Not really sure of the value of this is? Unless I am missing something, this reads like it was written by an "edgy teenager". Perhaps I am just missing some context.
One of the things I often hear, when people are talking about "shock jocks" (both left and right), is "They are just saying what everyone is thinking."
In my experience, there's a reason that we don't just say what we think.
That reason, in my case, is usually "I haven't thought out the long-term consequences of this, and I suspect that things really wouldn't turn out very well if it were generally in effect for long enough."
The context you're missing is literally the first sentence and googling "thiel question". Please put a little more effort before shooting.
Lazy web: The Thiel question is "What is something you believe and that nobody agrees with you."
It stands to reason that if you ask a crowd this question, you'll end up with a lot of out-of-whack answers (that's the whole point) and mostly false answer ("it's not that contrarian are often right, but when they're right, they're very right").
This isn't super valuable, it's just played for humor value. Each of these Thiel answers could still be interesting in its own right if the reasoning/motivation behind it was supplied.
Even if you don't agree with a contrarian statement, there's sometimes gems to be mined in the thinking that led to it.
It's the Thiel Question. The value in it is supposed to be that it generates thoughtful and insightful responses - if you are right and 99% of people are wrong then that is indeed impressive. Unfortunately, it selects purely from the extremes, where real insight is random. If it generated more concrete (i.e. scientific) responses that could be tested, it would be a much better question.
Unfortunately, with today's standards of critical thinking and speaking, you get fired for speaking independently, this is more likely to spawn a new movement rather than provoke thoughtful responses.
There has never been a better time for freedom of speech. You can pretty much say whatever you want and nobody is going to put you in jail or burn you at the stake. Indeed you have tools like never before with which to promulgate your message.
Even if your remarks are racist, xenophobic, misogynistic or some other kind of bigoted you can still pretty say much whatever you like and there’s even guys out there that will give you a platform.
You might think that these rights extend to the workplace but you would be wrong. Leave religion and politics at the door and just do your job.
I blame the culture of overwork that exists in the industry for many people not being able to know the difference between personal and professional.
The workplace has become hostile against certain thought and has fully adopted another. You will get fired for speaking against the entrenched thought. This is exactly what was said in the above comment.
If I said leave your politics and religion at the door and just do your job in a "safe space zoom call" or at a diversity committee, or at lunch, I'd be fired.
The silent ones just want to do our jobs but increasingly the ones with political power inside institutions of work have the control to setup the stage for only one type of thought.
I just want to do my job without going into these topics which occupy the majority of the companies all hands time and corporate communications.
That's not new, though. It's just adopted a different school of thought than it used to (and not even universally). It wasn't that long ago that you could be fired for mentioning that you are not christian at the office christmas party.
I would cite the exact law that made religion a protected class in the american workplace: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 56 years ago, this was happening often enough that Congress felt the need to act.
This isn't a citation, but if you have a discussion with a jewish american over fifty years old, they likely have stories about this sort of thing.
Fair point. I’ve heard of this kind of thing but have never experienced it firsthand really in any of the places I’ve worked so surely there must be alternative places to work if you’re not ideologically aligned?
But if you go to work for someone you generally have to accept their outlook quietly or move on.
> There has never been a better time for freedom of speech.
In the West, or at least the USA, I would say the 1990s and 2000s were better for free speech, and very recently there has been a relative curbing of free speech. In surveys, a majority of Americans say they are afraid to share some of their political views.
Still better than almost all of human history before that, but I would say we are no longer at the peak of freedom of speech.
The internet has existed for me as a boring citizen in the boonies since at least ‘95. This doesn’t even count Ham radio, BBS, and various other local and global methods of sharing speech.
Back in those days you had a very limited audience and I’d go so far as to say that it’s only in the last 10 years or so we’ve seen the public at large go online.
We live in an era when anyone can setup a multinational company.
