Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation
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docs.google.com
At one point Thiel is quoted with "The public transportation systems don’t work." Which is a bold and false statement, because public transportation can work extremely well. And in the source they don't even talk about public transportation but about Uber, which I think is a failure and pointless and not really innovative at all. Services like Uber existed long before Uber, Uber just put an app on it instead of a phone call. Also Thiel complaints about parking. That he can't think of any other modes of mobility than a car, it rather telling.
His definition of progress and innovation is not technical or defined by quality of life but merely what he as an investor can earn money from it. This is very visible when Thiel dismisses incremental progress with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.
I think you've missed his point which he lays out in the opener. If you've listened to him speak on podcasts about this topic (I recommend episode 1 of The Portal with Eric Weinstein) you will realize that his ENTIRE point is that incremental progress is simply refinement of things we already have since the 60s and for him thats NOT good enough. He isn't looking for incremental refinement at all, he is looking for the equivalent of the emergence of the solar cell or the wind turbine from nothing. Basically the emergence of a totally new way of arranging atoms to bring about big leaps, not small refinements. He isnt looking for the next best rocket, he is looking for the emergence of the warp drive. He always pressed the point that if you take away bites, our tech progress has been largely stagnant since the 60s. I've never heard anyone put it that way and I largely have come to agree. Most of what we have today is just better refinement of tech we had in the 60s. TV's, Refrigerators, Microwaves, Cars, Rockets that land themselves. Even computers.
Also, like it or not, capital investment drives innovation, otherwise there is no real incentive. Now I will say one can argue for better models for more longterm investment moon shots that might take decades to achieve, such as say Fusion reactors. ITER is largely stagnant as a multi-government funded 40 billion dollar project and MIT has some incredible designs for fusion reactor prototypes that would put ITER to shame. Problem is they estimate needing 300 million and 10 years to achieve this. Ultimately you need investors to create a company to make this marketable. If Thiel has the money and wants to invest in these sorts of mega leaps ONLY then more power to him and to us all.
Though it is questionable how much a theory of quantum gravity would affect every-day life. Physics hasn't made much progress on that front precisely because it's far removed from the human scale.
I think we still have some tricks up our sleeve for "conventional" technology:
- Space Elevators might never be built
- a warp drive will almost certainly never be built
- Fusion reactors are likely within reach, could potentially even have been achieved already but for ecomomic reasons and policy decisions, though I'm not sure how much of a game changer they would actually be
- AI Humanoid Servants (and related breakthroughs, eg brain simulation: forget warp drives, think about the ability to 'fork' a person, and have that version of yourself embark on a centuries-long journey across the stars aboard conventional space ships), I'm with you
Yeah, ITER is not really a fast project. Weirdly enough there is also Wendelstein 7-X in Germany, which is also mostly funded by the German government is way ahead of other fusion project. No idea if this research will lead to a power source or not, but I'm pretty if it does, those power plants will be subsidised by the government.
Warp Drive (or equivalent) - String theory is largely a 30 year dead end and we have no idea what the link between QED and gravity is. Imagine we could unlock the graviton, it would be huge. Currently we have no unified theory and the quantum realm is still considered "spooky" meaning we don't fully understand the hidden substructure. The fact that 2 particles entangled can interact at ANY distance should tell you something. Eric Weinstein talks a lot about this in his podcasts, one of the reason I think he and Thiel are partners.
The Replicator (think star trek) - I know some will say "But what about 3D printers". That is not what I am talking about. That still requires atoms of a material to be fed into what is the incremental advance of the printer, just substitute the ink with X material. I'm talking about a machine that can both synthesize the material from ANY substrate, since its all just proton/neutron/electron arrangements anyways, and then arrange the material in specific placement to create just about anything on a tabletop. I'd even settle for the material part only. That would be mega leap. Equivalent to say the advent of the refrigerator or microwave.
Humanoid Robots - On this point I agree with you somewhat, that both AI and humanoid robots are starting to emerge now from incremental advancement. However Thiel loves to point to household objects likes Refrigerators, TV's, etc, so what would be the next step for the household that would be a large leap: IMO it would be a robot that could do all the trivial tasks that I don't care to such as dishes, laundry, general upkeep, etc. All the dystopian robot takeover stuff aside, that convergence of tech would be a quantum leap for humanity.
A air-ground/water/space ship personal vehicle - I would not agree that this would be an incremental advancement of the car since the car can only do ground (air in 2 dimensions on specific surfaces). You have vehicles that can traverse these mediums in the singular sense, even small 1 person versions, but NONE combine all 3 mediums with full degree of freedom. I'm not talking flying cars, I'm talking flying saucer that can dive into the ocean or take you to orbit.
