Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Power Laws ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this gets to another topic which, I think, is really important, and it's a dangerous one to discuss, which is it seems to me that power laws, those distributions with very thick tails where you have a small number of outliers that often dominate all other activity, are ubiquitous, and that particularly with respect to talent, whether we like them or not, they seem to be present, where a small number of people do a fantastic amount of all of the innovation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do we do, if power laws are common, to make people more comfortable with the fact that there is a kind of endowment inequality that seems to be part of species makeup? I mean, I don't even think it's just limited to humans.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'm not convinced these sort of power laws are equally true in all fields of activity. You know, the United States was a frontier country in the 19th century, and most people were farmers, and presumably some people were better farmers than others, but everyone started with 140 acres of land, and there was this wide open frontier. Even if you had some parts of the society that had more of a power law dynamic, there was a large part that didn't. And that was what, I think, gave it a certain amount of health.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And yeah, the challenge is if we've geared our society saying that all that matters is education, and PhDs, and academic research, and that this has this crazy power law dynamic, then you're just going to have a society in which there are lots of people playing video games in basements or something like that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, that's that's the way I would frame it. But yeah, I think there definitely are some areas where this is the case. And then we just need, you know, we need more growth for the whole society. If you have growth, you'll have a rising tide that lifts all boats. So, it's the stagnation, is the problem.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I've joked about this as we are not even communistic in our progressivism, because the old formulation of communism was from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, and the inability to recognize different levels of ability. I mean, almost every mathematician or physicist who encountered John von Neumann just said, "The guy is smarter than I am." He's not necessarily the deepest, or he did all of the great work, but you know when you're dealing with somebody who's able to employ skills that you simply don't have. I mean, I know I'm not a concert pianist, and-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. Look, I don't know how you solve the social problem if everybody has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist. I want a society in which we have great mathematicians and great concert pianists. That seems that that would be a very healthy society. It's very unhealthy if every parent thinks their child has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist, and that's the kind of society we unfortunately have.