Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zao_AyBhNb8TPWrQqgXn5NzNAgfEqzTIaFYos7wdqGI/edit?usp=drivesdk

by apsec112 • 6 years ago

155 167 6 years ago

docs.google.com

skmurphy2• 6 years ago

From first paragraph: this is a 56,000 word summary of Peter Thiel’s view on progress and stagnation in his own words, sourced from a number of his interviews and articles. This document consists only of direct quotes from Thiel, lightly edited for clarity (except for headings and where marked otherwise). Key quotes are in the summary. Compiled by Richard Ngo (@richardmcngo) and Jeremy Nixon (@jvnixon).

read_if_gay_4• 6 years ago

I can recommend listening to Thiels episode on Eric Weinsteins The Portal podcast if this sounds interesting to you.

scop• 6 years ago

I recommend that people listen to that episode even if it's not interesting to you. Very good food for thought.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Audio: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...

seibelj• 6 years ago

Thiel is interesting to me because he is so different than others in the SV bubble. Whether you agree with him or think he is the devil, at least he has independent views. I find a lot of people don’t think for themselves anymore.

joshuamorton5• 6 years ago

People can achieve mainstream views through independent thought though.

bezmenov3• 6 years ago

If all your views line up with the mainstream you’re most definitely not thinking for yourself though. Thiel in fact suggests a question framed in way to force people to think for themselves:

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

czbond• 6 years ago

I think it is his heavy introvert side, which focuses on reflection and strategy. (In the pseudo-personality type world, "INTJ"). Entrepreneurs are typically ENTP, or ESTP and are extroverted, jump out and figure it out types. They reflect a whole lot less - strategize less - and power through things more.

peacefulhat3• 6 years ago

I don't think he's that different beyond partisanship. Especially in the YC ecosystem with peers like Balaji Srinivasan. A lot of SV people want to "disrupt" basic foundations of our government like the education system.

baxtr• 6 years ago

I wonder how many people realize that disrupt literally means to break something.

baddox• 6 years ago

What strikes you as different about him? I can’t really articulate why exactly, but to me he’s right up there on the list of archetypical SV personalities.

ZephyrBlu2• 6 years ago

He's not irrationally optimistic about the future.

alicemaz3• 6 years ago

honestly I think that's an artifact of how often he is imitated. having read more than my share of seed fund about pages in the past few months, there is particular flavor you encounter over and over again that can only be described like "ah yes, I see you also have read zero to one." heavy emphasis on the transformative over the incremental, hard tech, disinterest in pedigree and traction given a shamanistic insistance that they are uniquely capable of identifying the visionaries of tomorrow, constant reminders they go against the grain and buck consensus, punchy copy talking about bold iconoclasts making the future of tomorrow yadda yadda

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)

Balgair3• 6 years ago

Well, the blood thing comes to mind.

Animats3• 6 years ago

This is old. What's the date?

hckr_news• 6 years ago

"...sourced from a number of his interviews and articles"

Looks like it might vary

apsec1123• 6 years ago

The doc itself was only put together recently, but it's composed of quotes and interviews from over the last decade.

Pokepokalypse2• 6 years ago

Seems like he's stagnated.

dustingetz3• 6 years ago

Google also has $50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively ... if we're living in an accelerating technological world, and you have zero percent interest rates, you should be able to invest all of your money in things that will return it many times over. The fact is you're out of ideas.

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.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

Can you recommend further reading?

jjoonathan3• 6 years ago

In balance with? The free market is the mechanism for power consolidation, not its opponent. Companies merge and grow until they build a moat big enough to fend off their competitors and then the market enters nash equilibrium.

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.

noetic_techy6• 6 years ago

I think Eric Weinstein would agree with you on this point. You should really listen to his podcast with Peter Thiel where they talk about similar interests disrupting advancement (The Portal - Episode 1).

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.

dustingetz3• 6 years ago

FAAMG is like 20% of the GDP of the USA, the state can't intervene with itself

AndrewGaspar• 6 years ago

It would be nice if there was an .epub format version of this.

xwdv2• 6 years ago

I think the fundamental problem is that we have grown so used to the idea of advanced progress within our own lifetime that we now refuse to do anything where we cannot see the payoff within our own lifetimes, this means we will likely not have any more major multi-generational project timelines, which are necessary for things like mass human space travel, or even solving global warming.

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

Don't worry - I think it's pretty clear we're at the point now where if we don't solve global warming within a single generation, it's too late.

xwdv2• 6 years ago

We’re the wrong generation to solve this problem, it’s already too late.