Another way of thinking of it is, you have access to things now that only the uber rich had long ago, so what do only the uber rich have access to now that you do not: Access to resources (replicator), access to labor (cheap home robots), access to any point on the planet (personal space ships), even access to unlimited energy (fusion reactors, which I would argue are NOT incremental of nuclear). Lets start there. If you want to get outside the box, then you look for the star trek tech: Warp Drive, Tractor Beams (they can do this with sound waves to some extent), transporters, physical-real holographics.
So the counter arguments are "well all tech is incremental". From the point of view the 60's starting version 1 appliances most is, but you haven't got sufficiently outside the box IMO. Combinations of tech maybe (phone+computer=iphone, submarine+airplaine+space-pod=flying saucer, AI+Boston Dynamics Robot=humanoid home servant, 3D printer + ? = replicator), but not always incremental. Something like a warp drive or a star trek transporter would fall outside of that. The best we have is to look to sci-fi and ask what it would take to achieve that kind of breakthrough. Even fusion reactors or space elevators would be a huge leap even if there was only 1 on the planet within the next decade.
The next counter argument is "well we have reached the end of physics so there is nothing left to invent". Please explain the QED-gravity link and submit your unified theory to the journal Nature then, they are waiting. Until then we have not yet unlocked everything.
Happy to listen to you and figure out what points you disagree with, and also understand which ones you agree with.
With respect to the regulations - this is a huge topic. You've picked ones that makes sense. But there are regulations like patent laws, and absurd state laws (can't fill gas in Portland yourself) that need to be abolished. From car dealership lobby to a whole bunch of nasty things in Agriculture, there are protective laws that benefit the small proportionally advantaged people and prevent real innovation. There is a lot of gate-keeping in the regulations lobbied to death by companies with big and deep pockets (Philip Morris for e.g. and even companies like Google who spend millions in lobbying).
This is not fair with all due respect. I am in the same boat as you in some ways, I think Peter Thiel is a weird guy, but there is no denying - he is smart, tactical and he knows how to play the political chess. There are many progressive ideas in there too that align with Bernie sanders (wages section).
Not inclined to you, but I feel like SV folks have tattoed "PROGRESSIVE" in big bold letters and they've stopped thinking for themselves anymore. FYI - I live in SV. Get rid of that label, think from the bottom up - not from left or right.
Where I agree with him is the issue of real wages stagnation and even decline in the US and in other countries. Sadly, I don't think we would agree on the cause.
I guess, with SV you mean Silicon Valley? I live nowhere near that place. I also don't work in IT. And I hold a degree in economics.
That's why I said, you have benevolent intentions, but the result of your comment's popularity has to do with deep rooted not-thinking-for-yourself culture in SV and the mob mentality that goes with it.
I see this with my own eyes and feel it living here in SV.
I mean, it doesn’t work for him, since he doesn’t need it..
As someone without a car or even a license, who relies on public transport (albeit in Europe), I think this highlights the issues I have with economic inequality... Interests diverging until they become opposed.
(Just to be clear, I agree that Peter Thiel’s claims with regards to public transport is false in general)
What you’re doing now is imposing the current day to the past, like looking at the current Airbnb and pretending that’s how it was when it first started.
What if perhaps today wouldn’t be achieved if there had been so many rules and regulations? So picture the same government from now and place it in say 1870. What would you say the odds are we DONT end up anywhere as advanced as we are today?
There are good laws, and there are bad laws. There is good regulation, and there is bad regulation. The solution is to curate from the good set, and weed out from the bad set - not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If there was a temporary cleansing or removing of all laws and therefore the good ones would get immediately reinstated then perhaps that’s a better path.
Which coincidentally is exactly what Trumps executive order is attempting to do. Remove 2 for every 1 turd that gets added.
Personally, I prefer that to the days of radioactive toothpaste.
What makes you think that the toothpaste company wants to use expensive radioactive materials on your plain toothpaste and not charge you for it?
Uh, that's an excellent argument for legalizing and regulating weed. Or am I missing your point?
> What makes you think that the toothpaste company wants to use expensive radioactive materials on your plain toothpaste and not charge you for it?
I'll sell my radioactive toothpaste at a slight loss, capture the market, and then raise prices? Just off the top of my head. Or sell my radioactive stuff and also invest in companies that treat cancer.
Even hard core libertarians don't think there should be no laws. That's a straw man. They tend to believe governments should vigorously enforce contracts, trademarks, punish fraud and provide other tools that make commerce easy. In other words that they give people the tools to keep each other honest, but don't try to directly mandate every detail of every product.
The word law tends to mean these general, timeless rules that often date back a long way. They don't create ossification or stagnation (Thiel's primary concern) because they don't advantage any particular way of doing things, just enforce fair dealing and honesty.
