I was interested to read this interview with Peter Thiel because, although I’ve heard a lot about him and his stupid ideas, I’ve never actually seen what he has to stay for himself. It turns out that he’s an idiot — at least about science.
He’s basically the kind of person who, when the TV isn’t working right, believes in percussive maintenance — that is, to whack it a few times and see if that makes it work better. He basically supported bringing in Trump to whack the United States a few times and see if it starts to work better. His thinking is that, if it starts working better then great. And if it doesn’t, you just throw it out and buy a new one. I mean, it doesn’t really matter to HIM if a bunch of people that depend on government services die or whatever. But, rather than pushing this analogy any further, let’s look what he actually said.
His basic critique is that our society — science in particular — has become stagnant or, minimally, is offering only diminishing returns:
There are intellectual questions: How many breakthroughs are we having? How do we quantify these things? What are the returns of going into research?
There certainly are diminishing returns to going into science or going into academia generally. Maybe this is why so much of it feels like a sociopathic, Malthusian kind of an institution, because you have to throw more and more and more at something to get the same returns. And at some point, people give up and the thing collapses.
There are a couple of inter-related problems with his assertion. The first is that current science is just a lot more complicated than people in previous generations expected. If you read people around the time of Crick and Watson, everyone thought that, since we’d “cracked the code” of DNA, we would simply be able to read the “blueprint of life”. As we know now, it was not nearly so simple, with introns and exons and non-coding sequences and RNA processing and endogenous viral elements and epigenetic effects and many, many other complicating factors that people had no idea of in those earlier times. And complicated science leads to the second problem: it’s a lot more expensive and we’ve defunded the government and education.
If you note when all of these breakthroughs were happening, it was during a time when the United States was taxing the highest incomes at 90% and investing a lot of that money in growing higher education. That money was gradually choked off and before Trump researchers were spending most of their time applying for funding. Rather than, you know, actually doing research. That’s why things weren’t going any faster than they were. And now that there’s NO FUNDING, there’s no chance of doing the research at all.
Furthermore, the slow, patient work of science has made astonishing breakthroughs which he seems to completely neglect. We have made astonishing breakthroughs on cancer. Cancer used to be a death sentence. Now, there are a lot of cancers that we can simply cure. And the rate of progress has been accelerating — at least until we let Peter Thiel and his moron surrogates defund the NIH.
It’s impossible to quantify how many people are doing to die because of what Trump has done. Even worse, it’s probably going to take generations to recover — if science in the United States ever does. Labs that lose funding probably won’t ever recover. A lot of the people that were doing the work will move to other countries or other lines of work. A lot of people that were going to go into science now never will. We’ve lost momentum we will probably never regain.
Peter Thiel doesn’t care.
