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I just finished the Eric Weinstein/Peter Thiel podcast, and came away mostly agreeing with their assessment that we’ve really stagnated when it has come to prog

I just finished the Eric Weinstein/Peter Thiel podcast, and came away mostly agreeing with their assessment that we’ve really stagnated when it has come to progressing scientifically. I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.

wpasc 7y ago
I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science. I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated. I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).
- opportune 7y ago
  >ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    That, or we've already seen where this road leads: our best and brightest talent being used to make rich people richer. Nobody with a high-paying job in finance is losing that job.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Personally I suspect another aspect are ugly aspects of (high school) social order and anti-intellectualism. If the people they look down on start succeeding they get really mad. Virtually nobody complains about bankers and businessmen taking their jobs with outsourcing and wasn't taken seriously. Automation and AI creating more productivity instead of just moving jobs? The "nerds" doing it? "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!" hysterical reactions and rage. If tech becomes involved in an industry suddenly it is the great satan like Tesla, or any of the artificial meat companies and spoken of as not a part of the industry in spite of larger and smaller existing players and even foreign businesses receiving more respect. The mythical long lasting tech-bro insited as everywhere from countless hit pieces which hold homeowners blameless for rising rents along with other business jobs but engineers and programmers solely are clearly the great evil responsible for high rents. It harkens back to deep feudalistic stupid where the peasants and aristocracy distrusted the merchant and miller for making money from working smart and being "anomalys" to the social order. Money not made through serfs or conquest? Clearly deeply unnatural and wrong. Just look at Belphegor - literal demonization of discovery and ingenious inventions. Judging by actions and impacts alone he should be an angel.
- taurath 7y ago
  Regulation can be freeing, especially anti-trust when it prevents incumbents from getting so large they take over. Things like privacy regulations are somewhat stifling, but over time they can become a lot more easily abstracted. There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API.
  - opportune 7y ago
    >There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API. Actually, I can think of lots of reasons. It's certainly possible but it won't ever be simple and well-generalized.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The problem is, whenever something bad happens, people look to regulation, but they never look at the existing regulation to see how it might have led to this. They always want to add something new rather than fix what's already there. One of the strongest defenses against monopolies is adversarial interoperability, because it blunts vertical integration. It allows a new competitor to replace one piece of the supply chain and still use the rest of it, even if it's operated by the same conglomerate competing with them for that one piece. Because then you can have five companies replace the five pieces one at a time and end up with competition on all fronts, without them having to find each other and coordinate ahead of time before any of them can act. But we now have multiple laws conspiring to prevent that in tech. CFAA, DMCA 1201, EULAs, patent thickets, etc. We get monopolies because we passed laws that thwart competition. So how about we do something about those laws rather than adding new ones, when the incumbents are likely to have more influence in drafting the new ones than the average user or startup founder?
Kaveren 7y ago
I imagine you could make a convincing counterargument that Big Tech has done plenty of great things for developers at large. We could look to the historical example of Bell Labs under the ownership of AT&T, which brought us the C programming language. Today we could look to examples like Google's Material Design, the Go and Dart programming languages, or Facebook's stewardship of React. You can take the cynical view that people at Google are just trying to get people to click on things, which, true, is their primary business model. But you can equally say that employees of Google (who work on Search) are trying to provide a good search experience to everyone around the world for free. Tangentially, for Amazon, they deliver some of the best customer experience I've seen. I can start a Live Chat session at 3 AM (with a human) when I have a problem. It's not just getting people to buy crap.
- executive 7y ago
  while AWS delivers some of the worst.
typon 7y ago
Some of the best and most impactful AI research comes from Google DeepMind or Facebook AI research. Those ad clicks are subsidizing a whole lot of scientific advancements.
- lanrh1836 7y ago
  Google acquired DeepMind...
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    Sure, but Google also acquired Android, Apple acquired Siri, and Microsoft purchased DOS. They were still developed for years under their new companies. At some point, it does become their own project.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      To be fair, DeepMind is still fairly isolated from Google.
- samsonradu 7y ago
  The broader theory of Peter Thiel is that most of these advancements have been done in the rather unregulated ‘world of bits’, while areas related to physics, chemistry etc. have seen less advancement. Playing Go against an AI opponent while in a 1970s, crumbling, subway system would make for a good analogy.
- meowface 7y ago
  You're not wrong, but that argument can kind of be used to justify almost anything. "Yeah, what we're doing to make a ton of money right now is skeevy and not adding any actual value the world, maybe even creating negative value, but we promise we're going to spend all of that money on research to advance humanity." Google and Facebook actually did end up doing that, to good effect, but 1) was it worth it? (maybe, especially if we get benevolent superintelligent AGI directly out of it and Google / FB actually agree to not monopolize or abuse it), but 2) how many times should we accept that excuse from companies? If in the next 10 years, a hot up-and-coming new startup begins to grow rapidly and looks like it'll end up in the FAANG tier, should we also trust them when they say their questionable tactics are worth it because they're gonna spend that money on cool science stuff?
