lot to guys — look at cemeteries where lots of tombstones say only things like:
John Doe
1922-1997
U.S.M.C. 1942-1945
That’s what John Doe puts on his tombstone, so it’s not too surprising when Joe Blow starts talking like he saw the elephant too.
May 22, 2010 at 7:09 am
And looking at John Doe’s tombstone, you don’t necessarily know that even he saw the elephant. He might’ve, as George C. Scott says in “Patton,” spent the Great World War Two “shovelling shit in Lousiana.”
May 22, 2010 at 11:58 am
“the inventor of the (quite wrong) “disease model” of addiction.”
———————
I know it’s off topic, but care to elaborate on the “quite wrong” part? At this stage in the game, that’s like Kafka’s argument about his TB: “Secretly I don’t believe this illness to be tuberculosis, at least not primarily tuberculosis, but rather a sign of my general bankruptcy.”
May 22, 2010 at 1:06 pm
In the next issue of Inconvenient History I have a review of Melissa Katsoulis’ book, “Literary Hoaxes,” that ties in with this subject. One of the interesting things about literary frauds is how they often ride the wave of prevailing cultural fashions, such as in the 1970s when a spate of Native American pretenders (Grey Owl, Forest Carter, etc) penned best-selling polemics that tapped into nascent environmentalist sensibilities. These days “misery memoirs” are the thing, as evinced by Oprah’s public apologies.
I don’t know how credible it is, but a Hungarian Auschwitz deportee named Miklos Grüner has written a book called “Stolen Identity: Auschwitz Number A-7713″ in which he argues that Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Laureate survivor cred rests on the fraudulent appropriation of another inmate’s identity and published work. The H revisionist writer Carlo Mattogno has been sifting through the details in a series of posts at the IH blog:
http://www.revblog.codoh.com/
One of my favorite (exposed) phonies is the former New Republic writer, Stephen Glass, whose myriad inventions were nothing if not creative (in contrast to the contemporaneous NYT prevaricator, Jayson Blair, who just seemed lazy). If you haven’t, check out the film “Shattered Glass,” which is a lot more entertaining than I would have expected.
May 23, 2010 at 8:08 am
Could you email me the pdf for Goffman’s book?
Elie Wiesel is interesting to me since I’m thinking of humanness to botness spectrum, and he stands out in my head as high on the bot-end of the spectrum, in contrast to the cohort of stand up comics and shock jocks that orbit around the comedy cellar and sirius radio, that are on the cutting edge of generating robustly human microsocial pageants, it seems to me.
May 23, 2010 at 9:05 am
…when a spate of Native American pretenders (Grey Owl, Forest Carter, etc) penned best-selling polemics…
The reports of Forrest Carter’s fraudulence
appear to have been exaggerated:
http://www.jerrykopel.com/b/asa-carter-biography.htm
May 23, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Perhaps not “fired” under some definitions, but “removed from his position” at least.
H.A, you can find the pdf (along with many others from Goffman) at http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/ega/index.html
Dirk, Mark Kleiman gives the short version of the argument here:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21474?in=40:00&out=42:00
I would also cite Mao’s campaign against opiate use. The book-length version of the argument is in Addiction: A Disorder of Choice. Between the two is Bryan Caplan’s economics of Szasz paper, particularly its “gun to the head test”.
All I know of Wiesel is what I read in “Night” in middle school. I don’t remember anything particularly “bot-like” about it, so perhaps you should elaborate on the concept.
May 24, 2010 at 12:08 pm
You really should read Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will for economic models of addiction. I see Caplan cites an earlier work of Ainslie, but (as one would expect) fails to understand it, and gets things exactly backward.
May 24, 2010 at 12:19 am
TGGP,
I think it’s bot-like in the context of macrosocial construction. I don’t see a mind exploring, but rather perfectly consistent narrative-selling.