The word regulation tends to be used to mean rather modern and very sector-specific rules, which frequently ossify existing practice and prevent people trying anything new. Often they are nakedly about doing exactly that - taxi medallions are one such form of regulation.
The people who support such regulations invariably claim they're about safety or preventing some sort of harm. The evidence for this is highly mixed. It often relies on an absurd, cartoon-character view of companies in which they'll happily kill all their customers to make a quick buck with no concern for long term consequences whatsoever, if the noble and morally pure government employee doesn't step in to stop them.
But there are plenty of cases where regulations seem to have created more harm than good, and vastly more where it's ambiguous. Do we really need governments to regulate the taxi industry, for example? Arguably not. It seems Uber is widely judged as being a better taxi regulator than the government, as it can use far faster and more plentiful feedback vs the paper or faxed complaint forms governments typically provide.
Libertarians often make arguments of this form - that the alternative to government regulations is not some anarchist wild west in which people go mad murdering each other with explosive contraptions. The alternative is private sector regulation of various kinds, in which logos and trademarks are used to establish meaning behind a mark and consumers gravitate to products that have those marks, as they're understood to be a sign of quality and safety. The advantage being that if that organisation succumbs to various kinds of dysfunction, like capture, or stagnation, then another can come along and outcompete it. Whereas with government regulators that can't happen - you can get endless decades or even centuries of unfixable dysfunction.
That's not really a modern thing. For example, the reason why Lange Messer (a type of medieval sword, which are nominally "long knives") exist is because sword production was regulated.
The game changes if you make it into a product available for and advertised to the general public.
I wouldn’t even disagree that regulation slows down advancement. That is probably the case! But I also know that in the early 1900s you didn’t have the kinds of child labor laws and workplace safety protections in place that we have now. I’d rather a society without child labor even if it runs a little slower and less efficiently.
[1] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfCFR/CFR...
the three big aesthetic/intellectual strains of sv thought as I see them are truetype protagonist gleaming tech optimism a la early pmarca blog, folksy practicality a la pg, and dark horse contrarianism a la thiel. leonardo, donatello, raphael (turtles, not painters). but he did originate the kernel of it and can't really be faulted for the imitators
what actually makes him interesting tho is he's a disciple of rene girard, who argued among other things that the basis of socialization and social conflict is mimesis, which goes a long way to explaining his fixation on avoidance of imitation (and makes the raft of imitators that much funnier imo)
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
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.
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?
The vast majority of society have prescribed views, that is their views are derived from their group identity.
Why is this an issue? Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth.
The question isn’t to tease out a controversial answer, rather to assert an individual is not a mindless ideologue.
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...
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.
> 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 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.
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?
Idea possibly bad: Free market progress is a force in balance with consolidation of power and interests. So some lack of progress can be explained by reaching a tipping point in the monopoly power where concentrated interests just kill anything disruptive. Michael Seibel has written about this.
Growth (or anything chaotic, really) shakes up the stable condition, changes the rules, and lets new entrants compete with Goliath. That's why we covet it so much.
I don't buy the argument that the whole system is therefore useless and corrupt, but that it very much needs intervention to keep this sort of regulatory capture from occurring.
Very disappointed we don't have a Windows phone as an alternative also. I think 3 is the bare minimum for a technology to have good competition. So why not.
My overall point though is the same, regulatory capture is bad and we should fight it regardless of monopolies or not.
My eye-opening realization of American stagnation came in history class during high school. The teacher told us the narrative of progress through the 1800s, how industrialization brought more wealth and electricity improved quality of life. He spoke of an increase in wages that came with it: each decade, Americans were wealthier than before.
People assume the lives of their children would be better than their own. But in the 1960s, an American man could support a family of five: himself, his wife, and three kids was the norm. Sure, part of that can be explained by sexism and gender issues of the time, but the point was that women didn't have to work because a single income was sufficient to support a family. Today, most families are dual-income[0] as a matter of necessity, not necessarily desire. It's no longer obvious that progress will continue, and certainly not obvious that the progress we are making is a good thing for most people.
My grandparents, separately, once remarked that they had seen "perhaps the last real changes in quality of life any generation would have." Running water in homes, indoor toilets, microwaves, refrigerators, and the development of computer networks all happened in the 20th century. They predicted continued stagnation in human innovation, that most of the universe's great ideas had already been discovered.
Where are the big, boundary-pushing changes to life that the relentless pursuit of technology had promised? Where do we go from here? My father once speculated it would come from far-field wireless power transmission. That would kick off the next space race, pushing humanity farther into space than we could ever imagine by fuel. And certainly it would push a new generation of innovation forward, enabling ideas that would not have been possible before. What are the next transformative technologies waiting just around the corner, capable of changing and improving life for everyone on the planet?