Yoric 7y ago
Historically, scientific progress has extremely rarely been made by companies. Most of the time, it's the result of academic research. Most researchers typically have neither time nor inclination to build a company/a product based on their own research, and having great research is no guarantee that the company/product will succeed. So the way research results become visible is typically through publications and teaching. When companies hire graduates who have learnt from researchers, some of these graduates end up in position to "innovate", quite a few years after the actual research has been done. For instance, I'm going to talk about the field that I know best: programming languages (to keep it simple, I'm not talking of VMs or compilers, just the languages). Pretty much everything you see in Java, C#, Python or Go dates back to the 70s (with broader testing and quality of life improvements, of course), Swift gets a few improvements imported from the 80s, but not that many. The only industrial languages that seem to have real innovations are F#, Rust and Scala, which are three cases in which the actual researchers managed to convince (or found) a company to support the language. Anyway, it's really, really hard to measure scientific progress, and if you look at companies to try and gauge it, you're looking at stuff that is typically quite old.
- blitmap 7y ago
  It has been asserted that the best innovations come from baser instincts - the ability to go to war. Radar came from defense research. I hate this.
  - kyrra 7y ago
    As did lots of awesome materials. The material science advancements that happened with WW2 and the space race (fueled by the cold war) are pretty amazing. Nylon among many others came out of those drives. Edit: someone corrected me about nylon. It was invented between 1927 and 1938 my Dupont. But it was still a commercial Enterprise doing the r&d for it. Looks like synthetic rubber and synthetic oil two major ones to come out of world war II https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions-and-innovations-wwii.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions...
    - 7y ago
taurath 7y ago
Do you have a link to the podcast?
- akvadrako 7y ago
  Probably this: https://podcastnotes.org/2019/07/17/thiel/ https://podcastnotes.org/2019/07/17/thiel/
taurath 7y ago
> create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. I think its not the risk that prevents moonshots, but the consolidation in the industry and the moats that are built around the bigs. The network effect in social media and tech platforms works both to provide more value to users but also to stifle innovation - Amazon's customer is no longer the customer, its the merchant selling on their platform. Google and Facebook's customer is ad buyers. Think about how many new useful features could be built using the networks that are not ad-friendly. I find that Facebook and Twitter to be more like the preventer of socialization, rather than the enabler. They prefer you engage with products, videos and ads than each other, and when engaging with each other not in meaningful ways. The biggest roadblock to innovation that makes an improvement to people's every day lives is that if its not on one of the platforms or ecosystems that already exist it matters little
- lanrh1836 7y ago
  It is risky. Why work at a unproven startup doing something really hard for $150k and equity of questionable value when you can work at a FANG for $350k/year doing less work?
  - taurath 7y ago
    For founders I don't think the calculus has changed much. You do it because you believe in it and have the stomach or resources to take the risk. For workers it has changed a bit from 10 years ago. I just call this making hay while the sun shines - I don't think the massive salaries at FAANG will last forever.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      If you are a founder who takes on investments, the only thing “you believe in” is an exit strategy. Don’t drink the kool aid. Most founders are not trying to feed starving children.
      - tlear 7y ago
skybrian 7y ago
This is a reductive generalization, sort of like assuming people at Bell Labs were working on telephone equipment, or people at Xerox PARC were working on copiers. How a company makes its money isn't what determines the biggest impact of its research. In the end, it may be some other research area that they never figure out how to make money on at all. Google famously has lots of "moonshots" and publishes lots of research and open source code. It's too soon to say what's going to turn out to be a real advance versus an "illusion".
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  what google calls "moonshots" is a pathetic joke compared to the real thing. They called 15 million dollars in cancer research investment a "moonshot", as well as the various absurdly low x prizes (vs what they are asking for, and ONLY IF you succeed).
- tibyat 7y ago
  try: none of it is a real advance.
api 7y ago
Thiel's IMHO bizarre politics aside, I really agree with him on this particular subject. I have believed for quite some time that we entered a kind of minor dark age around the early-mid 1970s. Virtually everything we're doing now from spacecraft to AI to the Internet was invented before 1970. For some reason around that time we largely stopped making major advancements. There are a few exceptions (CRISPR/CAS9, graphene, Li-Ion batteries) but nothing since then compares to the insane rate of progress experienced in the 50s and 60s. We went from horse drawn carts to moon rockets and supersonic aircraft in 50 years with a great deal of the progress happening between 1940 and 1970. That's 30 years of a rate of innovation orders of magnitude beyond anything in human history. I am not certain of the cause. It's tempting to blame proximate things like the rise of neoliberalism, de-funding of basic research, or bureaucratization of science, but I wonder if the cause wasn't something deeper. It really seems to me that everything went off the rails around 1973. Take this graph for example: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/thp_20170926_thirteen_facts_wage_growth_figb.jpg https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/thp_201... Right around 1973 is when the decline of the US middle class really started. The effect just didn't become really acute until after the 2008 super-recession. Here's a few of the ideas I've brainstormed: * Did the collapse of Bretton Woods (a.k.a. the Nixon Shock) break something about the fundamental incentive structure of the economy? * Was the generation that grew up on television less able to think innovatively? Did they start taking power around the early-mid 70s? * Did we get scared? Was the rate of progress during those years so fast that it caused some kind of deep subconscious "future shock" backlash that manifested in things like the luddite wing of the green movement or the rise of fundamentalist religion? * Energy got much more expensive after the oil shocks of the 70s and after US production of the really cheap easy oil peaked. Maybe rising energy costs cut margin from the economy? I'm open to suggestions. I really think "what happened in 1973?" is a historical mystery.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  So I see two possible explanations: 1) Moore law started at the seventies and its about to end within few years. It might be that we got too lazy? 2) The economy become much more market driven/competitive. I.e. management went from technical to financial. Hence when the goal of innovating is financial , it is much more short term. The reason for optimism today are : 1) Moore law is ending, hence we should see many new hardware architectures and the software to follow. 2) Open source - companies can start innovating without the need to build basic staff.
