The Libertarian Futurism of Peter Thiel (2011)
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As for the anti-aging research: Fund the NIH. Basic science like that needed in aging research isn't going to come on a startup timescale. Thiel makes a big deal about encouraging people to leave universities, but the smartest PhD students are generally not the ones leaving academia.
As for smart PhDs leaving academia... They are. Getting a faculty position is basically a crap shoot that requires politicking, landing a lucky project, getting a high impact factor publication, or all three. The labor market was so saturated by decades of encouraging more people to be PhDs (it kind of became a dumping ground for students who didn't want to med school or look for a job) that the distinction between a good scientist and a bad failed to be the standard academic metrics. Good scientists who diligently pursued difficult research were more likely than not rewarded with little because such projects might not be doable in a five year PhD or a two year postdoc. The other route out is fraud.
Edit: oh, I see, you're in the MSTP. Please consider Upton Sinclair's quote: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
If you're going to call me out on my vested interested in NIH funding, I think you should acknowledge you have a pretty similar (opposite) conflict of interest :)
Certainly the NIH basic science funding situation right now is absolutely dismal. However, it's ludicrous to suggest that the reason is because of some lack of "accountability." It's also not exclusively "clueless program managers" who are choosing how funds are disbursed: There are panels full of (decidedly) non-clueless professors who do that.
The real reason is because there are more PhDs than there used to be, more professors than there used to be, more people applying for grants than there used to be, and NIH funding has become nominally stagnant (declining in real dollars) after a period of massive expansion.
I'm not arguing that getting a faculty position is definitely something of a crapshoot, especially if you aren't a dual-degree candidate and don't have a clinical aspect to your work that you can fall back on.
I think you missed my point. If the smartest are leaving academia, then the professors that are reviewing grants and papers ARE clueless. How did Arsenic Life get through review with glowing reviewer comments? How is it that Reza Ghadiri got $6M to pursue DNA nanopore research sequencing with zero previous experience in the field? I could go on and on.
As for alternatives for basic science, the idea that science must be funded by either the NIH or startups (or even industry writ large) is a false dichotomy: consider Peter Mitchell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell
It's also worth noting that one of the most major medical advances of the 20th century, the eradication of polio, was done similarly without the NIH.
From what I see (and this is getting more personal than I'd like to from a response to my lighthearted comment) you left academia to work at a pharmaceutical (non-profit) company you started. I may have gotten that wrong. If so I apologize.
I do think it's a bit beside the point to be arguing about this instead of the ideas, but so be it.
Peter Mitchell was exceptional, as was every other Nobel Prize Winner, the vast majority (the rest?) who were academics. If you're arguing that moving to a model where individual scientists soliciting charity for their research is better, I would have to disagree. You think the general public is better able to assess research value than the NIH?
On a personal level, I find it to also be a very distressing appeal to authority - "well these people are professors because clearly they deserve to be"... I mean, I have worked under/with professors who definitely deserve it (Ham Smith, Clyde Hutchison, Dan Gibson, Vanessa Hayes, Jeff Kelly, my boss at the University of Maryland - who does incidentally now work for the NIH, but is planning on quitting) but there is a very, very long list of professors who do not... I'm not really going to name too many names for obvious reasons.
Edit: I've just read the comment by eli_gottlieb further below and would argue that's a far better improvement for science rather than abandoning the NIH.
When a person gives out of their own pocket to an outlandish and unlikely project, that is on them. When the government gives out to an outlandish and unlikely project, the donors had no choice.
In that way, government is dangerous, and therefore must be held to a higher standard of accountability. A charity or private nonprofit, if it screws up, it will find itself in a more difficult position with regard to seeking further resources for its work.
Why, what would the opposite of being in the NIH be? I don't get it what you're trying to say about the person that "called you out" on the NIH link and your opinions.
Because I can't reply below: It's a little disingenuous to suggest you never benefitted from the NIH system if you've gotten a PhD at a life-sciences institution. Nearly all of the money at these types of places comes from the NIH, even if you were never specifically on an NIH grant.
True. That's because we've been cutting the percentage of GDP spent on basic research, and because we structure academic careers pyramidally, ensuring there will always be more PhD graduates than permanent academic jobs (unless you wish to pave over the universe in professorial offices).
Now look, I'm in industry right now, but while some smart PhDs leave academia and some don't, most smart MS and PhD holders would rather be doing research. So don't talk about how research productivity has dropped off and will never come back: social determinism is the kind most likely to be wrong (since if people understand the prediction made by the social determinist, they act to prevent its coming true).
Instead, let's understand just how much everyone stands to gain from advances in basic science (to follow the given example: longer, healthier, happier lives) - how much we have always gained from advances in basic science - and restructure the scientific career to make it happen.