We don't know the future, and there's no way to say for sure that we've see the last big changes in life. Your grandparents could be proven laughably wrong in next few decades.
That said, it is likely at this point that we've exhausted the current paradigm. That there isn't much left to gain in maximizing existing scientific theories, or pumping billions into mature technologies. These concepts and philosophies have failed to real creating something of note lately, and that might be a sign that they are at their limits.
So the next step would be a step-change function and something completely unexpected.
>The problem that I remain the most passionate about is for us to make some real and continued progress in the fight against aging and death.
But how does one help? Really. I've been in academia for more than 10 years. I've had done some really promising stuff and know people with pretty cool projects that are 1,000% worth pursuing. Yet I have found virtually zero support as I don't play well with the "the politics of science".
The problem is that the "politics of science" are typically against "actually doing science" as there is no surplus of time, energy and willpower that allows one to pursue both ends.
I would like people to consider that this is one of the biggest obstacles hindering human development (in science at least). This thing really needs to change, for the benefit of everybody involved.
The ideal institution that can break this cycle will have funding (only limited, see Hammings lecture) from a source with no questions or expectations, and be worked on by people with almost no academic influence. But they can't be herectics or crackpots because you can't just hack your way around biology like you did with computers. This is more akin to reinventing the transistor than creating tiktok.
I'm pessimistic about institutions but optimistic about people. I think the academy is an impediment to a lot of interesting and necessary projects, not just here but in general. risk-averse, prestige-obsessed, heavily bureaucratized. most of the institutions in our society are like this, hollowed out. there's a lot of basic research that needs to be done, so I think the highest leverage thing we can do is knock down barriers to more people being able to do it. route around the institutions
I keep a binder at my desk with printed articles from the web that I find interesting enough to want to keep forever (and give to my children one day). In there is your take on 'playing to win' on the minecraft economy. Thanks for that.
I'm not even remotely related to biotech stuff, but I'm considering moving there in a couple of years just because it's the most important problem I could possibly be working on.
EDIT: "There" is the ecosystem around Aubrey de Grey (whatever you think of him personally).
People live for about 80 years. The first 20 are spent learning the ropes, the middle 40 are spent doing good work, and the final 20 are (ideally) spent in repose and reflection. Half of life is spent contributing to family/society, and half is spent in dependence on family/society; 1 year of contribution for every 1 year of dependence.
By adding even 20 years of quality life, we would make a tremendous leap forward in terms of human productivity, wealth generation and quality of life; instead of 1 year of contribution for every year of dependence, you'd have 1.5 years. That would do wonders in terms of building wealth and improving lives.
"Science advances one funeral at a time". Make this premise obsolete and we will have a massive roi in science, probably keeping expenditure within the same order of magnitude. I am not speculating, I am truly convinced of it.
Open and flowing, but to the US. A high quality researcher, nobel price winner (etc.) does not have its intrinsic value turn to 0 once the clock reaches 65y.
As we innovate more than SK, I welcome their generous gift of talented researchers.
Not in my field, where superannuated faculty members in the late 70s rehash ideas from their postdoc days. Nobel laureates are few, but every tenured faculty member can hang on forever. The pace in SK and the research authority given younger scholars is invigorating to those few outsiders who sample it.
For example, in just the VR space, if I follow the most popular VR related subreddits and podcasts I often miss important Chinese VR hardware and software. And sometimes the hardware is better than anything available in the US.
I only found out about these cutting edge haptic gloves called Dexmo because I happened upon a review of an American product on an expert blog and the review compared them to a Chinese version.
https://skarredghost.com/2020/04/07/senseglove-vr-haptics-gl...
It is also helpful, that the Chinese government can just do things w/o any meaningful interference. In the 1960s and 70s, German cities wanted to build huge motorway like road through the city centres, which would have destroyed the cities, many of those project could be prevented from happening. Thiel would have critised those protests as a barrier for progress. Like he does, when he is mentioning zoning laws prevented a high-speed railway in San Francisco.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Audio: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...
. . . oh the non-clean is cheap for you. Expensive for the rest of us.
Yes, something happened on the early 70's. But that article is a biased gathering of disconnected evidence surrounded by a story that was set independently of any of that evidence and doesn't even make sense. It is still useful to point people to the problem, but it would be incredibly more useful if there were an actually good source we could use.
Even after the federal gold confiscation of the 1930's, maybe more so eventually because of increased productivity.
The vast majority of that wealth not only remained in the US, but was leveraged toward greater production in the US.
This led to increasing prosperity, and back when the system was half a century closer to being of the people, by the people, and for the people, prosperity was truly felt by the vast majority of people more than what you get today.
Half the charts on the site were fully predictable the day they turned the dollar into fiat currency.
