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Every single person who advocates or speaks in a visionary way about a new belief, cause, or theory is a prophet. Silicon Valley is full of prophets trying to p

Every single person who advocates or speaks in a visionary way about a new belief, cause, or theory is a prophet. Silicon Valley is full of prophets trying to profit from making their internal view an external view for all of us.

mwfunk 10y ago
I guess I would call those SV people inventors and/or entrepreneurs? Or visionaries (in the business school sense or the literary sense, not in the mystical sense)? There are multiple definitions of the word "prophet" and you have chosen the one where someone just imagines something that doesn't currently exist, but might or will someday. i.e., a prophet is just someone who is prophetic in the broadest possible sense of the term. I think of a prophet (in the context of this article and this thread) as someone who is convinced that they literally have supernatural insight gifted to them by some unseen omnipotent being who sits behind the curtain of the universe pulling the levers. I'm not inherently scared of someone who thinks that if only they could get the right product out there, they could make some money (and maybe even make some people happier in ways that they weren't before). I am inherently scared of someone who has convinced themselves that some unseen omnipotent being has a message for the world about who's good and who's evil and what's going to happen in the future, and everyone who doesn't get on board deserves to have bad stuff happen to them (in this life or the next). Although, I guess that person is harmless in isolation- what I'm really scared of are the people who hear someone like that and decide, "hey this guy clearly knows what's up, let's just listen to (and do) whatever he has to say, and stop thinking about all these hard questions about ethics and morality and life and justice. Even better, we get to act like we know infinitely more than all those poor bastards who wrestle with that stuff every day!". Anyway, that's what I think of when I think of a prophet. Someone who claims to have the answers to the hard questions via magic.

mwfunk 10y ago

I guess I would call those SV people inventors and/or entrepreneurs? Or visionaries (in the business school sense or the literary sense, not in the mystical sense)? There are multiple definitions of the word "prophet" and you have chosen the one where someone just imagines something that doesn't currently exist, but might or will someday. i.e., a prophet is just someone who is prophetic in the broadest possible sense of the term. I think of a prophet (in the context of this article and this thread) as someone who is convinced that they literally have supernatural insight gifted to them by some unseen omnipotent being who sits behind the curtain of the universe pulling the levers. I'm not inherently scared of someone who thinks that if only they could get the right product out there, they could make some money (and maybe even make some people happier in ways that they weren't before). I am inherently scared of someone who has convinced themselves that some unseen omnipotent being has a message for the world about who's good and who's evil and what's going to happen in the future, and everyone who doesn't get on board deserves to have bad stuff happen to them (in this life or the next). Although, I guess that person is harmless in isolation- what I'm really scared of are the people who hear someone like that and decide, "hey this guy clearly knows what's up, let's just listen to (and do) whatever he has to say, and stop thinking about all these hard questions about ethics and morality and life and justice. Even better, we get to act like we know infinitely more than all those poor bastards who wrestle with that stuff every day!". Anyway, that's what I think of when I think of a prophet. Someone who claims to have the answers to the hard questions via magic.