May 24, 2010 at 7:21 am
It’s Michael Bellesiles, not “William Bellisles,” isn’t it?
May 25, 2010 at 11:06 am
Says NIDA director Dr Nora Volkow at APA Frontiers of Science Lecture: “chronic use of addictive drugs erodes the very foundations of free will”
May 25, 2010 at 7:42 pm
mtraven, I’m afraid there are plenty of other books in my queue already, could you explain what the correct lesson is that Caplan got backward?
H.A, so by bot-like do you mean something like pre-optimized?
William, yes not William. I will correct it.
Dirk Hanson, tell me something I haven’t heard before. Also, I happen not to believe in free will.
May 26, 2010 at 10:27 am
You can read my linked blog post for a summary. But basically the root of Ainslie’s model is that people are irrational at the core, since they consist of a set of divergent, incompatible, and economically irrational goals. Coherent selves are an emergent phenomenon of this underlying chaos. Addictions are just the most obvious example where goals with different time horizons conflict, but the phenomenon is basic to human nature.
This point seems to have gone entirely over Caplan’s head, since he’s wedded to the economist’s notion of foundational rationality. There are economists who are smarter, like Thomas Schelling and Jon Elster.
May 27, 2010 at 3:11 am
Mtraven,
I don’t like “irrational at the core”. Maybe something like “a set of significantly uncoordinated agents” describes us more usefully.
May 26, 2010 at 3:03 am
TGGP, yes kind of. I’m not sure the strategy is optimal, but it seems an inhumanly consistent optimizing strategy. It seems unreflective, lacking in elastic meta-awareness, or at least it’s beyond my ability to detect those elements in the public life of folks like Wiesel.
May 26, 2010 at 10:39 pm
mtraven, I checked out your post and then re-checked Caplan’s paper. It wasn’t immediately obvious what Caplan got “exactly backward”. I guess in your post you lump together the multiple modules of the mind and multiple instances of the mind (at different points in time), while Caplan treats them differently.
Hopefully Anonymous, would you say that Wiesel engages in a sub-optimal amount of reflection?
May 27, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Caplan begins with an assumption of rationality and tries to explain (away) supposedly irrational behaviors. Ainslie start with an assumption of irrationaity (such as internal goal conflict and inconsistant time-discounting) and tries to look for mechanisms that generate rationality.
It’s not that Caplan is necessarily wrong, but he’s asking different questions and I think Ainslie’s viewpoint is much more interesting.
Here’s another site that gives a precis of Ainslie: http://picoeconomics.org/
May 27, 2010 at 3:06 am
TGGP, I’m saying that I can’t detect him reflecting on how to optimize his narratives about jews and the holocaust. Separately, his behavior also doesn’t seem truly optimizing behavior for either an autonomous agent, or for an agent designed to perfectly optimize status for a larger population, such as jews. But he might be a good enough optimizer for elite jews for a lot of the obvious thing their rivals criticize them for (using the holocaust to gain sympathy for them, which allows them to maintain disparate advantage over much of the rest of the global population, etc.)
I think J Street is better game than the Simon Wiesenthal/Alan Dershowitz clique for elite jews and I think a personality like Steve Sailer or Patrice O’Neal is more human and less bot-like than a personality like Elie Wiesel.
June 9, 2010 at 2:37 am
You’re accusing somebody of being “bot like”, Mr. Anonymous? Oh, the irony.
Steve Sailer is a swine, but not quite on your baroque level of inhumanity. Or maybe he’s just better at veiling his basic malice.
May 27, 2010 at 5:31 pm
It took me a while to grasp the bot-spectrum concept in relation to Wiesel’s MO, but now that I have a better sense of where HA is coming from, I can’t help but think of Elie’s overblown altercation with Eric Hunt as a meeting of opposite polarities.
It would be interesting to have readers independently rate a random selection of public figures on a human to bot continuum to see whether and how impressions converge and diverge.
