I don’t know about inflammatory, but it’s pretty clearly a waste of time. We’re more likely to find out what is true by looking for that rather than guessing about what Thiel is thinking.
Furthermore, is there any great mystery about the possible scope of these hidden opinions? I suspect (though how can I verify?) that most of these “too controversial to mention” opinions can be enumerated by simple inversion of common beliefs.
Blue is right → Blue is wrong
Green is good → Green is bad
If we’re talking about things you can’t say because of moral outrage, then there aren’t that many beliefs that are common enough to provoke widespread outrage by publicly challenging them. Maybe you can’t guess exactly why Blue is Actually Bad, but you know the general forms of how it could be so.
Certainly there are other, more exotic things you shouldn’t say in public (“How to build a super laser weapon from pocket change”, etc), but I doubt this problem is the driving force here.
I don’t know about inflammatory, but it’s pretty clearly a waste of time. We’re more likely to find out what is true by looking for that rather than guessing about what Thiel is thinking.
Well put.
Furthermore, is there any great mystery about the possible scope of these hidden opinions? I suspect (though how can I verify?) that most of these “too controversial to mention” opinions can be enumerated by simple inversion of common beliefs.
Blue is right → Blue is wrong Green is good → Green is bad
If we’re talking about things you can’t say because of moral outrage, then there aren’t that many beliefs that are common enough to provoke widespread outrage by publicly challenging them. Maybe you can’t guess exactly why Blue is Actually Bad, but you know the general forms of how it could be so.
Certainly there are other, more exotic things you shouldn’t say in public (“How to build a super laser weapon from pocket change”, etc), but I doubt this problem is the driving force here.