If all your views line up with the mainstream you’re most definitely not thinking for yourself though. Thiel in fact suggests a question framed in way to force people to think for themselves:
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
> If all your views line up with the mainstream you’re most definitely not thinking for yourself though.
This doesn't make sense. You don't have to hold atypical views to think for yourself. Someone who thinks critically and for themselves and arrives at mainstream views is not wrong.
In fact, you'd expect that the majority of people who did so would arrive at mainstream views, unless you presuppose that mainstream views are wrong because they are mainstream. But that's a circular argument.
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
This doesn't force someone tho think for themselves. It forces someone to make a statement that they believe to be controversial. Nothing more. Thinking for yourself does not imply making controversial statements. Making controversial statements does not imply thinking for yourself.
It's an entropic argument. Mainstream views are the result of many loose assumptions and lots of loose reasoning. Differences compound exponentially, so if you agree with mainstream thinking almost everywhere then either your inputs and thinking must extraordinarily well-defined in precise agreement with everyone else or, more likely, you are human and therefore susceptible to the same groupthink mechanisms as the rest of us.
I'm not fond of this argument because it's easy to formulate poorly and difficult to formulate well.
Instead, I favor a simpler appeal to history: from our point of view, any random person picked from history would be likely to have at at least one closely held belief that would be considered highly problematic by modern standards. What reason do we have to believe that we are somehow above this trend?
You can almost surely assert that the set of mainstream opinions contains at least one "wrong" opinion given the precedence of history. That is, of course, dependent on you believing that there are "wrong" opinions, which for some now has not been mainstream in some circles.
Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth.
It can get tiring to talk to yet another person that will explain to you how the theory of relativity is wrong when there's open house at the physics department, though...
> You don't have to hold atypical views to think for yourself.
The causality goes the other way around. Most people really interested on not being different and will hold mainstream views without questioning. It's expected that not all those views are correct, and you won't make the same mistakes in an independent process.
Thinking for your self does not imply a greater than average "holding" of atypical views. The people who came up with typical views thought for themselves, and people who synthesize their opinions based on similar information often reach similar conclusions.
> Most people really interested on not being different and will hold mainstream views without questioning.
Perhaps, but this doesn't imply the contrapositive, which was implied above (that holding mainstream views implies one does not think for themselves).
> Compared to making an effort to hold the typical views? How can it not imply that?
I'm not sure what you mean. Can someone who thinks for themself arrive at "typical views"? If yes, then thinking for yourself does not imply anything about the views one holds.
To look at the other side: do you believe that a q-anon conspiracy theorist "thinks for themselves", or do they just buy into a non-mainstream, but still completely dogmatic, set of views?
> Can someone who thinks for themself arrive at "typical views"? If yes, then thinking for yourself does not imply anything about the views one holds.
Can someone flipping a non-biased coin 50 times have heads come up every flip? Yes. While theoretically possible, in reality it’s almost certainly a weighted coin.
Of course it's a weighted coin! Mainstream ideas are usually (not always, but usually) more correct than a randomly chosen alternative.
Mainstream ideas are often weighted by such things as "scientific consensus", "observation", and "evidence". That doesn't make someone who holds many of them suspicious.
Again, not always, but usually, the mainstream ideas got to be mainstream by being better than all the ideas that came before. It's certainly somewhat conservative to hold only mainstream ideas, but on the whole I'd expect someone who only held mainstream ideas to be more correct than someone who only held non-mainstream ideas.
Like, are you going to sit here and tell me that most of your views aren't mainstream?
