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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

How do you know anything is true? What would satisfy you in regards to Thiel's presentation? That he was a top student at Stanford? That he founded PayPal? That he was the first outside investor in Facebook? That he invested in distribution monsters like Yammer, Stripe and Zynga? That he's a chess master? That respectable people think he's smart? What would satisfy you?

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Respectable smart people differ on lots of things - or do all top students at Stanford agree with Thiel? Do all chess masters agree with him? All investors? (And investment is such a random thing anyway...)

How do you know if it's true? Think through it yourself. Don't look for a hook that's going to make you feel better about accepting something as gospel.

How do you know if it's true? Think through it yourself. Don't look for a hook that's going to make you feel better about accepting something as gospel.

I am not looking for a gospel. I am looking for a method so that I can understand if and how he's wrong or right.

Some suggestions: 1) Check for yourself that the facts he puts forward are true. 2) Look for notable examples of success and failure, study them closely, and see if they affirm or contradict his teachings.

That said, apart from "facts", little of what he says can be proven as "wrong or right" - he's just imparting to students what he has learned from his own experiences and observations.

It's a complex world. No individual point-of-view can come close to being 100% right 100% of the time.

But people are getting excited about this class because he seems to have developed particularly profound insights into the fundamentals of modern technology businesses - as compared with the many others who study/speak/write about the topic.

I'm just throwing stuff out there to try to understand how the poster tries to evaluate the truth of a presenter/presentation.

He is just selling himself, conning the audience – even having fun while at it, self ironically quoting Douglas Adams. There is no truth to it – this is what the whole essay is about. It is BS and BD – there is no BS like HBS, as they say.

Go down the rabbit hole: http://archive.org/details/the.century.of.the.self

His investment track record is relevant, but that only tell part of a story. I'll also need to know the other side, his failure.

His education, the fact that he is a chessmaster, and that respectable people think he's smart is irrelevant. There's ton of smart people like him but they're not going to be wise in investment and strategy.

"Thiel was ranked #365 on the Forbes 400 in 2010, with a net worth of US$1.5 billion....However, this number now underestimates his wealth as his Facebook share alone, at a 2010 valuation, is worth US$1.7bn." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

Pretty sure he's not hiding $2B worth of bad investments. Paypal, Facebook, Palantir, Slide, Yammer, Path, Stripe... that's a pretty solid investment record.

Do you disagree with something he says? If so, can you back it up with anything?

> His education, the fact that he is a chessmaster, and that respectable people think he's smart is irrelevant.

Really? I disagree. I think those are at least relevant and actually significant.

What would satisfy me is empirical evidence justifying the claims.

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