May 28, 2010 at 4:47 am
Yeah, Chip I think you get where I’m coming from tool.
I think your rating idea would be interesting.
I’m also interested in how the following traits/abilities distribute in the complete sets (throughout history) of (1) all humans (2) all microsocial interactions, (3) all media representations of humans and microsocial interactions (tagged/sorted by audience size).
-meta-awareness
-self-reflection
-ironic self-awareness
-ironic detachment
-elasticisty in the above traits (for example how ironically detached an individual is capable of being in a situation)
etc. (you can probably think of other/better traits, abilities, or capacities on this theme).
May 28, 2010 at 4:48 am
“Yeah, Chip I think you get where I’m coming from tool”
should be “coming from too”, not “tool”.
May 27, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Caplan wrote a paper arguing that the reason the poor commit more crime is because they are more irrational & impulsive.
I tried wikipedia-ing “Eric Hunt” but apparently it was deleted. Well played,
SkeletorWiesel.May 28, 2010 at 1:32 am
So Caplan believes that the insane are rational while the poor (or is it criminals) are irrational? Why aren’t poor just pursuing divergent values? (And no, I’m not going to waste my life reading the paper — my guess is that Caplan has zero worthwhile insights to offer on either the poor or the insane).
I wish him luck building the libertarian master race though. White nerdboys are known for their high reproductive rates.
May 28, 2010 at 10:59 am
Looking quickly at the linked Caplan article, it seems to me the argument should not be that the poor commit more crime because they are irrational, but rather that they do so because they are stupid.
As one of his commenters observed, criminality is inversely proportionate to IQ, at least within the 70 – 130 range (recognizing that below IQ 70, the ability to do just about anything is very limited – including the commission of crime).
May 29, 2010 at 12:45 pm
“Stupid” is “irrational” in the parlance of Caplan’s social science peers. All of us are ignorant of some things because it is costly to become informed, informing the stupid is a challenging task.
There is a better example of inconsistency on Caplan’s part I realized a couple days ago that I am about to make into a post.
I agree that his strategic fertility plan founders on the public goods problem. Seasteading is far superior.
May 29, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing, and neither is equivalent to irrationality.
Ignorance is the lack of knowledge. It can be remedied if the ignorant person has sufficient intelligence.
Stupidity is the lack of native intelligence. It is irremediable. Just as a man who stands 5’6″ cannot hope to play NBA basketball, a man of IQ 85 cannot hope to get into medical school. The stupid – i.e., IQ-deficient – are likely to be poor because they haven’t enough native intelligence to learn a lucrative trade or profession. They are not irrational – they are jut incapable of more than the most elementary reasoning. A stupid person may see that there is money in the pocket of a passer-by, and decide to get it by mugging him; he doesn’t reason well enough to understand that by becoming that person’s lawyer or stock-broker, he could get far more from him, and be esteemed an upstanding member of society to boot. Thus stupidity is an antecedent cause both of poverty and criminality.
Irrationality is not just the inability to reason well, but the inability to reason properly at the most basic level, at least in some cases. Sometimes it leads to crime, as in the situation of a man who carves up his wife thinking she is the Christmas turkey. Most often it does not. Sometimes very bright people can be irrational – e.g., John Forbes Nash, Jr., or Bobby Fischer. Sometimes their irrationality is utterly disabling, other times it is not. It should not, in any event, be confused with stupidity.
May 28, 2010 at 11:59 am
Eric Hunt is the loser/nutcase whose divergent preferences for holocaust denial caused him to assault Wiesel in a hotel lobby in San Francisco. Good role model! Certainly not bot-like!
May 28, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Wow mtravern, you seem captured in a way that chip smith and I don’t seem to be (TGGP seems very lightly captured in a different direction, or maybe not).
Do you feel like your suborned by a subpopulation identity? Do you feel like you’re an agent with motivation capture?
It would be interesting to see you climb back up out of the rabbit hole and analyze the experience.