As the value of the dollar declined, the work done by the wage earners became worth less than the gold their dollars were worth, and far less than when still backed just a few years earlier. Even though they were doing the same jobs for the same pay in US dollars so it didn't seem so bad at the time.
This was a serious reversal.
US consumers were manipulated from participants in a producer economy, into targets of an extractive economy.
At the maximum rate the _market_ could bear.
I think making things not accessible for a single person financially would be the my main focus. You can do things today that your ancestors had no chance of accessing, so what things would be the next quantum leap for your productivity that currently only the uber-rich have access to?
I will start:
- Robot Servants - Eliminate of all trivial work and leave the creative endeavors for humans. Think about if 1 person could start a factory with the capital he saves from his full-time job.
- Space Elevator or equivalent - Access to space is achievable for even small 1 person operations.
- Fusion Reactors - Unlimited clean energy for said people, robots and factories. Couple that with some infrastructure to beam it into space and you could have some VERY interesting things emerge.
My theme is: Access to labor, access to resources, access to energy.
Anyone have any other ideas?
I think this is an excellent quote, but it doesn't convince me. Death is one of the only things we humans all have in common. It is the only great equalizer.
Unless every human is able to live forever, I will remain skeptical about a death cure being a good thing for humanity. Sure, you can argue about defeating death by degrees (e.g. extending a lifespan to 150, 200 years) but again, if it isn't available for everyone, I can't see that going well.
Or just plainly, is there a particular reason why I should care what a tech billionaire thinks about culture?
I'm not a fan of Peter Thiel in the slightest so maybe this isn't for me. I think it is a bit weird that at least one person finds his lofty opinions about stuff to be so important that they painstakingly collected them for... some purpose. Again, did Peter Thiel put this together??
I despise this guy but will listen to everything he has to say. He correctly predicted and bet like ford bet on Nazis that Trump will win, and is reaping the benefits. Given that we have a nincompoop at the top, I'm scrounging to get whatever meaningful literature I can find from the other side to see how they convince themselves of their deeds. This guy is probably up there as the best bets you have on this regard.
Also, I don't think backing a candidate and using their victory to enrich yourself is a particularly brilliant or unique move, at least not one that warrants "listen[ing] to everything he says."
Beyond that, backing a candidate that's (at least arguably) detrimental to a country simply for profit or to prove a point about how smart you are doesn't really engender a lot of respect from me. Leveraging your existing billions to make even more billions might be somewhat impressive but this brings me back to my original question: Why should I (or anybody) care what Peter Thiel thinks about The Enlightenment or whatever?
This whole thing reads as "here's a grand study of one of our greatest thinkers" despite his main qualification is being rich and litigious.
It's like if I painted a self portrait where I've got angel wings and Dwayne Johnson's physique. It might be fun and pleasing for me, but why would anyone else want to look at it? And why would it end up on the front page of HN?
Sorry I don't mean to be rude but I am still genuinely stuck on What is the purpose of this document? and Why would anyone necessarily care about its content?
Regulatory capture is real, but so is the lobby that knows exactly why Chesterton's fence was put in place and can't wait to trick us into removing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990
Couldn’t edit the document so I added a few corrections there
On deregulation: I totally disagree. I think he has the cart before the horse. To me, it's under regulation. $1.3B per new drug is a bargin. Look at exercise machine infomercials, that's what the drug environment looks like, at best, without regulation. To have a drug checked over, tip to tail, pregnant or not, old or young, etc., costs a lot of money. Not centralizing this process would be fantastically more expensive and error prone.
Interstellar?
I sound bitter about this, but actually a lot of friends of mine are in that type of position. Heck, I myself have to do process-box-ticking type things in my day-to-day as well.
This ends up being a sort of glue that's poured over all of society. Each checklist on its own seems reasonable, but put together we make change quite hard. We also end up creating a class of people who are incentivized to make sure there are rules and procedures to follow. I don't just mean lawyers, there's a whole slew of pseudo-lawyers handling things such as GDPR policies and IT Security policies, compliance officers, and so on.
All these process people depend on our continued desire to seem reasonable ("Make sure schools check for child molesters before hiring anyone"), but also abdicate responsibility for those decisions to the new policy expert class. GDPR has been around for not very long, but already you'd better hire someone who is an expert in it if you're going to do serious business (this in fact happened at my day-to-day, there's no way to do business without).
What apolcalypse is he worried about? Or is it the breakdown in politics, due to the stagnation, the problem? Why should the breakdown lead to an apocalypse, rather than a reformation?
