Dishonest framing.
The bottom 2% of society are not "the poor."
They are the violent, the liars, the evil, and the depraved.
Peter Thiel's idea is so profound and, like most great ideas, also obvious in hindsight.
There are always problems to solve in this world, but unambiguously benevolent work usually attracts crowd-pleasers.
Controversial work requires real conviction and courage, and very few people are willing to risk their reputation for it.
That's why too many people are working on the same easy problems, while few are willing to risk it on the hard ones.
Swing for the fences. Go do controversial work.
Okay. I’ll take the bait.
I went to work for Peter in 2013 with opposite politics.
He sat me down right at the beginning.
PETER: “I don’t want the (Thiel) Foundation to do good that the market can do. That is the job of the market. Likewise, I don’t want to do the good work that is seen as good. That work can be done by people richer, weaker and more needy of approval than we are. I want us to do only the work that is *deeply* good but somehow confused for being evil, because that is the work of the courageous and the strong. We strive to be both and that is where a small foundation can make the greatest positive difference. Go look for such good and let’s do that. But remember. Good has TWO different antonyms. What is “bad work”? It could be seen as shoddy work. Or it could be seen as evil work. And we can’t do shoddy work. Why? Because evil that isn’t competent never gets to be evil. It’s just pathetic. So we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work which we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”
I thought it totally logical. So that’s the argument. And that’s classic Peter.
This is an old idea of his. And now you know.
The world is filled with proclamations by confident idiots with self-inflated titles, like "Professor" Jiang (who is not a real professor and does not have a PhD).
We have an epidemic of coddled grown-ups who were raised to never hear the truth. Calling yourself a victim of insults and bullying when you don't like the facts is not how adults should behave
I usually don't post things like this because it’s not worth my time, but I am going to give you a piece of my mind, completely unfiltered.
All I can say is: Wow! This crowd claims to be inviting and uniting, but am I undesirable now because I’m not “smart” by your arbitrary standards?
If you plan on uniting humanity and living in a peaceful, harmonious utopia, this isn't a very good advertising campaign.
This whole idea that IQ is the ultimate measure of intelligence is getting incredibly old. Expand your mind. If you are that brilliant in one specific area, why doesn't that capability extend to the rest of your brain?
Truly intuitively smart people often play dumb just to see how people like you treat others before buying into the hype dreams. Discernment is a powerful tool, though you don’t seem to know anything about that. You have no idea what my actual intelligence is, yet you resort to insults simply because I spoke an inconvenient truth on a platform that brands itself on "TRUTH SEEKING” and attracting “CRITICAL THINKERS.”
Is it only truth-seeking when it fits your narrative? That is a massive double standard.
The ironic part is that the eugenics crowd has nothing intelligent to say back—2/2 now. All you can do is comment with insults. This is exactly why I stay away from social media users who lack basic human decency. There is zero productive conversation here. People are so glued to their screens that they’ve become brain-dead, repeating things like parrots just to escape themselves. It's just BULLYING. YOU ARE A BULLY. If you are so smart, you should know better. It is a shame that you’ve never thought to build up your emotional or moral intelligence.
Most well-rounded people with a semblance of humanity left in them stay away from this crowd because your moral compasses are completely misaligned with your egos. Hiding behind a screen to feed an insecure ego by insulting strangers isn't progress or human superiority by any stretch of the imagination. You want to take the same toxic human problems to Mars and call it "expanding consciousness.” And “normal.” That is rudimentary thinking. Real progress comes from looking inside yourself before you get there. You can change the scenery and you can outrun problems for a little while but you can’t outrun yourself. The problems follow even if the scenery changes. Utopia doesn’t come from abundance it’s from doing the eternal work inside not outside or on another planet.
You aren't helping to unite humanity; you are just uniting a echo chamber of people who think exactly like you. I would rather be a well-rounded person with multiple types of intelligence and strong character than have superior intelligence in just one tiny sliver of my brain. I’ve already had that super intelligence and I learned it was not enough at 10. I’ve been cultivating and integrating my mind for 30 years. What’s your excuse?
True intelligence isn't a quantitative measure like IQ. It’s how many areas of your brain you can utilize at once, how you integrate them and how ethically you use them. Real geniuses build up their weaknesses until they have none—in intellect, and in character.
You my friend are not even close. I am sorry to say.