If you have the connections to send a 33 year old without a science background to head research and engineering at the pentagon things coming true isn't a function of being smart or predicting anything but just being close to money and power.

Making things true by pulling your wallet or smartphone out of the pocket isn't exactly a good proxy for intellect.

Also ironically Taleb's most salient observation is that smart people should be very aware of the fact that the things that actually matter can't really be predicted at all.

The fact that Palantir wasn't stapled front and center as the catalyst for huge amounts of police abuse and corruption during the BLM protests is a testament to Thiel's position in the military industrial complex.

"Paul Graham, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Peter Thiel score high"

You say this is measured by the number of "true non-obvious predictions" - can you list those for each of these folks?

I'd also think a batting average would be useful, instead of just a count of "correct predictions".

Off the top of my head (and with no endorsement of related politics/ideology):

Paul Graham:

- That web-based apps were the future of software; the product that made him rich the first time around was Viaweb, the first ever web application, built in about 1995 when everyone else was selling thick-client Windows desktop apps in shrink-wrap boxes (http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html)

- That Yahoo was effectively a Ponzi scheme in 1998-99 (http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html)

- That startups using niche languages like (in 2004) Python and Ruby would do better than those using mainstream platforms like Java and MS .Net (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)

- That Bayesian filtering was a better approach to spam filtering (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)

- That startups were becoming dramatically cheaper/easier to start, and therefore could be started by fewer, younger people, didn't need "business people" early on, could get much further without needing to sell controlling stakes to VCs, and could effectively be mass-produced (http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html)

- That a team of founders who funded themselves by selling novelty breakfast cereal would build an amazing company, even if their idea seemed to suck (http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html)

- That a new, tech-focused news discussion forum, in a world that already had Slashdot and Reddit, could become popular and could remain popular for many years by employing specific mechanisms to raise the standards of content and discussion (http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

Nassim Taleb:

- He explained the fundamental weaknesses in the economic system that would lead to crashes like 2007-08, and the present turmoil.

- Has made huge financial gains during each of the major financial market crashes of the past 35 years: 1987, 2000-2001, 2007-2008, 2020 (https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/bloombergProfile.pdf, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...)

- Was on record suggesting a Trump win was more likely than most believed - https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/03/black-swan-author-nassim-tal...

- Was among the earliest raising the alarm about the Covid-19 pandemic https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1221486205847646208?lang=...

- Was predicting that a pandemic was the world's greatest risk at least 7 years ago (don't have time to sift through all the material but plenty is out there if you care to search for it)

Peter Thiel:

- Identified in 1993 that Silicon Valley offered more compelling career opportunities than NYC legal/securities work

- With Max Levchin, predicted that a money transfer platform would be one of the most important pieces of infrastructure, so launched PayPal, and built the team that enabled them to win the market

- Made first investment in Facebook, predicting that it would be a key piece of internet infrastructure due to its focus on identity, and that Zuckerberg - then aged 20 - would be able to execute

- Identified that big data analytics could be useful/attractive for government intelligence agencies, founded Palantir

- Was one of the first to suggest, in 2011, that the U.S. higher education market was in a bubble (https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubb...). (Granted this hasn't been proven yet but there are signs the current crisis may be the needle that brings on the burst).

- Understood that a well-executed operation could take down Gawker

- Saw that Trump could win in 2016, and would be worth his while to endorse/support

===

No doubt they've all made predictions that have turned out to be wrong or mistimed. I follow Graham and Taleb on Twitter and often see them make comments I disagree with or doubt.

You could argue that this was a false prediction by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html

But it's not really; he was posing a question, which helped him to make further decisions about how to proceed as he built YC.

YC itself has funded many more companies that failed than succeeded, but that's fundamental to the business model - http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

What matters is that they're able to identify investment opportunities with a very big upside potential relative to the downside risk, and back them even if almost everyone else believes they're insignificant/wrong/stupid.

Thiel's investment fund Clarium Capital has famously lost plenty of money, but other investments of his have performed spectacularly well; that's how investing works.

Bottom line: all three of them have become vastly wealthy by repeatedly making bets that others didn't notice or thought were stupid.

Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarked.

This was a great answer, thank you.

If anyone wants an amuse gueule for the thought of Peter Thiel, this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRleB034EC8

So many interesting, fundamental topics.

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN. You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Why is every reply getting flagged? Can I have some answers - Why is a response that refers to the SPLC getting flagged? SPLC is a very well respected organization. Who is flagging this and how are my comments outrageous or flamebait? Who is even tracking and following up on this thread? Why so much investment here!

I don't know why users have been flagging your replies, but it's probably because you're posting so many off-topic procedural complaints, which is not very interesting.