> [Peter Robinson: In 2016, how many professors at the top five law schools endorsed Donald Trump?] [2] Zero. And the law school example's interesting because you would think it's one where if you took the, a lot of academic fields are more internal to academia, but law is one that cashes out in a governmental political context, and taking a contrarian position in theory is quite valuable. If you're a tenured law professor at Harvard, and you're the only law professor at a top law school to endorse Trump, I don't know, I think there would be like a 50% chance you would've gotten nominated to the Supreme Court or something like that. So it seems like it's the sort of thing where the contrarian thing would be quite valuable, and then if nobody takes that bet, I mean, wow, there must be some unbelievable enforcement mechanisms, and it's sort of like a gentle version of North Korea.
What's more likely: Harvard law professors don't endorse Trump because he's unfit to lead a parade, or they are subject to (gentle) totalitarian barbarism?
Anyone who follows politics knows the only way you're getting nominated to the Supreme Court by a Republican president is if you've been doing the Heritage Foundation, Values Voters circuit. There's no way they're going to pick some Harvard professor over someone who's been hobnobbing donors for decades.
His point is that the groupthink at Harvard is so strong that people will actively demolish their dreams to stay within the group.
Even if you take a more cynical view, and assume that some of them will be selfish, the sort of person who's a tenured law professor at a top university probably values the opinions of their colleagues and peers. And if one of them were to do this, and they got nominated to the supreme court, their peers would see them (correctly) as sellouts, as would, likely, history.
There's nothing sinister here; law professors didn't do it because either (a) they were responsible or (b) they have too much self-respect/self-regard (depending on level of cynicism). Thiel's thesis would only really work if becoming a Supreme Court justice was some sort of all-overriding imperative for lawyers, like Sauron looking for rings.
I would assume it's worse in academia.
Looks like it might vary
The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled.
Actually the real price of oil was basically the same for the decade before 1973 (ranging $22.21 - $27.37) as 1993-1999 (ranging $18.86 - $33.63): https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...
It's true that it spiked in 1974-1985, and was elevated from 1986-1992 (ranging $32.48 - $45.65 — far from quadruple), and has been much higher than pre-1973 prices since 2000, but that doesn't really match up with the stagnation of wages. Policy changes in the 80s (Reaganomics) causing rising inequality are a much better explanation:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...
Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started.
He thought that was a problem under Obama and he sought to change that by elevating...Trump?
Tesla was out-competed by Edison, even though Edison had an inferior technology. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane, but they didn’t get to be rich.
Edison having inferior technology is kind of a myth, or at least a vast oversimplification. DC is superior to AC in many situations; ironically, Tesla the car company is all about innovations in DC technology, as is Musk's SolarCity.
The Wright brothers are arguably the first to privately achieve powered controlled flight, and it's obviously impressive that they were "just" bicycle mechanics before, but it's an American myth that they "invented" the airplane. French-Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually publicly demonstrated his independently developed powered controlled airplane in 1906 before the Wright brothers did in 1908, and there are many other claims to having been first, all independently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl...
More importantly, the Wright brothers did a bad job of turning their prototypes into useful airplanes, while Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators did a better job; instead, the Wright brothers focused on guarding their patents and promoting their names as the first inventors. If anyone would agree that execution matters more than ideas, it would be the HN crowd.
If you're a professor in academia, [you say]: the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure. So I think there’s this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.
Um...and what reason is there to believe that the VC-based tech industry isn't exactly like this, and that is how Thiel himself became successful? Cancer researchers are at least objectively making progress against cancer. Thiel got rich by founding or investing in some companies that he sold to other rich people.
On the other hands, some of these are interesting thoughts:
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance [...] A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. [...] In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money [...]
I think there is a big hysteresis part to this where success begets success and then failure begets failure, where if you haven’t had any major successes in a number of decades, it does induce a certain amount of learned helplessness, and then it shifts the way science gets done or the way innovation gets done in to a more bureaucratic, political structure where the people who get the research grants are more the politicians than the scientists. You’re rewarded for very small incremental progress, not for trying to take risks.
The "two perspectives on China" thing might be interesting, but I'd want to see a lot more substantiation. Who is saying what, exactly?
1) What's the evidence that technological progress has slowed? Is this nostalgia? Thiel is weighting more heavily "big" engineering projects like military hardware or aerospace above "soft" engineering projects. The Moon landing was a $150 billion project by the government BTW. Is LHC and LIGO not huge achievements? All three were science experiments, not consumer technological progress.
2)"only 3.5% unemployment". Quantitative vs Qualitative fallacy. Majority of new jobs created since 2005 are temp or gig economy jobs.
3) Is it regulation, or is it just diminishing returns in a cycle that is a punctuated equilibrium. Thiel expects steady progress, but between big cycles you have iteration and incrementally. Most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and reaching the next local maxima will require time. But SV libertarians always start out with the premise that government is the problem, and then try to tie their thesis at the end back to that.
