Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
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Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#2No post body was provided.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#3Perfect example of a brilliant thinker who needs to be contained. It's great to begin with ways of thinking like he does; but his love for secrets make him dangerous; people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#4> Sometimes, our sense-making machinery has a glitch too. Many years ago, a McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive. Based on that study, they held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone. Though Nokia had an internet-enabled phone with a color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera in 2004, the executives held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Between the peak of their mobile dominance and their sale of the mobile division in 2013, Nokia’s value fell by almost $250 billion.
The first half of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" int the 3rd sentence doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. (Edited; the first version referred incorrectly to the "2nd" sentence instead of the 3rd.
Also:
> I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel (...) the contents of our conversation will remain private
The whole purpose of the article seems to be to brag about having dinner with Mr Thiel.
It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#5Perfect example of a brilliant thinker who needs to be contained. It's great to begin with ways of thinking like he does; but his love for secrets make him dangerous; people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.
> people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.
Quite wrong. The article mentions that Thiel is anti-consensus - to him, 100% agreement with no real space for debate (on an issue with any amount of inherent complexity) is inherently fishy. This means that trying to figure out why the fence might be there is an especially worthwhile "search for secrets". And once you've done that work, you might end up tearing that fence down after all - or perhaps not.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#6I thought the Nokia story was a pretty bad example because it’s not like they got everything else down perfectly.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#7Huh I usually like Perell's stuff but this one seems a bit empty, like a cream puff without filling. The examples seem weak, for example the McKinsey story about smartphones is vague. Sure, people get things wrong, and groups certainly do. I wonder what the purpose of this piece is. Maybe there's 100 more pieces coming influenced by this dinner, this was just getting the crumbly cork out of the wine bottle.
Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#8It is interesting to me that Peter Thiel doesn't want to live / follow the same rules / laws he would have everyone else live under. Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#9So he is contrarian solely for the probability of asymmetric alpha, even if he hasn't identified what that could be yet
That puts a lot of color into his decisions, validates his decisions to me
Re: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’
#10For all the Germans here: ZDF Magazin Royale just yesterday did the show on Peter Thiel: https://www.zdf.de/comedy/zdf-magazin-royale/zdf-magazin-roy...