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Comment by jonalmeida | Hacker News Reader

I think Peter is mistaken as to why science goes about inventing things with little financial gain. There are some people that don't want money (who would have thought?), but find more value in the research. It's fair to say that on the other hand, there are those who also want some sort of financial gain, so there should be a way for them to go about this.

> "If people at Twitter make billions of dollars, it must be that Twitter is worth far more than what Einstein did."

Do people actually follow this thinking? Can someone give a better example of how this supposedly works?

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Yet, a 1000 years from now, nobody except maybe historians will know who Peter Thiel was. Except for Crassus there havent been many business men that survived the oblivion of time.

Eistein will certainly join the ranks of scientific giants.

The only people who are notable hundreds or thousands of years after their death are those who wrote something, or those who said something that someone else wrote down. In the long term no one is remembered for their actions.

I can think of two quick examples that disprove your point: Atila and Genghis Khan. They are most certainly remembered for their actions, not their thoughts or writings.

I live in the shadow of a university that is a major biology research magnet, and quite a number of the professors have their own off-campus start-ups going on.

There's a widespread misconception about scientists too, due to the assumption that we're all academics. In fact there are quite a lot of scientists in industry, either in companies or as entrepreneurs. I've known quite a few millionaire scientists. Within the company that I work for, and in my side-business, I have a sincere interest in seeing my inventions commercialized.

I saw a video'd lecture by Alan Kay (probably linked to from HN) where he distinguished invention and innovation: Invention is creating new things, and innovation is bringing things to market. Those are separate skills.

This the video of the talk where Alan Kay talks about Innovation Vs Invention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

Invention vs. innovation sounds like Schumpeter.

Thiel isn't saying that scientists don't want to make money, but that there is an attitude shared by many of them that making money is somehow wrong. Thiel believes that this attitude is just cover for the fact that so few scientists are able to make money from their discoveries even if they want to.

You should go back and listen again to what Thiel said, this isn't something he believes. He is describing society's reaction to technological innovation. Steve Jobs, Apple and the iPhone are good examples. Is iPhone the greatest invention of the 21st century? Did Jobs create more value than Einstein? You would think so just going by the media attention they have received.

Thought he said something quite different, which is that people explain the fact that scientists don't make money from their discoveries by saying that they aren't interested in doing so.

His point was that it was the nature of scientific discovery that made it hard to capture any value from it, not a characteristic of scientists.

Scientist making money in today's news: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2004/01/31/national/creator...

Thanks for clearing that up.

The way I see it is that science refers to research in a very fundamental sense. Computer Science, Physics, etc. I don't understand just yet how you could put a value on things like that.

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