May 28, 2010 at 6:57 pm
And what exactly am I supposed to have been captured by?
Do you operate on the assumption that any fringe belief, no matter how stupid or revolting, should be given equal consideration? Does my lack of belief in Time Cube mean that I’ve been captured by the more standard cosmologies? That’s certainly what the TIme Cube guy would say.
May 28, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Since I brought up Eric Hunt, let me clarify that I didn’t interpret HA’s spectrum to imply anything moral or judgmental. Hunt strikes me as a smart and troubled kid who got caught on a loose track. I’m not in the habit of calling people names, but I certainly don’t consider him a “role model.” Based on jurors’ statements after Hunt’s criminal case, I think the claim that he “assaulted” Elie Wiesel is far-fetched.
May 29, 2010 at 12:34 am
mtraven,
Well, I know it’s hack to accuse someone of being jewish, but I think I recall you mentioning some jewish heritage -if so it seems to me that you’re a bit captured by the identity and the mainstream strand of that identity that battling holocaust revisionist is good for that trait population.
As an aside I recognize you could be a catholic hmong who feels passionately against holocaust revisionists, and that part of the general pageant of public jews include minor parts for jews who are skeptical about the holocaust.
But you seem to neatly (and ucharacteristically for you bot-like) fit into the part of an ideologically captured agent for a subpopulation community here, at least to me, deforming your participation in this social epistemology.
As for my personal opinion as a good faith social epistemologist about Eric Hunt, I think he’s doing much more useful work than mainstream narrative echo chambers, although I’m no expert so I can’t tell if he’s usefully publicizing a more accurate world war 2 era history or if he’s making hoaxes too seemlessly real-seeming for me to detect.
He in his own niche way seems captured. I hope there’s a way for folks doing what he does to make good money doing it, because I think it’s subsidy-worthy (much more so than most npr dreck) and because folks like me spend our time trying to maximize our health wealth, and social status rather than make war with Steven Spielberg.
May 29, 2010 at 10:06 am
Since when do you have to be Jewish to refuse to buy into Holocaust denial? It’s one of the best-documented events in history. It occured less than 100 years ago, there are many eyewitnesses. Here’s a non-Jewish one. The only reasons to be a denier is if you are evil or insane. Or, I guess, if you are callow enough to think it’s a good way to be an independent thinker making a bold break from consensus reality.
If that’s the case with this crowd, why don’t you pick something that doesn’t ally yourself with evil creeps? I will once again suggest TimeCube, which is about as reliable, much more entertaining, and as far as I know not linked to mass murderer. Here, I filled in your own template for you:
More abuse of denialism.
Oh and BTW, if you are trying to maximize your social status, allying yourself with bottom dwellers is a poor way to go about it. I feel like I’m lowering my own social status just by participating in this conversation.
June 9, 2010 at 2:27 am
Much as I dislike you, Traven, I can only agree with you about the affectless Hopefully Anonymous. His strategy seems to be to maximilize his standing as a creepy creepy creep, complete with a Mad Scientist impression heavily influenced by bad comic books. He thinks he’s being analytical and scientific when he spouts gibberish, and if I had to make a guess. And as for his stated admiration for the torturer who ran Japan’s wartime biological warfare unit in Manchria, I’d say that it’s a tossup whether this is a product of evil or insanity. Holocaust revisionism follows naturally, of course.
(Publishing Holocaust revisionist books also follows, although the linkage is not as obvious, from publishing books denying rights. Yes, I mean you, Chip.)
June 11, 2010 at 8:18 am
“(Publishing Holocaust revisionist books also follows, although the linkage is not as obvious, from publishing books denying rights. Yes, I mean you, Chip.)”
I agree that the linkage is not obvious.
May 29, 2010 at 12:39 pm
You might have done so before, but could you elaborate on how I am lightly captured? And have you ever (perhaps in the past) felt you were captured, or have you always the Unique One who holds himself above all just as does God?
