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> The Thiel question is a great one because it reveals that most people hold conventional opinions and call them “heretical.”

Selecting a response that sounds "heretical" but is actually fairly mainstream sounds like exactly the sort of response you'd try to come up with in a job interview.

In other news, the famous interview question "what would you say is your greatest weakness" reveals that most people's greatest weakness is actually not very bad, and could even be spun as a positive.

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> In other news, the famous interview question "what would you say is your greatest weakness" reveals that most people's greatest weakness is actually not very bad, and could even be spun as a positive.

I think that question survives not because it plumbs the candidate's greatest weakness but because it shows how gracefully they can walk a tightrope. Same for the Thiel question.

I think that question survives because most interviewers are too lazy to come up with original insightful questions. Leading a good interview is hard and most employees treat it as a chore instead of a skill.

I heard that question for the first time during an interview recently and the entire conversation felt hostile. It felt like the interviewer was doing everything possible to find fault with me, and had very little interest in discovering my strengths (there was a lot more to it than just that one question). It was enough to make me think I should work somewhere else, despite loving everything else about the company.

It survives because around 15% of candidates, in my experience, say mind-blowingly dumb things that make it easy to say no.

As an interviewer, this is one of my goals - to hunt for easy filters.. the social version of a FizzBuzz test.

So your goal is to filter people who say dumb things answering a dumb question??

This. Too many interviewers treat the interview as a hostile test rather than a conversation. They often sound annoyed that they even have to give an interview. Even when I have enough connections to avoid the regular interview gauntlet I always choose to participate as it tells me a lot about the company culture. A series of bad interviewers asking dumb or lazy questions is enough to make me want to work elsewhere.

I’m also not convinced it’s a useful interview question because of the issue you raise, but thinking your mainstream views are heretical extends far beyond job interviews.

It seems like whenever I hear people talk about politics, they speak as though they’re persecuted lone wolves going against the current, but they tend to have opinions that something like half the country holds, which I would define as very mainstream.

I also think this occurs with myths that have been “busted,” someone will go around for years thinking that everyone else is sheep for still believing in the myth, when the reality is everyone else read the same article and no one really believes the myth anymore.

And then there are the countless posts on Reddit or Tumblr or Imgur or Facebook where someone dramatically makes a stand, admitting that they will be burned at the stake for their position, to the great applause of everyone watching.

> It seems like whenever I hear people talk about politics, they speak as though they’re persecuted lone wolves going against the current, but they tend to have opinions that something like half the country holds, which I would define as very mainstream.

Half the country and probably most of their social circle.

> Half the country and probably most of their social circle.

I doubt the latter part ("most of their social circle"). I believe many people have some very idiosyncratic (also political) opinions that are so far-off from mainstream that one only voiced them once in their social circle and got really strange reactions.

This (and this is the essence of the first part of your claim) does not imply that there don't exist many people in the country that do/might share this opinion - just (rather) not in your social circle.

That last one would make an excellent Onion article.

that was kind of my take as well. My initial response is that 95% of people who interview think they have some magical thing they can ask or do that gives them a way to analyze for certain traits.

And it's always false. These people always conclude things they ought not to conclude.

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