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What Do You Believe That No One Else Here Does?
Peter Thiel is well-known for asking this question in interviews:
PETER THIEL: The intellectual question that I ask at the start of my book is, “Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.” This is a terrific interview question. Even when people can read on the Internet that you’re going to ask this question to everybody you interview, they still find it really hard to answer. And it’s hard to answer not because people don’t have any ideas. Everyone has ideas. Everyone has things they believe to be true that other people won’t agree with you on. But they’re not things you want to say.
He himself was unforthcoming when asked the question, though:
TYLER COWEN: Peter, tell me something that’s true that everyone agrees with you on.
PETER THIEL: Well there are lots of things that are true that everyone agrees with me on. I think for example even this idea that the university system is somewhat screwed up and somewhat broken at this point. This is not even a heterodox or a very controversial idea anymore. There was an article in TechCrunch where the writer starts with “this is going to be super controversial” and then you look through the comments — there were about 350 comments — they were about 70 percent in my favor. So the idea that the education system is badly broken is not even controversial. You know, the ideas that are really controversial are the ones I don’t even want to tell you. I want to be more careful than that.
So what do you believe that puts you at odds with everyone else? What do you believe that puts you at odds with Ricochet, in particular?
Published in General
You’re dodging: If you know people are so irrational, by implication you know what it would be for people to be rational. Irrational is derived from rational. You are people yourself. Therefore, people are both rational & irrational. That raises questions about priority or nature.
This is by itself not worth the bother. You’d have to argue that people should only act on this oft-stated goal before you can go further. People may have more goals than gain & the goals may conflict.
‘Behave logically’ is a hilarious phrase. You want to say something more like natural right: If there is a standard of what human beings reasonably should do, then it is possible to think of deviations from it. If you do not know the difference between food & poison, you cannot prefer the one or the other, or judge which is better for you. If you do not know food, you cannot know it is different to poison. This is basic stuff, really, & there are very serious implications to you saying you know people are so irrational…
I suspect petroleum is a renewable resource, inasmuch as the planet is still making it down in the depths.
Ah, but there in lies the fun. Shall we pull our pitcher who’s having a great game in order to pinch hit with a runner on second, or should we hold fast because he’s going to hold the other side to less on average than our bullpen will.
Decisions make sports more interesting.
There is no such thing as Hell.
Basically, I would eliminate 90% of current laws, agencies, programs, and authorities.
I would leave just one post-Coolidge program to perpetually aggravate Fred Cole.
I have known this for decades.
If not, John should program that in because that’s a really good idea.
TT, logic follows basic rules, rules that mirror mathematics. That is what I mean by behaving rationally or logically.
So, for example, one might claim that people seek happiness. But the data is clearly true: people value a great many other things much more than happiness. So they are behaving irrationally – either by lying to themselves about what they want, or acting in ways that are inconsistent with their goals. Both are illogical.
Obviously you’ve never driven the Jersey pike.
German literature’s real Goldenes Zeitalter was the early 13th Century and not die Goethezeit.
You need to listen to Bill Whittle’s Stratosphere Lounge of 4/8/15. He addresses this very topic. And the whole thing is brilliant- well except for the 10 minutes of dead air at the beginning, which you have to move your progress slider past.
Money left on the street may well be another person’s property. It may also be more contaminated than money that was in your pocket. Not all value is monetary – otherwise someone would rationally be expected to kill himself if he was guaranteed to be paid the legal value of his life.
I favor the eradication of the deer tick genome, no matter what unintended consequences might result from its absence. Does that count as genocide?
:-)
I stand corrected! There is no Hell after death. Before death…plenty of hell!
Of course, petroleum is still being made. But the rate at which it is produced makes that replenishment useless and irrelevant to human purposes.
Quite likely correct. It’s just on a very long time scale.
Liquid fuel is most certainly renewable, given reliable energy. Fischer-Tropsch works on pretty much any source of carbon. With enough energy, you can literally turn even dirty diapers into fuel for vehicles.
This is preposterous stuff. The rules of mathematics & logic have nothing to do with food, clothing, & shelter. How in hell are you going to deduce political science from mathematics? Logic is a servant of political science, not a master. All reasonable thought has to obey not merely laws of reasoning, like the principle of contradiction, but also the things to which it is applied. For people to be reasonable or unreasonable so far as their actions, doings, the conduct of their lives are concerned, you need a standard of rationality that has nothing to do with mathematics. In fact, mathematics has got to fit into that more fundamental standard of rationality.