According to Wikipedia, intentionally touching a person without their consent can be considered assault (so it makes sense that groping is sexual assault). Apparently even violation of one’s personal space counts.
From what I’ve found through googling, it doesn’t seem like he did any useful work. He basically badgered a celebrity and got in trouble for it. My vague impression is that we’re well past the point of diminishing returns on effort devoted to holocaust revisionism, which is why I’m more interested in contrarian takes on the Armenian genocide, communism and/or the Soviet Union and Saddam.
mtraven, I think you might have spent enough time here that you’re already forever tainted. One of us, one of us, goobah gabba goobah gabba, one of us!
May 29, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I think we’ve had this conversation before – I’m not sure if I’ve been more than super-lightly captured by belief or ideology, am I the Robert Wadlow of detectable (by me) ironic detachment? Maybe -someone’s got to be in then less than trillion set of people who have lived.
I can tell Professor Tao is better at math than me, and I can tell that Professor Hanson is more literate in the social sciences, but I haven’t found someone who to me is clearly less attached biased views deforming their epistemological approach. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the many people who make more money than me, such as James Simon or George Soros are better candidates for being the “Unique One” you describe.
As for your own light capture, on this topic you seem to enjoy a moderate feeling of superiority over the “real anti-semites” whereas I think it’s most useful for you to hitch your sense of superiority to optimized epistemological work. I think your posturing too much and digging for the best models of reality too little. Just my opinion, like I said ww2 history isn’t my area of expertise.
But in understanding reality and dominant myths, breaking down holocaust narratives seems still more useful to me than breaking down armenian genocide narratives. Maybe it has been extensively done in niche areas outside of the mainstream, but I’d think there’d be robust generation of holocaust narratives 2.0 and the real time study of how they’re generated I think would be helpful in understanding the construction of our macrosocial environment.
As for mtravern, he seems to me to be our microsocial link, which is why I’m very interested in his own meta-analysis of his participiation in our microsocial epistemology/pageantry/shtick in this thread.
May 29, 2010 at 3:25 pm
TGGP,
Fair enough. You win the legalistic point on “assault.” I just think it’s silly that an overzealous kid did time for tugging an old man’s sleeve. Whatever.
As long as you’re inclined to broaden the skeptic’s lens vis-a-vis allegations of atrocity and genocide (and I emphatically agree with your instinct here), you might want to add Dr. Ishi’s Sadeian workshop to the short list. I can’t read accounts of Unit 731 without catching a sharp whiff of bullishit.
As to Holocaust revisionism, I obviously disagree with your assertion that we’re at the point of “diminishing returns.” My main reasons are: 1.) people still suffer under the onus of prosecution (in most of the Western world) for questioning key tenets of the standard historiography, and 2.) there has yet to be a truly open scholarly debate concerning the specific claims made by credible revisionist critics. Scholars and public intellectuals who express doubt about the historical reality of homicidal gas chambers are effectively ostracized from public discourse and imputed with sinister motives, no matter their reasons. This has a chilling effect that is not reasonably comparable to the stigma that attaches to other species of dissident inquiry. When the punitive laws are repealed and the shroud of taboo is lifted, I’ll gladly revisit the problem with fresh and open eyes.
After I publish Samuel Crowell’s big book (which I sincerely hope mtraven will read, despite the taint), I expect to leave the subject alone. For now, I will say what I’ve said before — that a disinterested account of revisionist arguments tips Occam’s razor against the presumption that the Nazis hatched a secret plan to gas-exterminate a massive chunk of the Jewish population of Europe. The extermination interpretation is bound to a selective and creative reading of official documents, and gassing narratives more likely arose through rumor, confusion, and myriad sociogenic cues, much like stories of UFO abductions, satanic ritual abuse, or “sudden acceleration”-linked automobile fatalities. It’s just that, unlike ephemeral belief contagions and conspiracy theories, the gas extermination one would live on long enough to be propped up by the state and reified through a prevailing discourse. In a nutshell, this is what I think happened, and this is why I am fascinated.