4) Thiel criticizes Steven Chu for backing Solyndra. Fine, post-facto due diligence shows it was a bad investment. But the DoE's investment portfolio has better success rates than most VC funds, it's not that Thiel himself has never made any dumb investments. Broadening your portfolio over a large number of companies (some of them starting with a dumb idea) is not necessarily a bad strategy and even companies with unworkable ideas can sometimes pivot to companies that are big hits. Solyndra didn't, but there are numerous examples of others who did. Even PayPal is an example of a pivot, I did technical due dilligence on the original idea, Confinity, in 1998, when it was about peer-to-peer payments between Palm Pilots. Switching to Digital Wallets was also a failure. None of the eWallets that were installable apps on the desktop got traction. It was only when it pivoted to email that it worked.
5) Thiel himself built Palantir on the backs of US taxpayer money. Hypocritical for him to criticize the government and government investment. He also got lucky from a serendipitous meeting between him and Zuckerberg, did he really know then when he gave seed money to Zuck Facebook would be so big? Was FB technological progress?
So in summary: 1) we don't have a way to measure technological progress in a way that permits computing the rate. Lots of flawed proxies, e.g # of patents, etc It's subjective, and your wonderment as a child at changes in technology become disillusioned and nonplussed as an adult.
2) wages are stagnated. Unemployment isn't "low", not when your replace a big chunk of stable middle class jobs with benefits with temp/gig work.
3) public transport is successful all over the world, and Thiel ignores the billions spent on other modes (like airports). e.g. California government has spent $60 billion on SFO/LAX/OAK/SJC/ec
4) no evidence regulations are stopping technological progress, there is evidence that risk aversion from conservatives attacking government R&D for decades has, especially in areas of renewable energy or climate (e.g. ARPA-E program)
The only thing I agree with him on is that our Sci-Fi is predominantly dystopian now. The United Federation of Planets (ironically, post-capitalist according to Picard), a multicultural society of tolerance and freedom from want, has been replaced with cyberpunk misery.
But this is largely a reflection is the fact that 40 years of wage stagnation, and continued attacks on collective action in building a better future, gave way to rugged individualism and survivalism. In Sci-Fi, grand utopias usually aren't built by spontaneous order, but by collective action.
Energy:
- Million-volt DC power transmission over thousands of kilometers is routine.
- Solar panels get cheaper every year.
- 46 nuclear reactors in operation, 11 under construction.
Transportation:
- 35,000km of high speed rail.
- Several major cities, including Shenzhen (16 million people), use all electric taxis and buses now.
- 600km/hr maglev train in test.
Medicine:
- First coronavirus vaccine approved and being given to PLA soldiers.
- Epidemic under control, most of country back at work.
Electronics:
- In-country manufacture of everything except largest CPUs.
Finance:
- Country runs financial system; financial system does not run country.
Government:
- Government is mildly oppressive but not incompetent.
Or a few decades ago, they captured mothers, 'tied them up like pigs' and physically forced abortions and sterilizations on them.
[edit] To be clear, i'm not saying this is right, i'm saying that right now, the power is way too concentrated in Xi Xinping's hands.
You shouldn't, you should read it for yourself and make up your own mind. If a lot of people say something is interesting or good, it's probably worth at least having a look.
My conclusion from skimming it is that it's fairly interesting, although I disagree with most of his conclusions.
Would you also argue Warren Buffet (literally nicknamed oracle of Omaha) has no special insight because he’s rich?
Warren Buffet has insight on what it's like to be rich, and insights on how to win at capitalism. That does not qualify him to speak about progress in general. Peter Thiel may be good at reading what trends will make him money, but I don't believe that makes him qualified to say what would make the world better (i.e. progress).
This means they became rich as a consequence of everyone being made better off. So I would personally value their insights.
For example, I may not believe that having pizzas or french fries delivered still fresh and hot to my home by having them cooked inside a car means "progress", but if enough people are ready to pay for that, it is progress. We are all better off based on the majority opinion.
Reality is the ultimate judge. What makes people better off will earn money, freely given away by these people ("Shut up and take my money!")
1. The cutting of research into a vaccine for the original sars coronavirus. I think a lot of us would be happier if we had that basic research done right now. Clear failure of market-based solutions / forward thinking. Same vein: lack of real change on global warming.
2. Social media companies optimizing their algorithms to make people unhappy, so they spend more time on the site.
Basically, no I do not accept your original premise.
HOWEVER, most people do not care about viruses, and problems in general besides imminent danger. If you too care, realize we are in the minority. Before covid19, most people though the wearing of masks when one has a cold in asia was overkill. Even now, in the midst of a pandemic, the wearing of masks is a hard sell. I fully expect all basic precaution like transparent plastic sheets in front of the checkout to be gone as soon as the pandemic is over, because we are in the minority.
