Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Conformity and Malthus ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things that I don't understand, and I don't know if you have any insight, is it feels to me that almost all of our institutions are carbon copies of each other at different levels of quality. And that there are only a tiny number of actually innovative institutions. It used to be that, you know, Reed college was sex, drugs, and Goethe, and you had St. John's with the great books curriculum that didn't look like anything else, or Deep Springs, and the university of Chicago was crazy about young people, but the diversity of institutions is unbelievably low. Is that wrong?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's fair, but I would say the bigger problem with a lot of these fields is, yeah, I think we have to keep training people. I think we need to keep training people in physics or even these fields that seem completely dead, you know?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That’s super important.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I think the question we have to always ask is how many people should we be training-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Way fewer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -and my intuition is you want the gates to be very tight.

'''Peter Thiel:''' One of my friends is a professor in the Stanford economics department, and the way he describes it to me is they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics at Stanford every year. It's six to eight years to get a PhD. At the end of the first year, the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students, where they’ve sort of agreed who the top three or four are. The ranking never changes. The top three or four have, are able to get a good position in academia, the others not so much.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, you know, we're pretending to be kind to people and we're actually being cruel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Incredibly cruel.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, I think that if there are going to be - you know, it's a supply demand of labor - if there are going to be good positions in academia, where you can have a reasonable life, it's not a monastic vow of poverty that you're taking to be an academic, if we're going to have that, you don't want this sort of Malthusian struggle. If you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry lab, and you have to have a fistfight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker, and you know, and if some somebody says one politically incorrect thing, you can happily throw everyone, them all out of the overcrowded bus. The buses still overcrowded with nine people on it. That's what's unhealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, yes, it would be mistake to say we should dial this down and have zero people in these fields.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. But this is what's scary to me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's not what I'm advocating, or what was being advocated here, but there is a point where if you just add more and more people in a starvation Malthusian context, that's not healthy.