Flipping the Interview Question

Peter Thiel asked the famous interview question:

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

I‘ve been familiar with this question for the past four years and every time I think about it, I instantly imagine myself sitting in an interview with Peter and completely failing to come up with a good answer. One of the two things always happens: I either realize that most people actually agree with my answer or my answer is incorrect. A good answer, of course, would the inverse of what most people agree with and is incorrect. The longer I go without having a good answer, the more interested I get in the question. How can an interview question be this hard?

The thing about this question is that it cannot be answered with an opinion. You cannot simply say “Most people like x but I really dislike x.” The answer has to be a testable truth. But the truth also has to be important. It doesn’t matter if you think the actual distance to Andromeda is slightly different from what is agreed upon. The answer needs to be useful. One is almost forced to spend more time thinking about the question rather than answering it.

I think one interesting way of reformulating it could be this:

“What important truth does Peter Thiel disagree with you on?”

I understand this is quite ad hominem but it can be used to find out which conventions are actually true. This also appears to be a very unusual form of contrarian thinking: thinking for yourself rather than listening to the contrarian. In fact, this may be the most contrarian form of contrarian thinking: thinking for yourself regardless of what anyone (even someone who thinks for themselves) thinks.

The problem, of course, is that Peter would probably agree with this.