Throwing free money at anyone with a PhD doesn't maximize scientific productivity. Neither does starving out the overwhelming majority of all trained scientists with a pyramidal career ladder and ever-shrinking science budgets.
That's basically a nonsense defense of the status quo. Consider your own mechanism: and because we structure academic careers pyramidally This is essentially an exponential growth process. Even if people understand the predictions, if their actions are limited to linear fixes, they aren't going to be able to stop the problem.
Why is it that people like Jay Keasing, Pete Schultz, Carolyn Bertozzi, George Church, etc. have giant pyramids with 50-100 direct reports? How do we stop that?
Ok. Now that we've solved that problem: Instead, let's understand just how much everyone stands to gain from advances in basic science (to follow the given example: longer, healthier, happier lives) - how much we have always gained from advances in basic science - and restructure the scientific career to make it happen.
Great. What exactly is the plan here? I don't think you have real data as to how the social and labor structure of science has an effect on innovation. Nobody does, the n is too low, and real innovations are largely black swans.
>Great. What exactly is the plan here?
We can start listing from incremental reforms and work our way up to radical ones.
1) Shift from post-docs to "perma-docs". This will immediately address one of the biggest hidden costs (in the sense that the accounting methods of grant funding conceal the cost entirely) in science: by the time you've got a grad-student trained to do decent research, they graduate, and by the time you've got a post-doc running experiments at a decent pace, they too leave. The only people who stay in a single lab long-term are the professors, and they've become glorified managers. The result is that science is actually losing a lot of productivity to skilled-labor turnover. The solution? Just stop pretending everyone will be a professor someday, and allocate money for paying permanent staff scientists with PhDs to actually run experiments and publish results rather than shepherding graduate students.
2) Lengthen the grant cycle. This does mean more money per grant, but it doesn't cost the government anything to allocate the same dollars-per-grant-year in longer blocks of years. Use this reform to commit to letting scientists do long-term work: more like five years than two years, or even, ideally, something like 10 years. Since whole sciences are not routinely totally revolutionized every decade or two, funding periods should look more like substantial fractions of one's whole career than like the time it takes to train up a new MS or PhD student.
3) Build and use a framework for allocating grants based on value-of-information calculations that reward doing experiments whose outcomes are uncertain, rather than experiments that will probably work (which really means: experiments that don't teach us anything new). Find a way of actually quantifying the uncertainty a subfield carries about its open problems before and after new publications, and reward the scientists who do best at surprising their peers.
And we can get more radical from there if I keep wasting my time thinking of these things instead of doing useful work.
1) with little advancement and negotiating power, perma-docs will become basically overeducated and exploited. I mean, your suggestion has already happened with the creation of "staff scientist" position, with marginal improvement in quality of science. The phenomenon of "perma-doc" is basically railed against anyways. Why bother putting someone through 5-6 years of economic and advancement distress as a grad student when basically, they should have had on-the-job training as a tech to do what you are suggesting.
2) Lock fundraisers (professors) in to money for long periods of time with limited for accountability or checks. Yup. No way that could go wrong.
3) The more seasoned professors with grantmanship will then gravitate towards uncertain outcomes. Of course this is no guarantee that these professors will actually have the skill to execute, and you know, how do you judge the reasonableness of an experiment with a highly uncertain outcome? Actually, this already happens to a certain extent - have you been to any DARPA jamborees?
What's wrong with that? If Thiel is a Libertarian (haven't looked it up, not that it matters), then supporting and making money off-of socially "neutral" things such as Facebook and Paypal seems like a very good representation of the things Libertarians believe in. Namely, freedom from violent coercion in all forms, and the voluntary trade and association between free individuals.
Calling it "Neutral" is also quite a loaded term, to be honest. You've already created and started projecting some sort of internal (and probably shared-with-others) scale of social good. And then you apply it to something completely voluntary and non-violent, as if to degrade from what it actually represents.
The problem with that is, they're just fine with every other form of coercion.
Yet we see a major political movement with constant scare stories about the evils of corporations.
Meanwhile, the US government spends $3 Trillion a year, collects it all via violence (eg: taxation or inflation which is a non-consensual devaluing of the dollar) and is literally using it to spy on people illegally, and drop hellfire missiles on innocent teenagers....
... yet all I hear is how we need more of this government thing and less of those evil, scary, companies that have to keep everybody happy in order to stay in business.
It boggles my mind.
Personally, I have been threatened with violence on a couple of occasions and robbed by the government every year since I became an adult... and only rarely does a company do something wrong/stupid, and when they do the scale doesn't even begin to compare.