Mangalor• 6 years ago

Some of the links are from 10 years ago, and it shows. His views on solar being too expensive for practical use seem anachronistic now, and I'm sure his opinion has changed with the market.

x3n0ph3n3• 6 years ago

It _was_ too expensive 10 years ago. Technology improvements have brought efficiency up and cost down since then.

turdnagel• 6 years ago

Sounds like progress to me. But since we can't travel at 2,000 MPH...

vondur• 6 years ago

Some interesting insights. I never thought of "stagnation" of non computer tech as something due to overregulation. However, I'm a bit hesitant to allow unregulated biotech/medical research.

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

I am super ok with "stagnation" of technologies that have the potential to cause the extinction of our species.

jjoonathan3• 6 years ago

The libertarian faith in deregulation offers an easy solution for all problems on only one condition: you must be too unimaginative to understand how it will go wrong. That's an easy condition for most people to meet. Deregulation also offers great opportunity in the form of resurrecting old hustles.

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.

Pokepokalypse2• 6 years ago

“Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,”

. . . oh the non-clean is cheap for you. Expensive for the rest of us.

novok4• 6 years ago

Some of these quotes are 8-10 years old, referencing events older than that. Back then solar wasn't that good of an idea financially and you had scandals like Solyndra. Now it's finally beating the cheapest dirty energy sources.

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

Why should I think this man has special insight into the state of the world? He is quite rich, that is true. But if anything, by definition that means he is deeply out of touch with the needs, desires, and problems of the vast majority of the people on this planet.

whatshisface2• 6 years ago

Taking your comment at absolute face value, this essay is about technological progress, not the needs desires or problems of anybody.

sigmar• 6 years ago

It isn't an essay. It is a collection of quotes grouped by topic.

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

"progress" has a few definitions. It can mean simply "forward motion", in which case you are right. Or it can mean what I usually take it to mean: "gradual betterment" - unless you're a shark, what's the point of moving forward if not to improve. How can you improve if you don't understand what "better" is?

SpaceRaccoon• 6 years ago

To play devil's advocate: for capitalists to remain capitalists, they must successfully allocate capital, which requires a knowledge of the "needs, desired, and problems" of the consumer class. And the stock market is a mechanism for transferring capital from inefficient allocators to efficient ones.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice many capitalists accumulate capital in ways that are unfair and uncompetitive.

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

which requires a knowledge of the "needs, desired, and problems" of the consumer class
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.

read_if_gay_4• 6 years ago

Because he’s self made. He got rich precisely by being in touch with the needs, desires, and problems of people. And also by being successful at investing, which also requires ability to read trends etc.

Would you also argue Warren Buffet (literally nicknamed oracle of Omaha) has no special insight because he’s rich?

kennywinker9• 6 years ago

Being a good gambler does not make you a good person.

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).

notJim• 6 years ago

Why should I think this man has special insight into the state of the world?

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.

ZephyrBlu2• 6 years ago

Which conclusions do you disagree with?

peacefulhat3• 6 years ago

I've listened to some of these interviews and agree completely with the basic premise. However, I don't think it's correct that China's success is entirely explained from simply copying America. Of course copying is responsible for part of their success, but there are clear examples of the reverse. For example, integration of payments into WeChat, which has been duplicated by Facebook and others (but not as successfully as in China). They certainly disruptively innovate by making extremely cheap electric cars that poor Chinese can afford.

istorical• 6 years ago

The language barrier is really making it difficult to see progress in China even for people interested in a particular space.

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...

tehabe4• 6 years ago

China did what Germany did in the 19th century and Japan did after World War II but differently. Germany and Japan copied and made own things until they were experts and made better things than the original. China did that differently, they invited western companies through cheap labour and made officially those things, copied it then and became experts and eventually made their own products, which at least as good or better than the originals.

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.

novok4• 6 years ago

It's interesting that many of his date coincide with the WTF happened in 1971 website: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

marcosdumay4• 6 years ago

Wait, despite the perfect timing for a real cause that page is really trying to attribute it to monetary policy?

novok4• 6 years ago

That is their take, but you gotta admit, something happened in the early 1970s.

Animats3• 6 years ago

The future is coming. In China.

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.

apsec1123• 6 years ago

Ten years ago I'd agree, but I don't think outright genocide qualifies as "mildly oppressive".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide_of_Uyghurs

Animats3• 6 years ago

That's not genocide, it's forced assimilation. China is trying to break the stranglehold of Islam. That's tough, as two decades of wars in the Middle East have taught the US.

novok4• 6 years ago

'mildly oppressive', while literally millions of Uyghurs are being led into nazi style concentration camp trains and hong kong is not free anymore.