You need to examine your concepts seriously. Do you believe that people want above all to be happy or not? Do you think there is any meaningful understanding of happiness, or is that just whatever strikes anyone at any given time, radically unpredictably? Do you believe people act in pursuit of happiness such that they fail or that they are actively pursuing unhappiness?
They do not. That is blindingly obvious to anyone who has not drunk the Socratic kool-aid.
This is complicated by the fact that happiness is a byproduct, not an end in itself. People very often make decisions that they know will lead to unhappiness.
Here is a simplified example: People are fat because they eat too much. People do not want to be fat. Yet they still eat too much.
It can be seen as long-term goals conflicting with short-term desires. Eating too much can also be seen as self-destructive behavior.
Oh, here’s one:
Fossilization is only possible in rare low-energy circumstances (static soil, benign chemicals, etc). Very few environments preserve bones in this way. So the fossil record is abysmally tiny and unrepresentative of most organisms in Earth’s history. Therefore, any theories and predictions based on this record are assuming a heck of a lot.
Incidentally, take a look sometime at the skeleton of a sperm whale. Nobody would guess the true shape of the whale’s distinctive head by its skeleton alone. Biology involves a stunning number of variables which make extrapolation from limited information difficult.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Timothy McVeigh. Nidal Malik Hasan. Charles S. Whitman.
All veterans.
I am more in favour of the legalization of cocaine and heroin than I am in favour of the legalization of marijuana, precisely because they are so much more harmful. Just as hangovers and lung cancer serve as natural disincentives for most reasonable people to abuse alcohol or tobacco, so too the unpleasant side-effects of cocaine and heroin serve as natural disincentives for reasonable people to abuse cocaine or heroin, therefore there is little need for them to be prohibited.
Both long-term goals and short-term desires are pursuit of happiness, as are less conscious impulses like hunger and sex drive.
Yes, human actions follow logical (though not totally conscious) calculations. Even emotions have structures. But those calculations are infinitely complex and self-contradictory (because the reasoning is flawed, information is incomplete and incorrect, chemical influences distort logical processes, and the human mind is able to apply different standards to the calculation of one premise than it does to another premise before combining those premises in a larger formula).
I wonder if you’re over-simplifying. People want to be happy. But they seek happiness in dozens of conflicting ways and often do not know how to satisfy those desires. We contradict ourselves because human nature is flawed and limited.
No, the hiring motivation is not low wages. Yes a business will pay what market forces allow to stay open but the other factor is if immigrants are the only ones applying for work they are going to be the only ones to get hired. If “average American” doesn’t bother to apply then they can’t complain about the wage scale because they don’t know what it is.
Claire, this might be the most epic and interesting Ricochet conversation yet. Kudos!
There are a whole lot of people in this country who miss the idea of working in factories more than they miss actually working in factories.
I think that different people have different genes and different genetic expressions. I think that our characteristics, physical, mental and social are mostly a product of those things and not how we are raised.
We can learn to act differently, but our basis is set when we are born.
I agree with this.
It’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation. The more people willing to do the hard and cheap grunt work, the more people will be free to perform higher-wage formal-education labor (and consider anything less to be socially inferior). The less outsiders doing the grunt work, the more insiders will fill those roles.
The hyper-regulatory environment is also a factor. I know many immigrants work under identical conditions as natives, but illegals are valuable in many industries because they offer escapes from paperwork and regulations. And the Nanny State is often, though not always, willing to turn a blind eye to illegal workers so long as they are the right color.
Look, this is too confused. It seems to me you keep dodging. the important stuff.
You cannot judge people to be unreasonable without referring to a standard of reason–you imply, but will not reason publicly for all of us here, that there is a right way of life, that is, a way that is right for people by nature. It is really worse than bad form in you to subject us all to your criticism of mankind but to then be unwilling to admit that that criticism implies a standard in light of which the judgment or criticism is made.
You cannot judge what is destructive or self-destructive except with a view to the good of the whole being destroyed, the human being. So again, you’re implying the existence of what you deny: The naturally right way of living.
You keep using these words about being rational or irrational or illogical or being self-destructive–they all imply a view of what is natural to the human being, or naturally good. But a mouse would deafen us all compared with your silence about all this. You cannot criticize people as bad or defective in any way without reference to the good. I’m really sorry for you, but you cannot-
(1) Modern economics is hokum and must be reimagined from first principles.
(2) Those who do learn from the mistakes of history will find NEW ways to screw up.
(3) Satan is real. I do not chuckle and shake my head when I read that the Catholic Church holds exorcism classes.