"Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point."
Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:
"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."
The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."
Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.
You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.
Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does),
Not for the lack of innovation. In fact, he specifically decries the lack of innovation by the government as well as the private sector. Thiel seems to blame it on a cultural shift - he believes the US has moved from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint.
Go read his stanford lectures to see this expressed fairly well.
Thiel [...] believes the US has moved from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint.
The optimistic-deterministic viewpoint is the opposite of the "lean startup" movement and the MVP approach, which is an almost completely pure expression of the optimistic-stochastic viewpoint, i.e.:
We're *optimistic* that innovation is possible,
but we also believe we can't know in advance, so
we'll use (controlled) chance to find out what
works (A/B testing, random trials, etc.).
IMO, the culture shift to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint is also why people hate Apple -- not because Apple is unsuccessful, but precisely because Apple is successful – wildly successful – but Apple is using the wrong paradigm to achieve that success. In Thiel's terminology, Apple works from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint, and to the culture today, that's just wrong somehow. Hence, the hate.
If you think about it, "minimum viable product" is practically the anti-thesis of innovation: let's create the least innovative thing we possibly can in the hopes that it might, someday, be successful after a lot of A/B testing to hack the buying and growth process and find a niche market. MVP is not about shooting for the stars, but it is about microscopic, incremental, improvement -- and a dramatic reduction in risk. That's the optimistic-stochastic viewpoint in action.
The problem with "deterministic optimism" (other than the obvious silliness of attributing one mindset to the entire US), is that it doesn't change the nature of reality. You can invest more in certain areas and yield a return on that investment, but you can't reliably call your shots. Life doesn't work that way.
Nearly all of the fruits of government research have been as a result of "stochastic" investment (i.e. nearly everything done by the NIH and NSF and DARPA), or second-order effects from "deterministic" investment (e.g. the space program and velcro, or radar and military spending). Other than wars and (maybe, debatably) the space program, we have a pretty spotty record of saying "we're going to do $X amazing technological feat in $Y years", and then making that happen.
Where we have successfully called our shots (and I'm thinking mainly of the space program here), it's only happened after decades of stochastic progress got us to the point where a politician could reasonably say "let's go to the moon" without sounding like a lunatic, and have some realistic hope that it would happen during a four-year term. Politics, as a societal force, is not particularly forward-thinking.
If you're looking for something governmental to blame for lack of innovation, you don't need to assign the entire political system a mindset, or compose elaborate pseudo-philosophical lectures: you need only look at the number of science PhDs who can't work in their fields, or the declining number of smart kids who go into research. When you gut government (and industrial) research, you don't get any returns.
You can try academia, but things are pretty bleak right now. There's so much competition chasing so little money that it's hard to see a path to a career for all but the luckiest few PhD graduates. And forget it if you don't have a PhD from a top school.
People put so much mental energy into pondering the lack of innovation, but we've been systematically under-funding science for more than a decade. There's not much of a puzzle here.
There's so much competition chasing so little money that it's hard to see a path to a career for all but the luckiest few PhD graduates. And forget it if you don't have a PhD from a top school.
The problem here is that academic research (at least in math+physics, what I'm familiar with) doesn't have a place for second best. Most academic research produced by people below the top tier is worthless and will never amount to anything.
It's a very different situation from technology, where yet another CRUD app can actually bring huge value to the business.
Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:
"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."
The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."
Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.
You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.