This guy doesn't like silicon valley's biased world.
Most silicon valley idiots either believe in the magic of free markets sans morality and techno-centric-utopia which is nothing but refurbished Christianity.
And this guy doesn't even attempt to refurbish - he takes magic directly from Christianity.
Don't get me wrong, these guys are intelligent in one field and one field only - they are hyper-hedgehogs.
Well, I am talking about Peter Thiel. Here's The Gospel According to Peter Thiel:
For starters, if he is really a so-called contrarian then he should drop the notion of "few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality." No doubt he articulated some smart ideas ("capitalism and competition aren't synonyms" is a great one that made me look capitalism differently) but that doesn't make one contrarian.
Buddha was a contrarian. Ashoka was a contrarian. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were contrarians. Gandhi and Mandela were contrarians.
They shock the norm of centuries and most importantly they followed what they preached in their real life and had a huge skin the game. To call this guy a contrarian is sad.
Why many smart people believe in a single idea can change the world without any attempts to change people's minds, uh?
Do they even read any history? My hunch is they do but their ideologies are primarily driven by the want and need to be immortal. That's another flavor of the subjective needs of sapiens even after kicking the bucket.
One big thing that I changed my mind during this COVAD-19 phase is that I had deeply underestimated the lack of intelligence of some tech people who are rich and articulate nicely (that is a deadly combination - always watch out for it). I am not talking about Peter Thiel here but others like Naval, Musk, etc., who are talking gibberish with biology and complex system.
If you want proof, please go read their tweets and other posts since March 2020.
This hyper-hedgehogs missed the simplest of lessons from Smith:
Most silicon valley idiots either believe in the magic of free markets sans morality and techno-centric-utopia which is nothing but refurbished Christianity.
And this guy doesn't even attempt to refurbish - he takes magic directly from Christianity.
Don't get me wrong, these guys are intelligent in one field and one field only - they are hyper-hedgehogs.
Well, I am talking about Peter Thiel. Here's The Gospel According to Peter Thiel:
For Kawas, Thiel’s economic and social vision borders on the mystic. “The real meaning of zero to one,” Kawas says, “is to make something new . . . the idea that we’re not stuck in the past. We can make something new from nothing . . . [and] that changes the nature of reality.” When resentful people see the world as a zero-sum place, they start redistributing assets, assigning guilt and blame to scapegoats. Instead, Kawas explains, “You can do magic. You can do tech.” This is, he insists, a “deeply Christian idea.” (Thiel himself has frequently publicly identified as Christian, though it’s worth noting that there is no Christian tradition in which the provenance of creating out of nothing—ex nihilo—is not understood as the specific and unique prerogative of God, rather than a right afforded to human beings.) It “rejects the blame” that comes from the erroneous belief that there’s “no way to change the reality.”
Thus, techno-capitalism-as-miracle: the notion that a few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality, which are revealed to be in part the product of intellectual sluggishness and moral fear. Thielism is the belief that a human being can—on his way, say, to a San Francisco speakers’ panel—conjure an idea for reshaping prestigious education in America. Old things must pass away, one way or another.
For starters, if he is really a so-called contrarian then he should drop the notion of "few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality." No doubt he articulated some smart ideas ("capitalism and competition aren't synonyms" is a great one that made me look capitalism differently) but that doesn't make one contrarian.
Buddha was a contrarian. Ashoka was a contrarian. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were contrarians. Gandhi and Mandela were contrarians.
They shock the norm of centuries and most importantly they followed what they preached in their real life and had a huge skin the game. To call this guy a contrarian is sad.
Why many smart people believe in a single idea can change the world without any attempts to change people's minds, uh?
Do they even read any history? My hunch is they do but their ideologies are primarily driven by the want and need to be immortal. That's another flavor of the subjective needs of sapiens even after kicking the bucket.
One big thing that I changed my mind during this COVAD-19 phase is that I had deeply underestimated the lack of intelligence of some tech people who are rich and articulate nicely (that is a deadly combination - always watch out for it). I am not talking about Peter Thiel here but others like Naval, Musk, etc., who are talking gibberish with biology and complex system.
If you want proof, please go read their tweets and other posts since March 2020.
This hyper-hedgehogs missed the simplest of lessons from Smith:
Smith, to put it bluntly, knew that there is all the difference in the world between learning how to get ahead in life and learning how to live life well.
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