I’m not obtuse. I absolutely don’t deny — or even question — the Holocaust; I think the Holocaust signifies far more than gas chambers and intentional genocide. Yet it seems clear that those elements are immensely important to the cherished uniqueness of a narrative that is, in significant part, nursed and enabled through confabulation and “trapped” enmity.
June 9, 2010 at 2:32 am
The saints preserve me from the dizzying moral heights inhabited by you and Hopefully Anonymous.
May 30, 2010 at 12:38 am
H.A:
You’re right. I do derive a pleasant feeling of superiority.
I think you once said that you thought you were bizarrely the only person you knew of focused on maximizing probability of persistence, with perhaps Aschwin de Wolf & Aubrey de Grey coming close. I can’t find that post now.
Soros is famous for dumping a huge amount of money into the 2004 election and MoveOn or Open Society stuff more generally. I would think that indicates significant ideological motivations.
Chip, wasn’t Hunt acquitted in the end?
Skimming the Ishi article, I agree that many of the claims should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s hard to know just what is causing the “rotting leg disease”. I would guess some subset of the claims about Japanese biowarfare are true while others are not. Strange things can happen, our own military apparently conducted such experiments in our own cities in the 50s.
May 30, 2010 at 11:12 am
TGGP,
Hunt was acquitted on most counts, but he was found guilty of felony false imprisonment and a couple of reduced misdemeanors. There was also a “hate crime” penalty enhancement. Here’s the story. He was locked up for well over a year like a paparazzo.
Military and state programs carried out under secrecy provide fertile soil for the generation of more far-reaching conspiracy theories. In The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, Crowell shows how speculation about the Nazis’ covert euthanasia program led to many fantastic claims that were probably “retrofitted” in subsequent gassing narratives. In a similar way, our own government’s secrecy about pre- and post-9/11 intelligence permits Truthers to fill in the gaps to suit the needs of a paranoid imagination.
May 30, 2010 at 11:13 am
“He was locked up for well over a year like a paparazzo.”
Should read:
He was locked up for well over a year for behaving like a paparazzo.
May 30, 2010 at 11:10 pm
It seems more likely to me that Soros is engaging in game than that he’s ideologically captured. Same with Bloomberg, Thiel, Murdoch, and DeVos, to name billionaires positioned differently in their public ideology.
May 31, 2010 at 9:59 pm
From what I’ve heard of Murdoch, he’s fairly flexible politically (was an early supporter of Blair in England, for instance). Politics is also bound up in his business, and that business has done quite well in its niche. I think Thiel is ideologically captured. He’s donated a lot of money without much prospects for returns. I also think his claim about Goldman Sachs vs Merill Lynch is b.s, since he didn’t actually put his money where he claims his mouth was at the time. Bloomberg may or may not be (he’s usually thought of as centrist rather than particularly ideological), but he’s at least obtained mayorship of NYC. I’ve never heard of DeVos.
May 31, 2010 at 10:33 pm
TGGP, Amway founder, with a conservative shtick to match Soros’ liberal shtick.
Has Thiel really donated a lot of money in a way that specifically indicates ideological capture? I think it’s hard to say judged on the net-worth he’s finding it socially sustainable to maintain.
June 1, 2010 at 9:17 pm
I guess he hasn’t donated that much relative to his net-worth. His political donations seem smaller than his other, more nerdy, donations (or might that be even better evidence of capture?):
http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.php?name=Thiel%2C+Peter&state=&zip=&employ=&cand=&all=Y&sort=N&capcode=4y2wt&submit=Submit
http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&lname=Thiel&fname=Peter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Philanthropy
I’d heard of Amway, but not of its founder and always heard of it as just an apolitical pyramid scheme.