Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Teleology ===

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of the questions I always come back to in this, is what is the teleology of these programs? Where do they go? One of the analogies I've come up with, is I think elite undergraduate education is like junior high school football.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Junior high school football. I did not see that coming.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Playing football in junior high school is probably not damaging for you, but it's not going anywhere-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Ah, I see.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -because if you keep playing football in high school, and college, and then professionally, that's just bad. And the better you are, the more successful you are, the less well it works.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the question is what's the motivational structure? And when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s there was still a part of it where you thought the professors were cool, it might be something you'd like to be at some point in the future, and they were role models, just like in junior high school football an NFL player would have been a role model.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But now it just looks like brain damage in both sides.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And now we think it's, yeah, you're just doing lots of brain damage, and it's a track that doesn't work, and therefore the teleology sort of has broken down.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So undergraduate, part of the teleology was that it was preparing you for graduate school, and that part doesn't work, and that's what's gotten deranged. Then graduate school, well, it's preparing you to be a postdoc, and then, well, that's the postdoc apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it, postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Postdocalypse?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You heard it here, folks, postdocalypse.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But just at every step, I think, the teleology of the system is in really bad shape. Of course, this is true of all these institutions with fake growth that are sociopathic or pathological, but at the universities it's striking as very bad.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think this was already true in important ways back in the '80s, early '90s, when I was going through the system. And when I think back on it, I think I was most intensely motivated academically in high school, because the teleology was really clear. You were trying to get into a good college. And then, by the time I was at Stanford, it was a little bit less clear, by the time I was at law school, really unclear where that was going. And by the time I was 25 I was far less motivated than at age 18, and I think these dynamics are just more extreme than ever today.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What I find so dispiriting about your diagnosis is first of all that I agree with it. Second of all, if we don't train people in these fields, if we don't get people to go into molecular biology, or bioinformatics, or something like that, we're never going to be able to find the low hanging fruit in that orchard. So, it seems to me that we have to find some way that it makes sense for a life to explore these questions.