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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky, and that's a sore point for him. so he's used his paypal riches on an extended PR campaign to make everyone believe he's something more than he is. literally every quote and quip i've heard from him is recycled directly from elsewhere, rather than being even a semi-original notion, but he passes it off as wisdom from on high. he wants more than just respect; he wants to be worshipped. if i ever met him, i'd tell him to just go the scientology route and found another fake religion already. he could even fashion himself up as the new new jesus.

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Jeez. I hate to burst your bubble, but Peter is more talented and intelligent than most of the readers/writers on this website. It's easy to make your claim when your perception of the guy is based solely on news articles and hit pieces. I don't agree with him on everything, but there is no denying that he's gotten where he is through maneuvering and foresight.

A lot of people think intelligence means people behave according to their ethics. In reality intelligence doesn’t mean that you are a good guy. A lot of “bad” guys are very intelligent. Not many people could pull off what Pablo Escobar or El Chapo did. Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos is pretty smart.

Elizabeth Holmes is facing 20 years in prison. Pretty smart.

A lot of smart people do dumb things. The Enron guys were pretty smart and went to jail. The people who blew up the financial markets in 2008 were very intelligent. Actually they were the smartest: made the public believe the world would go under if they couldn't keep their bonuses and receive a bailout.

I consider myself pretty intelligent and I have done plenty of dumb things although with some thinking I could have known they are dumb.

Also he is a ~2200 ELO-rated chess player. That alone would make the baseline IQ and ability to think through logic, analytical thinking, calculation skills and stratetic planning beyond most HN users, even though in a small domain of Chess; I'd wager more broadly.

https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2022389

Personally, I find his thinking savagely brutally straight to the point and cuts through cultural rust we've built up in our thinking process. It is fascinating, I don't agree with him on a lot of things but I admit, he is interesting.

I don’t understand how this rating is calculated? The fide profile doesn’t have any recorded matches or statistics on him, just the rank number that I can see.

Got any links to reading on this? You piqued my interest.

> Personally, I find his thinking savagely brutally straight to the point and cuts through cultural rust we've built up in our thinking process.

I agree with both of you

> thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky,

This is true for more than 99% of extremely successful people. It is only worth mentioning when one does not like any particular successful person.

99% of internet posts make claims without sources.

76% of all statistics are made up.

He has a whole chapter in his book about this nonsense viewpoint that is quite thought provoking.

"Everything is just stochastic process bro" is such a dumb view of the world masquerading as an intelligent thought.

His Sea steading ideas are actually pretty idiotic in my book.

Proof: Everybody who tried it just to find out how extremely expensive it is to maintain structures in the middle of an ocean.

But it's not only that. They also find out in a very painful way that the high seas are just about the most regulated entity apart from aviation and possibly medicine.[0]

It seems that very smart people are totally able to maintain very dumb ideas.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

While I see your point, a lot of invention happened when someone ignored conventional wisdom and others’ failures.

He’s actually very Christian and I’m told attends services every week. I’m not sure what denomination though.

Being a Christian usually doesn’t have much impact on how people behave. You can be super greedy, super generous, never cheat on your spouse, cheat all the time and so on. Somehow people find a justification for their behavior within their faith no matter what it is.

i suspect a number of narcissistic christians secretly wonder if they're actually the second coming. it wouldn't surprise me if thiel were in that group.

Now I'm curious: do the scriptures say when Jesus became self-aware, that he was (the son of) God?

from what (little) i remember, he was pretty self-aware in all of the bible that i read growing up. i'd guess a supreme being who wasn't really "born" would always have had self-awareness.

He's also human, and most of us do have to develop self-identity as children. That part of his life is mostly omitted from scripture though, as I recall.

edit: Googled and remembered there's the episode where he goes wandering off from his parents, they find him in the temple, and he asks why they'd think he would be anywhere else but in his Father's (God's) house. So, well aware at least as a twelve year old. Luke 2:41-59

it’s been a while since i read anything biblical, but i think he convinced himself of this pretty early on.

he told people to worship him pretty much right away.

it's not expressed exactly when he realizes, but awareness of identity is demonstrated in John 8:58 and John 17:5.