Or a few decades ago, they captured mothers, 'tied them up like pigs' and physically forced abortions and sterilizations on them.

orwin• 6 years ago

Nitpicking, but this is not a few decades ago, its a few years ago. Enforced the one child policy by force in autonomous province, basically removing the enforcement power of the governor and city mayors.

[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.

peacefulhat3• 6 years ago

When you say "Nazi-style concentration camps" do you think millions are soon to be killed?

spacechild1• 6 years ago

"mildly oppressive" - are you kidding?

xenospn• 6 years ago

China is as "mildly oppressive" just as much as a bullet to the head is "mildly inconvenient".

melling• 6 years ago

The author posted his Twitter announcement on HN a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990

Couldn’t edit the document so I added a few corrections there

moralestapia3• 6 years ago

On Page 92, under Biotech,

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.

dgut2• 6 years ago

Would you please explain a bit further what you mean by politics of science and how it's agains't actually doing science?

biomcgary• 6 years ago

Not GP, but science is becoming increasingly hierarchical in it's funding mechanisms, placing bigger bets on bigger projects that reflect the perspective of older scientists and the status quo. This pulls funding away from up and coming scientists with new ideas they'd like to try out. Classic increase of risk aversion.

roveo• 6 years ago

There are several funds and dozens of companies trying to solve this problem (appeared in the last 5 years or so). I would consider searching there.

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).

alicemaz3• 6 years ago

the way my and my partners look at this is an infrastructure problem. our hope anyway is we can build tools and methods (better mathematical modeling, better bioinformatics software, faster/more accurate sequencing, eventually standardized gear for continuous process chemistry) that can serve startups of a bioengineering bent while also making it more practical for independent researchers to work outside academia. the biologist of our team is particularly interested in longevity research herself so partly we're trying to make the things that she'd need to do her own research 5-10 years down the line

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

moralestapia3• 6 years ago

Hello Alice, off-topic but it's great to see you here.

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.

marcusverus• 6 years ago

But how does one help?

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.

ramraj072• 6 years ago

Totally agreed. Dumped (hopefully temporarily) a decade of bio training due to this. I think the fundamental issue with every attempt at reinventing biology research is that they end up recruiting the same professors from academia who bring the exact same culture with them.

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.

alangibson• 6 years ago

I think Thiel is worth listening to, but sometimes his contrarianism flips into derangement:

[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?

lgessler• 6 years ago

Yeah, came here to say this too. There are much more convincing ways of making this point.

briefcomment• 6 years ago

I would say the second. Trump supporters in tech companies are certainly subject to (gentle) totalitarian barbarism. I know some people who support Trump privately who would never defend Trump in a work setting. It's simply not worth losing your job over.

I would assume it's worse in academia.

rsynnott• 6 years ago

Harvard law professors don't endorse Trump because he's unfit to lead a parade

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.

jbob2000• 6 years ago

I think his point is that, Trump provided the opportunity for these law professors to get their "dream job" (a seat on the supreme court, your name is in the history books for centuries). And yet, NONE of them took this up.

His point is that the groupthink at Harvard is so strong that people will actively demolish their dreams to stay within the group.

notahacker• 6 years ago

Thiel's insistence that Harvard law professors ought to have put [in this instance highly unlikely] personal advancement opportunities ahead of their actual beliefs about the fitness of a presidential candidate for office when deciding whether to make an endorsement says much about Thiel and little about groupthink at Harvard.

spaced-out• 6 years ago

I think there would be like a 50% chance you would've gotten nominated to the Supreme Court or something like that.

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.

viburnum• 6 years ago

Just take all the money and build loads of solar and wind power.

bem94• 6 years ago

There are people who say that death is natural to which I think the response always has to be that there is nothing more natural for us than to fight death.

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.

riazrizvi• 6 years ago

The premise of Libertarianism in this doc is flawed. The idea that fewer laws gives rise to freedom is a Conservative distortion. Fewer laws gives freedom to the most powerful few to do what they like to the rest. The freedom we need for social progress and innovation, is the freedom and rights of the productive class, ie workers, to help society through creative destruction. Their freedom and rights can only be provided through robustly defended and well-crafted economic opportunity laws, including a permissive patent & copyright culture. Since certain Conservative interests will always be opposed to certain creative destructions, when they are too powerful it doesn't happen. That's why autocratic empires don't develop at anywhere near their potential rate, except in the narrow channel they point themselves in (war for Nazi Germany, manufacturing for modern China). That's why the printing press languished in the Han Empire, but lead to the Scientific Revolution in less autocratic/fragmented Europe, where people were able to say heretical anti-establishment stuff by hopping between legal jurisdictions.

