Question: What do you see as the biggest changes in the practice of science, say, over the last 50 years, for better, for worse, from the perspective of innovation, and whether you think that the public consciousness or concept of science has matched those changes?
Peter Thiel: It’s gone dramatically for the worse. The basic narrative I would give is that we had this preexisting ecosystem of idiosyncratic scientists who were driving research in all sorts of independent ways. You could dramatically accelerate it by giving them a lot of money, which is what we did in the 1930s to 1960s, but it came at this price of suddenly politicizing the system. The problem is that a good scientist is very much the opposite — now, this may be more like 180 degrees, not 175 degrees, it’s 179.5 degrees — the opposite of a good politician. It’s like, a scientist is someone who’s interested in the truth, a politician is someone who has a very troubled relationship with the truth.
I think we’ve had this sort of Gresham’s law, where the bad scientists have driven out the good, or people who are nimble in the art of writing government grant applications have replaced the eccentric scientists who’ve really pushed the research. I think that’s sort of this deep corruption of the process.
It’s very hard for the public to fully appreciate it, because science is so specialized. Who am I to evaluate superstring research, or quantum computing research, or nanotech, or immunotherapy as applied to cancer? Because of this extreme specialization of science, you have these self-reinforcing expert communities that have made this process of politicization extremely opaque to the broader public.
I’m very much in favor of science, but I’m skeptical of people who excessively invoke science as an incantation of sorts. When you use the word science it’s often a tell, like in poker, that you’re bluffing and that no science at all is going on. We have political science, we have social science. We don’t have physical science or chemical science. There are just physics and chemistry, there’s no debate. If you think about other areas where people use the word science excessively, I think those are areas that we should perhaps be a lot more skeptical of.
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