Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Hyper-specialisation ===

'''Peter Thiel:''' The direct scientific questions, I think, are very hard to get a handle on. And the reason for this is that in late modernity, which we are living in, there's simply too much knowledge for any individual human to understand all of it. And so in this world of extreme hyper specialization, where it's narrower and narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are, the string theorists talking about how great string theory is, the cancer researchers talking about how they're just about to cure cancer, the quantum computer researchers are just about to build a quantum computer, there'll be a massive breakthrough. And then if you were to say that all these fields, not much is happening, people just don't have the authority for this. And this is somehow a very different feel for science or knowledge than you would've had in 1800 or even in 1900. In 1800, Goethe could still understand just about everything.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' 1900, Hilbert could still understand just about all of mathematics and so this sort of specialization, I think, has made it a much harder question to get a handle on. The political cut I have on the specialization is always that if you analyze the politics of science, the specializations should make you suspicious, because if it's gotten harder to evaluate what's going on, then it's presumably gotten easier for people to lie and to exaggerate, and then one should be a little bit suspicious. And that's sort of my starting bias.