April 20th, 2012



Peter Thiel on Contrarians

Highly recommend the Peter Thiel video from the Pando Monthly event last night.

One quote from Thiel that really stuck out:

“I don’t think it makes sense to be contrarian [just] to be contrarian. That assumes that people have well defined views. That’s one of the things that has shifted — people don’t have real opinions anymore.”

Some thought questions:

How is it that we have, according to Thiel, lost these well-defined views that apparently were once ubiquitous?

Does the digital dissemination of information and opinion mean that we are less likely to develop our own opinions, and more likely to just steal soundbytes from someone else?

Or rather is it that there’s so many opinions floating around that we prevent ourselves from developing anything deep and well-defined because we are too busy shuffling from one to the next?

While there’s certainly a ton of me-too thinking pervasive in technology (and a ton of other industries), I am struggling to think about it as a “new” phenomenon. Has it become particularly pronounced over the past 15 years as the technology startup world has grown and become more mainstream?

What’s interesting though is that if you’re a contrarian and you’re right, and the world actually does shift in the way you say it is going to, how do you keep it up?

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  • http://taggers.com/robin Robin Kim

    My co-founder and I were sitting in the front row during this event!

    Herd mentality prevents people from forming well-defined views. As different types of media (e.g. news, opinions, entertainment, social, etc.) become more and more intertwined, I think herd mentality takes more and more control.

  • http://amandapeyton.com amanda peyton

    True, though I am optimistic because I think the the development of subcultures and anti-cultures will persist despite even the most fundamental shifts in media.

  • http://qcircles.net/ Jeff Jenkins

    I think that the state of there *not* being tons of opinions floating around was an anomaly created by the modern news industry.  This reminds me of The Economist's special report on the future of the news.  It's slightly off-topic from contrarianism but important background material on diversity of opinions:

    http://www.economist.com/node/...

    The rest of the articles in the report are under “In this special report” for reasons I can't comprehend.

    The gist of it is that before the mid 1800s when the first mass market newspapers opened people largely got their information socially, and up until the turn of the 20th century the currently favoured “detached” style of journalism hadn't fully taken hold (and it may have only done so for financial reasons, since they needed to not piss anyone off to reach a (local) mass market).

    It seems like we're just now getting a return to where we were a few hundred years ago, where mass-media referred to the  producers and consumers.  The one key difference now is that people can organize by niche rather than geographically.  That's had some good and bad outcomes, but I suspect that it wouldn't make a difference to most people since a couple hundred years ago geographic areas would have had much tighter beliefs than they do now.

  • http://www.jeffreyjenkins.ca Jeff Jenkins

    I think that the state of there *not* being tons of opinions floating around was an anomaly created by the modern news industry.  This reminds me of The Economist's special report on the future of the news.  It's slightly off-topic from contrarianism but important background material on diversity of opinions:

    http://www.economist.com/node/...

    The rest of the articles in the report are under “In this special report” for reasons I can't comprehend.

    The gist of it is that before the mid 1800s when the first mass market newspapers opened people largely got their information socially, and up until the turn of the 20th century the currently favoured “detached” style of journalism hadn't fully taken hold (and it may have only done so for financial reasons, since they needed to not piss anyone off to reach a (local) mass market).

    It seems like we're just now getting a return to where we were a few hundred years ago, where mass-media referred to the  producers and consumers.  The one key difference now is that people can organize by niche rather than geographically.  That's had some good and bad outcomes, but I suspect that it wouldn't make a difference to most people since a couple hundred years ago geographic areas would have had much tighter beliefs than they do now.