But literally what you say is wrong. It's not "coercion" to offer a better product. To claim companies are "unchecked" is wrong as well, they are checked by the need to keep everyone happy. Government doesn't even run fair elections!
You consent to being taxed merely by continuing to live in this country and use government services. If you don't like it, then go live on a boat in international waters and leave the rest of us to enjoy an actual society. And good riddance.
And I stopped taking you seriously when you started talking about taxes and violence. It's the dumbest God damned thing out there in libertarian rhetoric.
Care to paste an example of what you mean by that?
But that's not the point: most "libertarians" seem to believe that the ostensible usefulness of the nanny state can be eliminated by people choosing to do good and engaging in market activity with others who do good.
So profiting from something that's so evil is, to this way of thinking, counter-libertarian.
http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/b...
Seriously, libertarians have no idea of the history of the political movement they are involved in.
Your post doesn't make sense to me at all. What is this about levels of being an anarchist? I'm an anarcho-capitalist, basically, which is quite different than the typical leftist "anarchists".
>Seriously libertarians have no idea of the history of the political movement they are involved in.
Kind of a pointless remark don't you think? I'm pretty well-versed in the history of libertarian anarchism and lest-"anarchism".
Now if only my In-Laws that just spout out whatever Glen Beck says with mixed in "small governemnt" people say gets them to believe liberty is best experienced in Anarchy :)
For example, I frequently hear liberals say that if libertarianism were pushed to its logical extreme, you'd end up with Somalia. For some reason, liberals are insulated from the question on what happens when leftist ideology it pushed to its extreme.
US modern liberalism, on the other hand, has basically no pure ideological component other than beliefs in humanistic morals, pragmatism and empiricism. (And, of course, pandering from politicians). Most of us really distrust overly strong ideologies, so that's what we poke fun at. Liberalism isn't the opposite of libertarianism in terms of ideology, we're not in favor of nationalizing industries, it's the opposite where we don't think there's a one-size fits-all narrative to define everything.
I try to split beliefs between small-l libertarianism for what I believe (which is not ideologically pure), and capital-L Libertarianism for the party platform. It's the only way to reconcile liberals and conservatives with their presumptive parties, though Libertarians, not having won anything, aren't as compromising.
I only ever see that in discussions where libertarian participants attack every criticism drawn from real-world experience with "but, that's only because of government, but in a real libertarian system, that wouldn't happen".
> For some reason, liberals are insulated from the question on what happens when leftist ideology it pushed to its extreme.
Except in the real world, where conservative arguments often start with some caricature of what leftist ideology pushed to an extreme would be presented as exactly what everyone even mildly to the left of them actually wants, at a minimum, and immediately. (And, yes, the reverse happens from liberals to conservatives frequently, too.)
Because they keep espousing positions that have proven to be terrible ideas. They forget about history, and why things like government regulations came about.
Not all but some libertarians are arguably more familiar with history, because they understand the degree to which regulation historically has been twisted (generally: to screw over the poor), wheras their detractors have been sold the line that exists to defend the status quo on any given regulation.
Well, it helps that liberals are not leftists. "Leftist" begins at social democracy (think of Elizabeth Warren) and goes from there.
Libertarianism was strongly rooted on the far left for a long time - Lenins "Left Communism - An infantile Disorder" was aimed at libertarian Marxists, for example.
The "modern" right wing libertarianism is the new kid on the block.
*fixed, thank you kind sir
I'll crawl back into my hole now. :)
The HN version of this is
"we wanted a thoughtful discussion about his ideas, instead we discussed the finer points of being a libertarian."
Discuss.
And I would extrapolate a third "disruptive" belief: that a quick discussion on a web forum by persons with a vague layman's understanding and absolutely no data beyond links to popular science articles (perhaps some of whom skipped college at Thiel's instigation) believe they can bring insight to these topics.
I would imagine anyone knowledgeable enough to discus these issues has left the building, likely to watch the Fonz jump the shark.
In other words, if you aren't thinking about it, then you shouldn't abdicate your moral responsibility so facilely like that.
I do have expertise in some small amount of things myself, so I can recognize it in others. An easy heuristic is: the ability to make detailed predictions, and to specify where and why one is able to make detailed predictions.
Because decades of research by countless independent teams has not been invalidated by data and methods so poor they aren't extensively acknowledged in peer reviewed journals.
If you think that process is corrupt, have you ever looked at the actual data and methods yourself? If we are dismissing peer review then show us that data and how you came to your conclusions.