For most people, the experience of directly seeing the person doing their checkout is preferable to the alternatives. It makes them happier. It is not hard to expand that to other issues: even for a virus like Ebola, research doesn't get much money. Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care.
2. Have you noticed how people play various games like Zynga, which accomplishes nothing? Just like videogames in general: unless you are being paid for playing (professional player), you are getting nothing out of it, except maybe better reflexes - but you could achieve the same result in much less time. Social networks are the same. What am I accomplishing here? Nothing. You could even say, as I often talk to people who reject my premises, HN makes me unhappy. Yet I post here?
So you must consider that what we consider make people, you or me unhappy is an oversimplification. We must gain something else out of this - maybe a dopamine hit?
Social networks are all in competition with eachother. You will prefer the one that gives you the best overall experience, the largest dopamine hit with the lowest unhappiness.
This social network increase overall happiness. There may be more than one: facebook for regular people, HN for hackers, Twitch for gamers, etc.
It's hard to overcome the fallacy of composition (the tendancy to extrapolate from our own experience to the population level): what makes us happy make make 50% of the people miserable, and vice-versa.
You are right in both of these descriptions. What we want (are willing to spend money on) and what is going to make us happiest, are different things. And capitalism rewards finding things that we will spend money on. Not things that will make us happier.
But can you imagine a world where we didn’t make billionaires out of people for making us unhappy? For destroying the environment through resource extraction? Imagine we took all that money and funded and rewarded the scientists who had the forethought to develop a coronavirus vaccine. We’d maybe all be able to see the checkout person‘s whole face, and hug our family and friends right now.
Since capitalism rewards the opposite of that, the only way we get to that world or closer to it is by abandoning capitalism as the gold standard for social organization. One small step towards that is to stop idolizing billionaires like Thiel
Or maybe not, just like how the FDA fumbled the test development while forbidding private alternatives to avoid losing face.
I can imagine such a word, were graft and power decides what project gets the money, instead of the population aggregated preferences through the free market.
I seriously believe we would all be worse off. It is not about justifying our own preferences, but thinking about all of mankind. If the vast majority of the world population believes "destroying the environment through resource extraction" is needed to elevate their standard our living to ours, we have to gracefully accept they are our equals, and to collectively deal the problem later on.
I think you should consider that what we want and what is going to make us happier is generally the same. There are rare exceptions, and we take offense that capitalism rewards them too, but they remain exceptions.
And in any case Thiel doesn’t need to have a 100% perfectly “focused-on-your-definition-of-progress-only” track record to be worth listening to. Just apply that standard consistently and see how many people can fulfill it.
OTOH, building something like PayPal alone will make a lot of other people interested in what you’ve got to say. You cannot deny that someone who achieves such a feat when no one else does (besides Elon Musk) has some special insight. But the fact that you do deny that seems like it’s rooted in some form of subjective dislike.
Edit: just read your reply to sibling comment, confirmed my suspicion here.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice many capitalists accumulate capital in ways that are unfair and uncompetitive.
> In practice many capitalists accumulate capital in ways that are unfair and uncompetitive.
I don't think this is the right binary. It's not a choice between "better allocation" or "unfair". In my lifetime I've seen capitalism reward exploitation, cruelty, and abuse, without having some unfair/noncompetitive advantage. Walmart pays domestic employees a non-living wage, and exploits weak labor and environmental laws and "free trade" to produce goods at lower prices, and uses weaknesses in the political system ($$$) to avoid paying taxes. That's pure capitalism working as intended, not dirty trickery.
In jurisdictions where/when those laws have been well crafted, spectacular social progress has followed:
- in Athens, the crafting of the Solonian Constitution created broader property rights which lead to the renaissance that was Ancient Greece; which was later destroyed by the absolute rule of Alexander's heirs
- in Rome, the crafting of the Law of Twelve Tables lead to the Roman Empire; it was destroyed by Marcus Aurelius when he eliminated the last voting rights, handing hereditary power to his son
- in England, the crafting of Parliament led to the Industrial Revolution because it undid domestic Royal Monopolies; it has been continually eroded by Conservative interests over the centuries, today the UK is not epicenter of economic opportunity
- in the USA, the crafting of the Constitution designed a classless, more equal opportunity society, far from perfect, it nevertheless resulted in unprecedented economic growth resulting in the USA's dominance during the 20th Century; it almost died at the end of the 1800's as the robber barons sought to create monopolies that would define a new Conservative class system based on the wealthy people of that day; today it is under attack again by large companies who are eating/disappearing upstart competitors; Republican policies, and activist Republican judges are eroding antitrust. Libertarians want to disassemble what made America great, whether they know it or not.