Comment by dharmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dharmon | Hacker News Reader

There's not much commentary in the article on why Thiel feels compelled to do this, so I'll make a more general comment.

For me, Thiel is a healthy reminder of the dangers of being a very smart person, who knows a lot about one thing and has been successful with that one thing, but then thinks that means you know a lot about everything.

I'm thinking of three things in particular: 1) his childish libertarian fantasy, 2) his surprisingly narrow worldview of education, and 3) his experience with Clarion Capital, where he went to NY and promptly got his ass handed to him.

So anyways, while most articles I see about him induce a bit of eye-rolling, he does remind me stay vigilant to seeking out blind spots in my own decision-making.

I very much think Trump is the exact same way. He knows a lot of business and his business, but he knows absolutely nothing about governance. That's not necessarily because he's a bad person, but because he's an extrovert and the type of extrovert who learns from experience and not from books. Evidence of the this is the violence at his rallies, when is the last time that happened to a Presidential candidate? I think the sort of policies he's going to push are going to lead to a lot of problems in the world for America in the long run. But it's very likely that he will be elected.

Also in terms of intelligence, getting a lot of money early in life and then making lots of small time investments in a lot of companies and having them turn into unicorns is not necessarily signs that you are super intelligent. You can just as likely just be lucky, and it be a case of survivor-ship bias.

Can you provide specific examples of where Trump does not understand governance?

> 2) his surprisingly narrow worldview of education

I think Thiel has a broad worldview of education by rejecting the notion that education is exclusively done in colleges and universities. Whether it's smart to encourage people to drop out is another issue, but I do agree that the traditional educational system can be rather constricting to those with very high intellect and ambition.

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