The story you refer to was created by those philosophically upset by climate change and is in the form "we can't tell if it warmer in this cherry picked area therefore climate change is false" then cloaked that story in jargon. It is identical to the argument used by less bright conservatives "there was snow on tv in Peoria therefore climate change is fake"
The disappointing thing here is that people who could genuinely to look into climate change if they were honestly interested don't and instead choose to convince themselves of blatantly false views from biased media outlets for ideologically reasons. If there were knowledgeable people here, this has certainly chased them off in the same way there are no evolutionary biologists chatting on fundamentalists websites.
But maybe you are saying that papers on climate change in peer reviewed journals are only there due to cronyism and corruption. That the theory of evolution has come to prominence mainly do to that too.
I imagine many have not heard the extent of this conspiracy. Perhaps there is a quote from Thiel about it.
I also understand climate change posses the same threat to laissez-faire capitalism theories as Darwin did to bible literalists and that is why it is such a visceral topic.
I believe they genuinely can not tell the difference between a domain expert and a random post on the web. They will not have herd of peer review let alone read journals such as Nature.
Bernie Sanders is a civil libertarian.
I am not trying to start a political argument here. I am only adding to the OP's statement.
What ever happened to 'summary' then 'summary with more depth' then 'summary with even more depth'?
Others need / want context. Who has the idea? What motivates them? How are they as a person? Etc... In this way, ideas are a social thing. People, who may not be informed or able to work with the bare nature or essence of an idea can often get something out of a longer form, people centric, presentation. Another example would be, "How does Peter's life experience compare to my own, or to others that I trust or believe in?"
Trust plays an important role.
I see this distinction often in advocacy. Libertarians, as a great example, will often go to great lengths to demonstrate the technical purity, accuracy, and logical consistency of their ideas. In a very real sense, they've sorted it out to be "right" by some measure, and where that measure is consistent across individuals, they all will center on a few ideas and seek to include others.
Nothing wrong with this. Just making a point, mind you all.
This type of advocacy centers on the rational. And it's often framed as and presented in ways that are comparable to debate. But that isn't how everybody works. Effective advocates, and by effective I mean being able to reach very large numbers of people and seeing more of those people motivated to act on the product of the advocacy than average, employ all three components: reason, emotion, character. (logos, pathos, ethos http://courses.durhamtech.edu/perkins/aris.html)
This means large swaths of people cannot / will not even hear Peter and his ideas without sufficient context to warrant the exercise. "Who is Peter Thiel?" as a question actually matters, and it's not just fluff, which is why the New Yorker presents in long form as it so often does. And there is trust potential in that the person may well be one that "makes sense" or is appealing in some way, adding that resonance to an idea.
A contrast to this might be the religious right, where the reason may not be potent, but character and strong emotion can be linked to values and ideas anyway. One sees simple ideas, attractive in that they aren't complex things and in how they may resonate with our basic nature, coupled with strong characters and emotions that back the ideas, long form as we see here, in ways that do reach people while not centering on rational merits.
Where somebody like Thiel may center on the reason, the religious right may center on the person and emotion, for example.
This can also be seen in the left where the appeal is mixed in a different way through emotion and reason as the centers, leaving some slack in people and their character overall. BTW, I've always thought this is contributing to why the left does as well on social issues as it often does and embodies tolerance. It's core to how and why the advocacy works as it does. And that plays out too, with the left often expressing economic ideas in more complicated forms with mixed results too.
You might see some of those differently, and that's OK. They are not absolute statements. We can and do see a variety of presentations and advocacy forms. A lot of the perception I'm presenting here depends on how familiar one is with the various types of advocacy and where we fall on the scale of what actually will reach us and motivate us to act, or at least (re)consider. Coarse differences can be seen through this kind of lens, and that's my intent, not to argue one over the other, or merits.
*I included some brief contrast incorporating several politics here to provide some support for my point, not to argue merit.
Seeing down votes suggests breaking that out and making it clear might be worth doing. It's not my intent to offend or make a value judgement. It is my intent to highlight the merits of this piece, and speak to it's style.
The primary point I'm making is the New Yorker can and does reach a lot of people in ways that are relevant and effective, which is why they do what they do. And we need that as much as we do the other forms and presentations out there so that the body politic is inclusive and relevant to everyone. We know that story, and we know something of who Peter is. A large portion of the New Yorker audience probably does not.
In a very simple sense, it's a lot like preparing a great meal to feature an ingredient rather than a spartan one where the ingredient stands alone, bare, depending only on it's intrinsic appeal. Some people will try it to experience it. Others won't. But they will experience it in the context of a great meal overall.
Edit: For what it's worth, understanding advocacy, it's components and various forms is valuable professionally. The selling of ideas and things sometimes requires reaching people who may not center on familiar norms. A longer form proposal, for example, may reach that person in ways that resonate where a Power Point, or other brief presentation might not. Understanding who, when, how has high value, again why I put this here.