Thiel Is Too Optimistic About Scientific Achievement Since the 70s | Hacker News Reader

Thiel Is Too Optimistic About Scientific Achievement Since the 70s

scholars-stage.org

17 pointsbarry-cotter12 comments

Surprisingly, I find myself in accord with Thiel: most of the technological progress in the last few decades has been in the digital world, i.e. the virtual world. In the physical world, we've been stagnating since the 70s. David Graeber made some insightful comments about this in one of his lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q84ar89Oxo

But, do you agree with the article, which asserts he isn't pessimistic enough?

I think genetic engineering is a clear example of massive progress in the last few decades and it’s only accelerating.

certainly genetic understanding in general has made massive progress. Thiel might classify all of that as “digital progress” but it may have alot of real world impact soon with new drugs and treatments as well as improved agriculture etc

I see many things wrong with the arguments (both the authors and Thiels). Both are very selective about which countries they look at i.e. they talk about the fundamental changes made to English and US societies before, but completely ignore the changes we have seen in China in the last 20 years (I would argue is part of the "democratising" of wealth).

There are also many false statements, for example they mention a person from the early 20th century would not be surprised by the way we communicate, because it is all still radio waves. Which is wrong, our communications relies almost exclusively on fibre optical communications, which was invented and made a reality in the 60s and 70s. Moreover, communications has changed from analog to digital, which rely on completely different mathematics.

Discounting the progress made in communications (exponential growth in throughput over an optical fiber over 40 years, with several revolutionary inventions) seems to be completely unjustified and arbitrary. The thought that any person could converse with any one else in the world with video at any time was pretty much unthinkable and has completely transformed society.

The progress that has been made in advanced fabrication with lithography is also revolutionary. This has enabled us to harness the power of the sun directly. I would argue the transition that we are (hopefully) seeing now with the move to renewables is a much more fundamental revolution, because everything before was essentially still digging stuff out the ground and burning it.

> but completely ignore the changes we have seen in China in the last 20 years (I would argue is part of the "democratising" of wealth).

To argue from Thiel’s perspective, I believe he sees the US as the leader in “zero to one” technologies and China as mostly “1 to n” technologies. Therefore, he focuses on pushing/keeping the US on this frontier, that’s also where he has the most influence.

I don’t think he would say there have absolutely been no breakthrough technological improvements, just not enough. I would imagine if you asked him if the advances in solar power was a great achievement he would say yes. But he would also say we still spend too much time and money building the next mobile app that marginally improves on the status quo.

I also don’t see him as a historian of technological progress, carefully documenting the wins and the losses in his writing and speeches. He’s trying to push a narrative which I think is broadly true but obviously has the pitfalls of any subjective opinion.

I mean any 50 year period is likely going to pale in comparison to the biggest leaps in technology in mankind’s history. How fast should technology be progressing for us to not be alarmed?

[ This was a fun read and worth far more than the comment I'm about to place here ]

There are times when I wonder whether we fail to spend enough time understanding one another. Failure in this generally creates many distractions and unplanned after effects that really do add right up over time.

Take this idea:

Thiel says we have made significant progress on things related to air travel, but the actual aircraft flies slower than it did back in the day.

I've seen this put in front of me a few times in various contexts. One common conclusion is we are leaving real money on the table by ignoring the speed of air travel, despite the fact that actual travel from point A to B may be quicker and or far more accessible than it was in the era of faster aircraft.

To that I would argue failure to understand one another goes well beyond the classic "what is worth what?" conflict inherent in so many of Thiel's points.

The real money left on the table is massive security theatre!! We have bogged down air travel, and perhaps other travel as the tentacles of the TSA continue to work their way into the machinery of society. That growth is driven by our failure to understand what creating an entity in charge of reducing risks presented by threats it is also supposed to identify! Fact is the incentives are in the wrong place here!

I would question any mandate to grow. Growth may be indicated as growth in real threats grow. Fair enough. However, when the identification and mitigation of said threats is within the scope of the same organization, any growth comes with serious questions about "security theatre." It's obvious, yet here we are continuing to ignore a basic problem.

[none of this should be taken as an attack on the TSA, which is simply operating as intended, nor Thiel, who is arguably operating as intended :) ]

Given the current state of affairs, Thiel talking about airplanes needing to go faster, and why we aren't doing that, makes a lot of sense too, and I will stop the security discussion right there really wanting to make a point more than continue this discussion.

That point being we do not understand one another as a nation of people and it's chronic, impacting almost everything we do.

And, like with the security example above, this failure to understand one another has left us a nation with peoples in it[0] rather than a nation of people. This has left us with many expensive symptoms inhibiting progress and or valuing it in ways that aren't doing us any favors.

[0] "Peoples" taking the definition referring to many distinct groups, factions, sects...

> There are times when I wonder whether we fail to spend enough time understanding one another.

We most certainly do, according to pretty extensive and established psychological research into social attitudes and behaviors.

One clear example of that is the Fundamental Attribution Error [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...

In general, our collective zeal to judge one another is the cause of far more grief than the judging could ever have value.

The golden age of the first half of the twentieth century was entirely propelled by new theoretical underpinnings for science (mostly qm). The theories were driven directly by unexplainable experiments.

And unfortunately we are at a point where the conditions under which our theories may not work, are not conditions we can access.

Was it Derek John de Solla Price who showed that WWII, far from being a time of scientific breakthroughs, had permanently slowed the climb of science (measured by published papers)? Very fine technical work took place, but at the expense of basic science which simply halted.

Maybe we're seeing something of the same thing as our best minds have been occupied for decades (yes, really - some saw further) with the practical problem of climate change. With good results; cheap solar panels, practical electric cars. Elon Musk, way back when had a physics degree but didn't dream of solving the paradoxes and problems of quantum mechanics; even then he was preoccupied with creating electric cars to tackle climate change. It's no wonder the very best minds don't go in for basic research in a world (legitimately) screaming emergency.

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