I read his book "Zero to One" and I felt like it did learn good things from it, for example that "competition is for losers". Before I thought capitalism was all about competition, but maybe I was a rube in not knowing that.

Buffett's "good businesses have moats" is roughly equivalent.

"Saying you like “moats” is just a nice way of saying you like oligopolies" - Musk

sure, information has many channels and routes into our brains, so that's not unusual or a criticism of how you learned that bit of information. but the idea that you try to avoid competition is straight from a first-year strategy course at any business school, in which this has been taught for at least the last 5 decades, if not much longer.

capitalism, the ideal, puts competition on a pedestal, as a broad mechanism to ensure profit margins gets squeezed out of markets as they mature (that is, as risk stabilizes, the risk premium does as well). capitalists don't want their profit margins minimized, so they employ as many mechanisms as they can get their greedy hands on to minimize competition. capitalists are literally anti-competitive. capitalism is not.

You weren't a rube at all, that view of capitalism as being characterized by competitive markets is popular and the result of Milton Friedman style ideas being almost propagandized from the 80s onward.

His points in the book however do basically go back to Schumpeter who argued the same thing. That oligopolistic markets in which outsized firms earn excess profits, are significantly more dynamic than overly competitive market economies.

The economic definition of competition, beyond its simplest variety, allows for natural "moats" and differentiated firms. Looking for a "moat" is just engaging in competition on a larger scale than that of a single product - and the "excess" returns involved are ultimately a reward for good positioning. (Of course artificially-created 'moats' are a form of rent seeking and should be eliminated via antitrust regulation, but this can take some time.)

“ thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky,”

To get and stay where he is you have to be pretty smart. Maybe not in the way you define it but most people wouldn’t be able to do what he did. This will get me in trouble but I think the same can be said about Trump. The way he pushed himself into the presidency against resistance from the media and the established parties was pretty phenomenal. You have to be very capable to pull that off and not many people would be able to do the same.

Being intelligent doesn’t mean that you do things people view as ethical.

i wasn't claiming thiel was dumb, just that in his case, luck overwhelmed, and that he's not as smart and talented as he'd want the world to believe (that everything he's achieved is solely due to his own brilliance only).

trump is, in a way, a good analogue. he also claims rare intelligence, but it's pretty clear he's not smart at all. he happened to be propelled by daddy's wealth, and translated that into infamy via a second-tier reality show that saved him just as he was floundering in real estate, another stroke of luck. along the way, he was bailed out time and again for billions of dollars, something almost no american has the luck to have access to. trump is decidedly not smart, just extremely lucky. sheer statistics say we're bound to have a few trumps; people with extraordinarily dumb luck but little talent otherwise.

You think he could bully his way into becoming president and dominating the republican party by sheer luck? Even if I wanted to I couldn't do it what he did and I doubt you could do it either.

you're right, the universe has deemed you and me to not be as extraordinarily lucky as trump.

i get that our primal belief in our own agency creates strong cognitive dissonance against the centrality of chance in our lives. it's almost as if evolutionarily, it doesn't matter to our egos that we often get the causality exactly backwards. esteem rises either way, even under false premises.

You sound pretty brilliant yourself . Mind sharing your achievements that would illustrate how much more talented and smart you are than Thiel?

thanks random internet person! in my infinite modesty however, i'll decline to boast about my many amazing and wonderful achievements. but y'know, just between you and me, i did once receive a canned award from my state senator AND my state congresscritter! with fake-signed certificate and everything! *puffed-chest*

notice that i'd made no reflexive or comparative claims. but comparatively speaking, thiel on a daily basis most assuredly looks at musk with full-on green-faced envy.

> thiel on a daily basis most assuredly looks at musk with full-on green-faced envy

How do you know?

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