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.

vngzs• 6 years ago

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress.

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?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm

sharadov• 6 years ago

I agree that the hard problems are not being worked on, that's what happens when VCs descend on the market and are looking to 100X their investments. It's incredibly hard to work hard on difficult problems when you have to grow for growth's sake and pump out numbers that satisfy the market/VCs every quarter.

troughway• 6 years ago

Most people are not wired to be explorers or risk takers. That's where the whole rent-seeking mentality comes from, which is a form of risk aversion, and the incumbent laws and whatnot have put a hard stop on "what could have been".

pcbro141• 6 years ago

Only a part of the mission, but there should be ambitious action taken to dramatically improve education and provide truly equal opportunity for all in the US. Pay teachers properly, give a proper education in all schools especially impoverished neighborhoods. The US should be ranking higher than it is in Math/Reading/Science scores compared to other countries. Other special programs to remedy the huge racial wealth gap from the slavery/Jim Crow/other institutional racism legacy. The US can and should do a much better job at providing better education and opportunities for all of its citizens.

chrisco255• 6 years ago

Robotics and AI have the ability to transform a great deal. We have still not fully explored Crispr and what's possible with biotech. AR & VR I think, once they reach maturity, will also transform society. Finally, I do think cryptocurrency will change as much about society as double entry bookkeeping did in the 14th century. This change may not be as radical for 1st world countries, but I think it will allow many developing countries to catch up much more rapidly.

toohotatopic• 6 years ago

Why do we have to go? The big question is: What is awareness? That awareness is wherever you are. No need to go to outer space. However, once you can create awareness artificially, you can send it into space, without human time constraints. There is no problem in travelling for millions of years if your awareness doesn't end.

Hypx• 6 years ago

You should at least bring up the story of Max Planck in the late 1800s. He was basically told not to enter physics, because supposedly nearly all of physics has already been discovery. We know what came next in physics.

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.

philipkglass• 6 years ago

It's harder than ever to escape local optimums. Invent a better drug for high blood pressure? It needs to compete with several older, cheaper "OK" drugs for the same condition. Invent a better electricity source? It needs to compete with fully depreciated power plants that were built 25 years ago. Invent a better large scale search algorithm -- an innovation on the order of PageRank? Googlebot is welcome on billions of pages that will aggressively try to prevent you from crawling them. Google's "good enough" search plus stronger position in content acquisition will prevent people from escaping the local optimum.

tehabe4• 6 years ago

I disagree with Thiel on almost every page on this document. And I don't know which topic to really critise. Like his view on regulation, which he calls a burden. I don't want to live in a world w/o regulations, I want to know what is in my food, I want to know that the devices I use are safe. We could see what happens, when regulation fails, when two 737MAX crashed due to the fact that Boeing was able to hide MCAS from the FAA and the FAA let Boeing go forward with the plane.

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.

whb074• 6 years ago

I’m saddened that you think it’s okay to make it a federal crime to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits (seriously).

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?

mjlawson4• 6 years ago

That's a really unfair comparison. Suggesting that all regulation is akin to your marmalade example is akin to suggesting that we shouldn't enforce any laws because adultery laws are still on the books.

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.

_Microft2• 6 years ago

Why is it not permitted to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits?

jjj1232• 6 years ago

I think if you left it up to the market we would have even more misleading food labels than we do now. It’s already hard enough to determine what is and isn’t healthy at the supermarket, regulation ensures that we at least have the most basic calorie, nutrient and ingridient information.

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.

cygx5• 6 years ago

I’m saddened that you think it’s okay to make it a federal crime to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits (seriously).

Personally, I prefer that to the days of radioactive toothpaste.

noetic_techy6• 6 years ago

> 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

rschneid• 6 years ago

I think it's a mistake to assume that technology advancements will come in great leaps and bounds since the day of the wright brothers are over... we've been out of our atmosphere and to the bottom of the sea and made nukes++ and transistors at nm levels. Humanity has been so experienced in the domain of physics for so long that there is no low-hanging fruit left within the periodic table. The physical world has limits that our higher order thinking has identified and relentlessly struggled against. This is done every day by independent humans in labs and dreams around the world and seems by it's distributed nature to be incremental. I think Thiel's being quite foolish for lamenting/admonishing a trend that I believe will only getting stronger as the sophistication of collective human knowledge increases...

tehabe4• 6 years ago

Oh, than his views on innovation are even more wrong than I thought. Most progress, most innovation is the result of incremental progress. Sometimes you can see a leap forward, which usually comes that someone puts several incremental innovations together and combines them in the right way.