I don't know what more to tell you about your GP comment. It's not as if this is a borderline call - it was an inflammatory one-liner. Starting a celebrity flamewar is tedious, especially when it's one that has been repeated countless times already.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? This is a place for intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The more the rest of the world is consumed by the latter, the more we need to focus on the former here, or else HN will simply not survive. The whole idea of this place has been to stave that outcome off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That means we need to moderate comments like the ones you've been posting in this thread, so please don't post them.

Also: we've had to ask you multiple times in general to stop breaking the site guidelines, and unfortunately your commenting history shows many other cases of you doing this, with comments that are unsubstantive and/or unkind - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044862 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094678. Comments like that are bannable offenses on HN. If you keep breaking the rules we are going to have to ban you.

Please fix this by posting substantively and kindly from now on. Alternatively, it's always fine not to post.

All of them are risk takers and public intellectuals. They are independently wealthy, none of them need the exposure or income from peddling certain ideas or catering to a certain audience.

I can't even tell which you one you mean, let alone for what reason.

Instead of assuming that "surely every sane person" must share your point of view, can you point to specific accusations and sources that validate them? You might just convince someone you have actually a point, if your arguments hold up.

I assume you're talking about Thiel and maybe China, but still don't actually know.

Have you ever actually listened to any of Thiel's talks and the reasons why he takes particular stances? If you did you'd realize that his stances on things like China are related to geopolitics and economics, not race.

Does that invalidate their opinions about other matters?

Now apply this logic to people who believe that there is an invisible man in the sky watching all your actions.

That's a majority of the worlds' scientists, teachers, politicians, and just about every profession.

This is an absurd argument. At the very least, science can absolutely provide conclusive evidence that the world is not flat and that vaccines cannot cause autism. This isn’t a “belief.” This can be shown with clear conclusive evidence. Religious beliefs cannot be tested due to how they are structured (“just gotta have faith”).

So even assuming you are arguing in good faith, an anti-vaxxer and/or a flat-earther are people who can be shown irrefutable evidence that goes against their beliefs and they will simply close their eyes, plug their ears, and scream and shout until you go away. The opinions of those people are ones I don’t care about or think worthwhile because they have already made up their minds and are working backwards to look for evidence that supports their beliefs, and invalidating all others.

I did not mean religious beliefs in general, just particular 'man in the sky' beliefs, which are as absurd as flat earth. But somehow a bunch people who have such beliefs are smart and productive.

> if someone was a ___ or a ___ I would be really uninterested in their opinions on pretty much anything because they're obviously ___

Dismissing one’s ideas based on group membership is a terrible strategy for truth-seeking. It’s a root of all kinds of problems we see with team-based politics where both sides have turned their brain off and largely accept the entire slate of talking points their side serves up.

It also borders on the definition of bigotry.

I had a flat-earthier as a roommate for about half a year. We had some detailed discussions about his beliefs, which was interesting since my time at the South Pole gives me personal experience that directly contradicts most of his beliefs. The guy clear had a very poor understanding of math (especially geometry) and physics (especially optics) but was a generally nice guy with a good head on his shoulders.

I would trust very ñittle he had to say about things outside of his direct experience, since his BS detector was apparently broken, but I would tend to trust his knowledge of things he had dealt with directly.

While I don't judge people for their ideological bent, I do judge them for uncritically accepting BS because it fits their ideological bent. This leads me to dismiss many of the knowledge and opinions of people who find themselves trapped in the ideological games played by our media.

Yes! This is so much more precise and productive, and stands in stark contrast to a blunt stereotyping heuristic. You're engaging in discussion, analysis, and identification of cognitive biases and memetic complex traps. Then applying all of that appropriately, understanding where you can and cannot trust a person's ideas, without categorically dismissing the balance of that person's ideas indefinitely.

I'm going to say that flat-earthing is a sort of dividing line for me. If somebody insists on flat-earth with a straight face, I'm going to ask them some questions. It's unclear that any flat-earther would be able to come up with answers that are reasonable, and I think it's reasonable to impute that the person's ability to be reasonable about other things is probably impeded.

They weren’t talking about group membership, but about misunderstanding some basic things about how the world works.

Public intellectuals? Perhaps the public within a small geographical area. Maybe even just a couple of zip codes.

Can you please not create accounts to do ideological flamewar with? It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ok, but please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Ok, but I really feel that my comment was the main substance of this matter. Easily verifiable.

That sort of denunciatory rhetoric is not substance; it's name-calling. That makes it against the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, you've posted many such unsubstantive comments, and we eventually ban that sort of account.

Ok, I will try harder. FYI:

https://www.theverge.com/21331900/peter-thiel-kris-kobach-ka...

Sounds like Thiel has had his daily top up.