Peter Thiel: Why Science Has Been Stuck Since the 1970s

Well, I mean I'm not saying there's been zero progress in the last 50 years, but outside of the world of computers there's not been much. And if you were, the main function of our iPhones seem to be to distract us from the way in which we're in subways that are 100 years old and the ways in which nothing in the rest of the world has changed or progressed very much. And if you look at cars or houses or things like this, they haven't changed that much in the last 20, 30 years. Maybe the 70s were still a little bit different, but it has not progressed very much at all. There's a meta-level question you could ask which is that in science we measure God's number, the fine structure constant in physics, to many, many significant figures, but the question of the progress of science—how fast it is progressing, is it accelerating, is it decelerating, is it relatively stagnant—never gets asked. And if it gets asked, we get nothing but short propagandistic answers from, let's say, university presidents who will tell us using adverbs as a substitute for thought that clearly and demonstrably science is progressing faster than ever before. And I think it is instead rather stuck. And we can go through sort of any number of places where things have fallen way short of expectation. Nixon declared war on cancer in 1970, it was going to be defeated by the bicentennial by 1976. So we fast-forward 50 years, we're presumably 50 years closer to curing cancer than we were 50 years ago, but the expected time has gone up quite a bit.

So that was really meant mainly as a joke.

A little bit, although I'd say it fooled me a lot since I thought it would translate into all sorts of cures by now, 20-plus years later. And so there's always sort of a question how this actually translates. And even if we say that things are progressing at roughly the same rate, I think that they're slower, they're objectively slower. Life expectancy is not going up anymore. This would be like one way to measure progress in medicine is how fast is life expectancy going up. The last three years it has actually been going down, which is, you know, even someone as pessimistic as me would have never predicted that it actually would go backwards. Because surely we might progress more slowly.

I think one of the things—the sort of the failure, the question, you know, why has this happened, what changed, what went wrong—is always a little bit overdetermined. But certainly one cut on it is that big science is something like an oxymoron. And when you make it big, it stops being science. And we have probably about a hundred times as many people today in the world or in the United States who have PhDs in the sciences as in 1920. If progress was happening still at the same rate as in 1920, you would infer that the productivity of the average scientist is 99% less than it was 100 years ago. And I think it's even worse than that. So one partial history I would tell of what happened is that we had sort of a decentralized, healthy scientific world before the New Deal. And it was heterodox, it was science as discovery, not science as—I always think you have science as discovery, which is sort of the science one now only reads about in children's books on Einstein, sort of like a creative person thinks of new things. And there's science as governance, where it's sort of you're a robot in a lab and that's what you do. And most of science is science as governance, not science as discovery. And so part of my history of what happened is that in the 1940s with the Manhattan Project, it was possible to take this pre-existing healthy system and accelerate it one time only. The New York Times—I'm going to paraphrase this—but this was about four or five days after the Hiroshima bomb, the op-ed in the New York Times was, you know, hopefully this will silence the sort of conservative and libertarian people who said that the Army could not ever direct scientists and just tell them what to do, because the Army has proven all these people wrong and hopefully they will now be quiet because they were able to get a new invention to the world in three and a half short years of the bomb that if you had left these prima donna scientists to their own devices might have taken them 50 years. Wow. So now I will say the New York Times doesn't write editorials like that anymore today. And I think part of the history is you were able to accelerate science one time by pouring money into it and scaling it, but then it came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions. It still worked with NASA and Apollo, but at this point it is all just a slow bureaucracy. It's, you know, it's peer review, never have any heterodox ideas, and you've created a very large monoculture which is pretty unhealthy. So that's sort of one cut of what happened. It was, you know, the government was able to accelerate it and then at the price of destroying it forever.