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A comment on Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?. Parent comment

Re:Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innova... by ethbro on Thursday September 18, 2014 @09:50PM (#8338637)
If you're going to look at it that way, could you not say that one of the principles of the Age of Enlightenment was that every man (and as Cosmos nicely noted, every woman, albeit more discretely) had a responsibility to explore?

Rose colored glasses of history, but I would hazard to say that the average knowledge + ambition + creativity of a person today is far lower than in the various retrospective golden ages.

... you can't find a genius and then teach him or her. You teach everyone, then genius blooms.

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Re:Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innova... by adamjs on Friday September 19, 2014 @02:14AM (#8339179)
Yes indeed, I believe every man, woman, and child born on this planet has a responsibility to participate in its exploration and advancement.

I actually see plenty of ambition in the valley and elsewhere— ambition to be the next billion-dollar success story.

What I don't see is a lot of purpose-consciousness + ambition. It's been offered that the purpose of all for-profit companies is to make money; any venture intending to create value for anything but its shareholders is therefore a non-profit.

I think this is wrong. For-profit companies can work toward a clear, common goal without sacrificing profit. I think the modern web (which was built by contributions from hundreds of companies) is a great example of this. SpaceX and Boeing (funded jointly by NASA) working in tandem to enable private space travel is another.

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