If you want to limit your market, setup your own company and alienate your customers and limit your recruitment to a narrow field of people who think like you, don't be suprised when you don't attract the best talent
That's just how so-called "Rationalists" like to write. They have a lot of interesting ideas that are fun to learn about but the core community itself is basically a bunch of computer programmers who believe they can solve the worlds problems simply by thinking a lot and writing a blog post that uses a big metaphor.
I hadn't seen anyone arguing misotheism as an actual description of reality and (possibly eventual) omnicide as the only moral position to take on life before I ran into them online.
> this reads like it was written by an "edgy teenager"
"Edgy teenager" is about right. This reads like most of the writings and essays by the crowds of Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. Though many aren't teenagers anymore...
This appears to be a direct response to the many recent articles stating that a large percentage of the US has political opinions they are afraid to express. So the author mined his blog readers for their answers to the Thiel question and then wrote a long form version of what those beliefs would mean.
It is a satirical representation of how society often romanticizes beliefs outside of the Overton Window because they are signs of a “unique free-thinker” when most of the time they’re just poorly thought out hot takes.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what this is.
The author posted a survey of the Thiel Question, which asks "Tell me one or more things almost nobody agrees with you on." The motivation of the question is a belief that to build something revolutionary, you need to be able to think outside the box. "People would be willing to rent air mattresses in their living rooms like hotels" is the canonical example (from 2008).
The problem is, most iconoclastic ideas tend to be... pretty outlandish. Also, people posting to anonymous web surveys (especially in the rationalist community) are probably tempted to exaggerate a little. So it's comedic to survey a group of people, collect the responses, and put them together as a hypothetical political platform.
I'm getting a lock of kicks out of the comments here. Clearly, many people don't get it's a joke (but at the same time, based on a survey whose purpose is probably not to make that joke in the first place (1)).
I'm considering using this as a filtering device. Misunderstanding this is a red flag for not trying to understand the context. And having a raging negative reaction to it is a red flag for temperament.
Humorous but also pretty disturbing! Just by reading these survey responses, it seems that we humans are mostly a bunch of racists and pedophiles. I guess that dovetails nicely with the assertion that human life is worth less than 500$?
But the survey wasn’t conducted among “we humans”, it was conducted among lesswrong readers. Lesswrong is normally pretty worthless, but this gentle lampoon if its own readership’s dumb opinions is actually pretty funny
I remember reading a few years back an article about the most commonly shared views among voters (as in 90%+ agree rates), finishing with a political manifesto designed to incorporate as many of said views as possible (unfortunately I don't quite remember exactly where that article was from, or I would link it). This, being the opposite of that article, is certainly more thought-provoking for obvious reasons, and I note that while there are likely people who agree with every statement in the other manifesto, there is almost certainly no-one who agrees with every statement in this one.
This reminds me of Paul Graham's 2004 essay "What You Can't Say"[0] which I think predates Thiel.
"The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence?"
It's a joke, somehow. There's a link in the article to the raw responses of every participant in the survey. Some of them are not so outrageous, many of them just make me sad.
The joke is that, being from different persons, the article makes a mix of them that remarks the contrasts.
Cute and disturbing, but reading the survey responses (there weren’t a whole lot), the piece seems highly embellished. It reads like a sociopathic mad-lib and I’m not sure there are any valuable takeaways here (particularly insights about a so-called Silent Majority)
This may be unfair. As (I think) the Slatestarcodex guy put it, rationalists are one of the few groups where "Chesterton's Fence"[1] is a sufficient two-word rebuttal to many arguments.
> Yesterday I asked readers the Thiel Question. 40 people responded. I have combined the responses into a single political platform. You can view the raw responses here.
Whoa. Somehow my brain skipped over that 3rd sentence, and I read the whole thing 3 times. My bad.
I should read it then. Because such a facile dismissive comment makes me more interested in reading the article and less in what the commenter has to say.
Without having read a line yet, I'm betting the article goes against "polite conversation", and ventures into trying to say something interesting, and this is the "pearl clutching" that usually accompanies such a thing.
