Peter Thiel AMA(reddit.com) |
Peter Thiel AMA(reddit.com) |
I think there's been a Gresham's Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast.
Also, I wonder if there a risk that this characterization just perpetuates the pointy-egghead stereotype - that good scientists don't have social skills? The discussion of "holistic" evaluation in Steven Pinker's recent essay on Harvard admission comes to mind [1].
Perhaps the funding agencies need a separate, high-prestige "individual contributor" track similar to corporate Principal Engineer or fellowship tracks, to allow non-political but brilliant scientists to work hands-on and avoid the grant scramble?
HHMI tries to provide something like this already, giving longer grants to early-career faculty to reduce grant pressure, and I guess NSF and NIH have also been trying to do this with CAREER awards and New Innovator grants...
[1] Very interesting piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277941
I could imagine that this trend has made it more difficult for more eccentric scientists to succeed because they might be less able to "play nicely with others" in a big collaboration.
Basically, the organization (scientific community) needs to decide which type of population to select for to fulfill their strategy.
Edit: Actually, just increasing the science funding, say by 1% of the total government budget, would probably solve the problem.
One way to circumvent a broken system I guess.
Increasing the funding probably just creates more of the latter, not of the former.
Question: What did you think when you first met Elon Musk?
Peter: "Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven -- a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two. It was kind of scary to be competiting against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000."
You can see a transcript of a conversation I had with him here: http://www.cnet.com/news/talking-tech-with-peter-thiel-inves...
I don't think most famous people need the karma bad enough to even set aside that much time.
> To think of Christ as a politician might be the easiest way to get him all wrong. The theological claim that Christ is the "son of God" is also the anti-political claim that Augustus Caesar (the son of the divine Julius Caesar) is not the "son of God." So I think that Christ should be thought of as the first "political atheist," who did not believe that the existing political order is divinely ordained. Now, I think that there is lot of resonance between political atheism and libertarianism, even if they are not strictly identical...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_tec...
I thought that was interesting.
@peterthiel: No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.
> many of the bad monopolies in our society involve the unholy
> coalition of urban slumlords and pseudo-environmentalists.
Much of this property is subsidized under the Federal Section 8 program, which pays a "prevailing rent" rate for low income property. Often these rents approach the rates paid for luxury apartment complexes in the suburbs.
These folks need to keep the areas around their property poor and ignorant. So they work with phony "progressive" mouthpieces/lobbyists that block good construction projects using the environmental impact review process. They'll blow up issues like traffic impact, greenspace, impact on storm sewers, etc to block things like medium-density housing. (Typically, they are silent when their sponsors drop a 200,000 square foot big-box + strip mall nearby)
They're already busy in the field of parasite extermination, it seems like it would be a small broadening of the scope to me.
I think he nailed it. Working a bit with "big data" I 100% agree with him.
I am not getting this. Anyone care to enlighten me?
This is the first time I've been introduced to Girard's theories. I don't agree with a lot of his claims but I think he (and others; his theories aren't entirely novel) definitely stumbled upon a real aspect of humanity.
I suspect the real "truth" is a greater superset theory that encompasses some of these theories and also unrelated theories and observations, though. Girard espouses a lot of absolute claims ("all human behavior is mimetic") while discounting other potential factors and certain counter-examples.
I can not relate to this man at all.
>Perhaps you should not become an entrepreneur...
eh?
Either situation could change very quickly. A meal delivery restaurant chain could take SF by storm and rake in billions. A startup could launch tomorrow that begins rapidly stealing Google's market share. Nothing prevents this but the lack of people willing and able to do it.
Private individuals are free to upend industries without fear of unreasonable government interference. This is what capitalism is and it's alive and well in most industries.
Nothing prevents people leaping over skyscrapers in a single bound except the lack of people able to do it.
"Are restaurants like State Bird Provisions, which seems to resist simple economic analysis, the exception or the norm? And if they are the norm, is that because it is somehow self-defeating to raise prices even at booming restaurants? Or are chef proprietors a unique breed in the business world, immune to supply and demand and content to leave money on the table?"
http://priceonomics.com/why-dont-restaurants-charge-for-rese...
Christ denied the prevailing notion of the day that Julius Caesar is a god (and Augustus is a son of god). Therefore, he is an anti-establishment, and an atheist or unbeliever in the political realm. Thiel refers to this as 'political atheism'.
In his last sentence, he mentioned that libertarianism is related to 'political atheism', which was Christ's view of the political order of the day.
The commonality I make out of his reasoning is that both Christianity in those days and current-day libertarianism are anti-establishment.
