Thiel is a great writer, IMHO, and thought-provoking with some fringe-worthy truths. Yet, I often disagree with his inductive leaps from the social criticism. For example, Thiel has been lamenting the lack of progress, economically and technologically, for several years now. He first told me that stagnant wages over the past 50 years in America means that Moore’s Law was an illusion over that time period. I disagreed, seeing an easier answer in globalization and accelerating income inequality.
And now, in his book review of The Decadent Society, Thiel argues that the perceived lack of tech progress is a sign that science has stagnated. I disagree. As the primary process for making progress, the scientific method is in florid bloom across the sciences. Innovation is broad and profound as long as you are scanning the frontiers of the future and not the fountainheads of the past. As seen in the computational-capability abstraction of Moore’s Law, humanity’s capacity to compute has continually compounded for 120 years. The combinatorial explosion of possible idea-pairings should continue to foment new ideas and new inventions and drive accelerating change… unless, we somehow lose the ability to vet the ideas we consider to be true.
Rather than a slowing of science as the autocatalytic origin of progress, perhaps we can explain Thiel’s lack of perceived progress as a growing societal alienation from science — not just the advances, but the process of learning itself. (Consider, as just one example, the breathtaking advances in genomics counterposed to a growing fear of genetic engineering and distrust of its practitioners.) The polarization of progress is more worrisome than the simplistic, and perpetually incorrect induction that innovation has stagnated.
Here’s some of the provocative prose from the P.T. (Barnum) of futurism:
“Every aspect of decadence feeds back into the others. Legal sclerosis is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem. Poor transportation makes it more expensive to raise a family and so lowers birth rates. Aging brings risk-aversion and arrests creativity.
Choosing agency over boomer complacency, The Decadent Society sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?
A renaissance will require motivational goals. To be motivational, a goal must be both ambitious and achievable.
For technologists, that means pursuing goals that are difficult but possible: cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s; compact nuclear reactors and fusion power. For statesmen, that means deconstructing the corrupt institutions that have falsely claimed to pursue those goals on our behalf.
It is a paradox of our time that the path to radical progress begins with moderation. Extreme optimism and fatalistic pessimism may seem to be stark opposites, but they both end in apathy. If things were sure to improve or bound to collapse, then our actions would not matter one way or the other.
Not only do our actions matter, I believe they matter eternally. If we do not find a way to take the narrow and moderate path, then we may find out that stagnation and decadence were all that kept immoderate men from stumbling into the apocalypse.”
P.S. For a short example of a spectacular failure of inductive reasoning… this debate was 2012, just before the Model S shipped: “We cannot come up with dramatically better batteries because all of the chemicals have been discovered that exist on the periodic table.” — Thiel
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