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Comment by killedbydeath | Hacker News Reader

I had to remove two of the three negations in the title to understand it: You need a non-mainstream opinion to be successful. Does anyone else have to do this mental exercise to understand?

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it was fine for me, perhaps because the message is very obvious to me.

I got it at first but was confused later, so yes I had to at least re-read it too.

I really like the post though and I agree that we need different thinking people that stand their ground. It's a shame so many give in to the 'mainstream' to save themselves from a few weird looks and some embarrassments.

Take the contrapositive:

If you're successful, then you have a non-mainstream opinion.

That contrapositive isn't quite accurate, because it indicates a different time-order than the original. "If you don't have a non-mainstream opinion, then you can't be successful" implies that you must have non-mainstream opinion before you become successful. "If you're successful, then you have a non-mainstream opinion" indicates that you have a non-mainstream opinion after you become successful. It's fairly likely that your non-mainstream opinion before becomes the mainstream opinion afterwards. After all, isn't that almost the definition of "successful"?

Good point about time. Just for fun...

Assume t0 < t1

Original: NOT(NOT(Mainstream(t0))) ==> NOT(Succesful(t1))

Contrapositive: Successful(t1) ==> NOT(Mainstream(t0))

Edit: Small edit for clarity and spelling.

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