A very interesting shift in frame of reference. And you can point out that, politically, some Christian beliefs have in practice become part of the establishment today, which sort of contradicts his point. What do you think?
Please correct me if I'm wrong. My scant knowledge of the Roman era is mostly from Crash Course [1] (highly recommended for learning in an entertaining way, and I believe most of the contents are good too) and a bit from Wikipedia [2].
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/crash-course1/cr...
Jesus wasn't anti-establishment: "give to Caesar what is Caesar's".
Political atheist is not a great term. But I guess the Jesus of the Bible is a "political atheist" to the extent that he doesn't think rulers necessarily have God's approval. Jesus started life as a refugee from a king that wanted to murder him. But that is not a new thought. After all, the pharoah (allegedly a god) refused to release the Israelites even after Moses told him God's will and performed miracles to prove it.
Interestingly, the contemporaries of Jesus were expecting him to reassert the political (and probably military) might of Israel in his role as Messiah. In the Bible, there is a lot of confusion around him and his teachings sprouting from the meme that he was a divine political savior, not a primarily spiritual one.
When Jesus rejected that notion (riding into Jerusalem on a donkey instead of a regal horse, submitting to execution, etc.), he took a particularly apolitical stance: that politics aren't as important as loving God, loving neighbors, and living in the spirit of God's laws.
Jesus was a fan of quoting the canon scriptures of his time. Something he surely read and agreed with is: "In the Lord's hand the king's heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him."
...which implies that politics and rulers aren't a particularly big deal compared to pleasing God.
So yeah, Christ can be seen to be against the controlling social order of his time, as can Libertarianism today.
Disclaimer: I'm so far left wing that most libertarians would call me a fascist, so assume some bias.
[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Political%20A... > A person or persons who has a disbelief in the ruling of a dominating government with morals of any kind. Those who have belief that not everything produced by politics or the media hold truth of any kind. He/she whom holds their own belief in what is wrong or right not based on what is fed to them by what the general public allows themselves to be brainwashed with.
Absolute rulers generally need to have some linkage or endorsement of their power. It's an important critical element of political legitimacy. So they tie themselves to some higher power -- god, "the people", the sun, ideology.
Christianity broke the mold (by acknowledging only one god, not caesar) and undermined the legitimacy of imperial Roman rule.
If anything, Jesus broke the mold by not being interested in running things, which would be the first thing many of us would reach for if we had a Bruce Almighty opportunity.
On the other hand, the blind faith in the 'forces of the market' is another politically deistic stance, so i don't know how 'politically atheist' it is.
It's really humanist. It's the idea that none of us is as smart as all of us. Markets are considered distorted when they aren't free or start to resemble other types of organizations like autocracies, aristocracies, plutocracies, kleptocracies, etc.
So there is faith, but it's in humanity as a group, not magic math per se.
Do you think that there is a widespread failure by the scientific community to identify and support superstars?
Every sentence he said (as well as his responses in the AMA) was a a complete idea, full of insight and depth. Mere mortals, like yours truly, need to take a couple minutes to process examples and counterexamples, to define the assumptions made, to wonder at the implications. You want him to speak more on the subject.
Instead, it's so obvious to him that he continues speaking and you've just missed 3 more profound statements. Makes him fascinating to listen to.
Biology is interesting because small, high-impact groups become arguably more sustainable every year due to cheaper, smaller instruments and the rise of contract services (e.g. DNA sequencing). On the other hand, many of the human problems biology is attempting to address are hard to inferentially study on a small-sample level, again necessitating large organizations.
Wouldn't it make sense for your friend to try and organize a group of people with similar goals so everyone can work together to achieve them?
That's the idea behind democracy. I believe the idea behind libertarianism is quite the opposite (that the few that are better should not be hindered by the hivemind).
It's like how recruiting for engineers is best done through the networks of your engineers; they really only hang out with top people anyway (give or take).
If you want to jump over a building, you need to depart the ground at the same speed as you'll hit it on the way down (more, because of air resistance). The forces applied to your body are just as lethal in both directions.
(This specifically applies to jumping, where all your acceleration comes at the beginning of the journey. Jetpacks, planes, etc. get around the problem by letting you accelerate while in midair.)
So while his motivation may be different than most authors, the path he must follow to make the book do well is largely the same. We'll likely see more things you wouldn't expect to see him do. A billionaire's ego is on the line.
Little fish may not matter matter on their own, but if the big fish follow the little fish (even unconsciously) then feeding the little fish is a good strategy for subtly influencing the big fish.
Well, the horizontal speed can be gained more slowly (running before the jump). Only the vertical speed needs immediate acceleration.