Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Polymaths in Universities ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so I totally want to riff on on this point, because I think you've hit the nail on the head. To my way of thinking, the key problem is, if you go back to our original contention, which is, is that there is something universally pathological about the stories that every institution predicated on growth has to tell about itself when things are not growing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The biggest danger is that somebody smart inside of the institution will start questioning things and speaking openly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The polymaths would be the people who could connect the dots and say, you know, there's not that much going on in my department, and there's not much going on this department over here, and not that much going on in this department over there, and those people are very, very dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of my friends studied physics at Stanford in the late '90s. His advisor was this professor at Stanford, Bob Laughlin, who, you know, brilliant physics guy, late '90s he gets a Nobel prize in physics, and he suffers from the supreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel prize he has total academic freedom and he can do anything he wants to. And he decided to direct it at, you know, I mean, there are all these areas you probably shouldn't go into, you probably shouldn't question, climate science, there are all these things when one should be careful about, but he went into an area of far more dangerous than all of those.

'''Peter Thiel:''' He was convinced that there were all these people in the university who were doing fake science, who were wasting government money on fake research that was not really going anywhere, and he started by investigating other departments, started with the biology department at Stanford university. And you can imagine this ended catastrophically for Professor Laughlin, you know, his graduate students couldn't get PhDs. He no longer got funding, Nobel prize in physics, no protection whatsoever.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Julian Schwinger fell out of favor with the physics community despite being held in its highest regard and having a Nobel prize, and he used the epigram in a book where he wanted to redo quantum field theory around something he called source theory, he said, "If you can't join them, beat them." And I think it comes as a shock to all of these people that there is no level you can rise to in the field that allows you to question the assumptions of that field.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. It's like, you know, you're sort of proving yourself, you're getting your PhD, you're getting your tenured position, and then at some point you think, you would think that you've proven yourself and you can talk about the whole and not just the parts, but you're never allowed to talk about more than the parts.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, like the person in the university context, or the class of people who are supposed to talk about the whole, I would say, are university presidents, because they are presiding over the whole of the university and they should be able to speak to what the nature of the whole is, what sort of progress the whole is making. What is the health of the progress of the whole? And, you know, we certainly do not pick university presidents who think critically about these questions at all.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, I remember discussing, with a president of a very highly regarded university, he came to me, he said, "Can you explain how your friend Peter Thiel thinks? Because I just had a conversation with him, and I could not convince him that the universities were doing fantastically, and this university in particular, like how does he come to his conclusion?".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I said, "Well look, Peter doesn't come, you know, with a PhD, but let me speak to you in your own language," and I started going department by department talking about the problems of stagnation. It was very clear that there was no previous experience with any kind of informed person making such an argument. I mean this was a zero day exploit.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's all, yeah, but in some sense, if you're a president of a university, you probably don't want to talk to people that dangerous. You want to avoid them, and you don't want to have such disruptive thoughts because you have to convince the government, or alumni, or whoever, to keep donating money, that everything's wonderful and great.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think one has to go back quite a long time to even identify any university presidents in the United States who said things that were distinctive, or interesting, or powerful. You know, there was Larry Summers at Harvard a decade and a half ago, and tried to do like the most minuscule critiques imaginable, and got crucified. But, you know, I don't think of Summers as a particularly revolutionary thinker.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, he was possessed of an idea that the intellectual elite, in which he undoubtedly saw himself a part of, had the right to transgress boundaries. And I think what's stunning about this is the extent to which this breed of outspoken, disruptive intellectual has no place left inside of this system from which to speak.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's not that surprising. In a healthy system you could have wild dissent and it's not threatening because everyone knows the system is healthy. In an unhealthy system, the dissent becomes much more dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's not that surprising. There's always one riff I have on this is always, if you think of a left wing person as someone who's critical of the structures of our society, there's a sense in which we have almost no left wing professors left.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's right. Like Noam Chomsky is still there as sort of a last remnant of some clade that no longer exists.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Left-wing in the sense of, let's say, just being critical of the institutions they're a part of.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And there may be some that are much older, so if you're maybe in your eighties we can pretend to ignore you, or you know, this is just what happens to people in their eighties. But I don't see younger professors in their, let's say, forties, who are deeply critical of the university structure. I think it's just not, you know, you can't have that.