4 ms·
i wasn't claiming thiel was dumb, just that in his case, luck overwhelmed, and that he's not as smart and talented as he'd want the world to believe (that every
by clairity 5y ago
i wasn't claiming thiel was dumb, just that in his case, luck overwhelmed, and that he's not as smart and talented as he'd want the world to believe (that everything he's achieved is solely due to his own brilliance only).
trump is, in a way, a good analogue. he also claims rare intelligence, but it's pretty clear he's not smart at all. he happened to be propelled by daddy's wealth, and translated that into infamy via a second-tier reality show that saved him just as he was floundering in real estate, another stroke of luck. along the way, he was bailed out time and again for billions of dollars, something almost no american has the luck to have access to. trump is decidedly not smart, just extremely lucky. sheer statistics say we're bound to have a few trumps; people with extraordinarily dumb luck but little talent otherwise.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoYou think he could bully his way into becoming president and dominating the republican party by sheer luck? Even if I wanted to I couldn't do it what he did and I doubt you could do it either.
- clairity 5y agoyou're right, the universe has deemed you and me to not be as extraordinarily lucky as trump. i get that our primal belief in our own agency creates strong cognitive dissonance against the centrality of chance in our lives. it's almost as if evolutionarily, it doesn't matter to our egos that we often get the causality exactly backwards. esteem rises either way, even under false premises.