I'm biased because I already expected to disagree with much of his worldview, but I think a lot of Key Quotes Summary are bad takes:
The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled.
It's true that it spiked in 1974-1985, and was elevated from 1986-1992 (ranging $32.48 - $45.65 — far from quadruple), and has been much higher than pre-1973 prices since 2000, but that doesn't really match up with the stagnation of wages. Policy changes in the 80s (Reaganomics) causing rising inequality are a much better explanation:
Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started.
He thought that was a problem under Obama and he sought to change that by elevating...Trump?
Tesla was out-competed by Edison, even though Edison had an inferior technology. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane, but they didn’t get to be rich.
Edison having inferior technology is kind of a myth, or at least a vast oversimplification. DC is superior to AC in many situations; ironically, Tesla the car company is all about innovations in DC technology, as is Musk's SolarCity.
The Wright brothers are arguably the first to privately achieve powered controlled flight, and it's obviously impressive that they were "just" bicycle mechanics before, but it's an American myth that they "invented" the airplane. French-Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually publicly demonstrated his independently developed powered controlled airplane in 1906 before the Wright brothers did in 1908, and there are many other claims to having been first, all independently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl...
More importantly, the Wright brothers did a bad job of turning their prototypes into useful airplanes, while Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators did a better job; instead, the Wright brothers focused on guarding their patents and promoting their names as the first inventors. If anyone would agree that execution matters more than ideas, it would be the HN crowd.
If you're a professor in academia, [you say]: the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure. So I think there’s this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.
Um...and what reason is there to believe that the VC-based tech industry isn't exactly like this, and that is how Thiel himself became successful? Cancer researchers are at least objectively making progress against cancer. Thiel got rich by founding or investing in some companies that he sold to other rich people.
On the other hands, some of these are interesting thoughts:
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance [...] A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. [...] In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money [...]
I think there is a big hysteresis part to this where success begets success and then failure begets failure, where if you haven’t had any major successes in a number of decades, it does induce a certain amount of learned helplessness, and then it shifts the way science gets done or the way innovation gets done in to a more bureaucratic, political structure where the people who get the research grants are more the politicians than the scientists. You’re rewarded for very small incremental progress, not for trying to take risks.
The "two perspectives on China" thing might be interesting, but I'd want to see a lot more substantiation. Who is saying what, exactly?
The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled.
Actually the real price of oil was basically the same for the decade before 1973 (ranging $22.21 - $27.37) as 1993-1999 (ranging $18.86 - $33.63): https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...
It's true that it spiked in 1974-1985, and was elevated from 1986-1992 (ranging $32.48 - $45.65 — far from quadruple), and has been much higher than pre-1973 prices since 2000, but that doesn't really match up with the stagnation of wages. Policy changes in the 80s (Reaganomics) causing rising inequality are a much better explanation:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...
Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started.
He thought that was a problem under Obama and he sought to change that by elevating...Trump?
Tesla was out-competed by Edison, even though Edison had an inferior technology. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane, but they didn’t get to be rich.
Edison having inferior technology is kind of a myth, or at least a vast oversimplification. DC is superior to AC in many situations; ironically, Tesla the car company is all about innovations in DC technology, as is Musk's SolarCity.
The Wright brothers are arguably the first to privately achieve powered controlled flight, and it's obviously impressive that they were "just" bicycle mechanics before, but it's an American myth that they "invented" the airplane. French-Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually publicly demonstrated his independently developed powered controlled airplane in 1906 before the Wright brothers did in 1908, and there are many other claims to having been first, all independently developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl...
More importantly, the Wright brothers did a bad job of turning their prototypes into useful airplanes, while Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators did a better job; instead, the Wright brothers focused on guarding their patents and promoting their names as the first inventors. If anyone would agree that execution matters more than ideas, it would be the HN crowd.
If you're a professor in academia, [you say]: the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure. So I think there’s this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.
Um...and what reason is there to believe that the VC-based tech industry isn't exactly like this, and that is how Thiel himself became successful? Cancer researchers are at least objectively making progress against cancer. Thiel got rich by founding or investing in some companies that he sold to other rich people.
On the other hands, some of these are interesting thoughts:
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance [...] A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. [...] In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money [...]
I think there is a big hysteresis part to this where success begets success and then failure begets failure, where if you haven’t had any major successes in a number of decades, it does induce a certain amount of learned helplessness, and then it shifts the way science gets done or the way innovation gets done in to a more bureaucratic, political structure where the people who get the research grants are more the politicians than the scientists. You’re rewarded for very small incremental progress, not for trying to take risks.
The "two perspectives on China" thing might be interesting, but I'd want to see a lot more substantiation. Who is saying what, exactly?