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.

fermienrico2• 6 years ago

There are so many points he makes. Which ones do you agree with? I have a hard time understanding your opposition and painting everything he says as some what illogical, unreasonable, impossible or absurd. The examples you've given, I agree with (and even the most far right people would). But the document is massive and I feel like you're painting a broad stroke with a tiny brush. Peter Thiel is a controversial figure, but your comment to me comes across as rather less objective (besides giving strawman examples) and not substantiated enough for the bold claims you lay down.

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.

tehabe4• 6 years ago

I focused mostly on the parts I have some or a lot of knowledge about: energy and tranportation/mobility. I simply can't rule out that in the other fields Thiel might have an opinion I would share if I knew more about those topics.

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.

cannabis_sam• 6 years ago

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.

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)

thu21112• 6 years ago

A lot of what Thiel writes is from a US centric viewpoint, which is fine, he's an American living in America. And in the biggest US cities public transport doesn't work all that well.

newbie7892• 6 years ago

I'm kind of confused. What is the purpose of this document? Did Peter Thiel put this together? Is the target audience people that like him? Or is the target audience people that are critical of him?

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??

ramraj072• 6 years ago

Whether he put it together or not, an argument can be made (I make it as well) that it's worth reading it. Any one can have valid arguments, even (or especially) if you don't agree with the conclusions. The only question you can ask is if they're being logically consistent. If they are then they deserve to be listened to, if you truly want to understand how to join them or fight them.

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.

newbie7892• 6 years ago

I don't think anybody had to be a super genius to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. I'd bet a good chunk of road comedians could've told you that in 2016.

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?

buzzert• 6 years ago

As a PDF: https://6761deed1591e2a2-buzzertdotnet.s3-us-west-2.amazonaw...

lordnacho• 6 years ago

He's right about process vs substance. There are so many people involved in box-checking in this world, it's amazing. People whose job is substantially to ensure some process is followed, rather than think up better processes. Even when we are talking about ostensibly innovating orgs, there are people there to make sure everything follows a plan that cannot possibly contribute to the discovery of knowledge.

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).

cromwellian• 6 years ago

Almost every time I see an SV libertarian try to discuss social issues from an apparently disinterested, logical standpoint, they always seem trapped inside of libertarian bubble and unable to expand this viewpoint to consider other possible causes.

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.

noetic_techy6• 6 years ago

So lets cut to the chase shall we: what would be the non-biotech arrangement of atoms that we can conceive of now that would be mega technological leaps for our species and achievable within 10 years of investment?

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?

laughinghan• 6 years ago

I'm biased because I already expected to disagree with much of his worldview, but I think a lot of Key Quotes Summary are bad takes:

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?

eb3c90• 6 years ago

I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to apocalypse.

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?

Balgair3• 6 years ago

First, Wow, this is going to take some time to chew through.

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.

Shmebulock2• 6 years ago

What is meant by "SAS enterprise software, really overrated"? Does he mean SAAS as in Software-as-a-Service?

novalis78• 6 years ago

I highly recommend the website https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ and in particular their excellent newsletter. Surely, it would be an oversimplification to reduce everything to one cause but how much the setup of the original gold standard of the bank of England in the late 1770s spurred on the industrial revolution and how the centralization of gold and the final abolishing of the gold standard and ensuing financial tinkering led to malinvestments and threw wrenches into the engine of capitalism, wealth generation and ever increasing living standards has IMHO not yet sufficiently been investigated (Prof. Saifedean Ammous work here being one laudable exception). In an interview from 2019 Peter Thiel mentions that Paypal would have never succeeded had the Patriot Act existed at the time. Banking regulations would have never allowed Paypal off the ground. Just a few years between Paypal and that monstrocity: We would not have Tesla. We wouldnt have SpaceX. There wouldn't be any Boring company or any Neuralink. The opportunity cost of all of that is unfathomable.

Shmebulock2• 6 years ago

"The easiest way to see this, and this is always my challenge—people don’t agree with this—is challenge you to name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it’s not dystopian, it doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t destroy the world, it doesn’t not work, etc., etc."

Interstellar?

Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

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