nikofeyn 7y ago
> create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. this obsession with moonshot ideas is just as damaging as these big companies turning customers into statistics and sucking up talent and feigning innovation. long-term technological development simply does not occur in the united states. EVERYTHING is under accelerated schedules and thus entirely short-term. i do not know of a single entity other than possibly universities, although even they are suspect, in the united states that focuses on long-term research and development goals. there are many long-term investigations that are waiting to be undertaken that are not moonshot ideas. the united states has a real danger of falling behind due to this hyper-focus on short-term results.
buboard 7y ago
yeah say what you want about Thiel, but he has had 20/20 vision in seeing where the trends are going. I also agree with Weinstein's assessment that silicon valley is hiring engineers that are not there to do business. It certainly feels like every redesign of the major apps is becoming needlessly inefficient and uninspired.
- deleted 7y ago
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jinfiesto 7y ago
I used to think this, but I've come around somewhat. The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening. Obviously no kind of exponential growth is sustainable, even at a low rate. The best minds are getting sucked into this at least partly because the work is necessary to keep the economic wheels spinning. If we give up on having an average % of yearly growth, we're committing to living in an economy that's a zero or negative sum game. So yes, we are stagnating scientifically, but it's not necessarily for no reason. The longer we keep running the economy as is, the more smart people are going to have to be allocated to figuring out how to keep up with the exponential growth our system demands. Unfortunately, no one seems to have cracked steady-state economics, so it looks like we'll be doing this for the foreseeable future... Additionally, I don't know how we're supposed to keep up with this absurd need for exponential growth without leaning hard on technology (at least if we presume we don't want to wreck the planet more.) I feel like big tech is actually doing something important with regard to growing the economy disproportionately with the physical resources they consume.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening. That isn't really a thing. The 3% growth aligns closely with population growth (including immigration), and that's where it really comes from. If the average company makes widgets and the population grows by 3% then they hire 3% more people and sell 3% more widgets to 3% more customers, and the company is worth 3% more. The unsustainable thing is really unlimited population growth, but steady state populations don't require some kind of cataclysm. They work a little differently, in particular people have to on average work longer before they retire because there are fewer working people to support them in retirement, but it's hardly mass starvation and nuclear war. And even the drawbacks are offset by things like automation -- not as good as both automation and population growth, but still probably not worse than your grandfather had it. The real problem is that there is no iron law that says people have to spend their working hours on pie-growing activities like automation and honest medical research instead of pie-stealing activities like adtech and patent trolling, so if we have rules and institutions that make the latter more profitable, that's what we get.
johnvaluk 7y ago
I think it depends on what your definition of "We" is. As a species, the scientific progress humans have experienced in the last century is unparalleled. But the United States is falling behind because we are not doing enough socially to promote careers in STEM and health.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  STEM and heathcare training are hugely overemphasized, hence the poverty wages claimed by many such fields. It's the delusion that market mechanisms can create sustainable socially beneficial (vs. unsustainable and. socially parasitic) business models within these domain that's the problem..
alevskaya 7y ago
Science hasn't stagnated yet. As someone with a long career in physics/biology, this attitude only reflects the myopia and ignorance of the people that hold it. We're in the middle of a revolution in our understanding of biological systems and our ability to engineer them. But because that field is so technical and intrinsically slower-paced people discount it in these discussions because they don't know anything about it. There's much more to science and technology than "tech" companies.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > There's much more to science and technology than "tech" companies. Specific observation of mine is actually important tech takes decades to make it's presence felt. That's a totally different world than "tech companies" that are mostly fronts for ad dollar scams, casino's for international crooks, and laundromats for central bank money. Lets talk solar panels, first developed in the 1950's. Variable Frequency drives first developed in the 1980's. Lithium Ion batteries developed in the late 1970's. All this stuff is decades old and still working it's way through the day to day infrastructure. I feel like there are a bunch of biological and agricultural science stuff is coming, massive changes in the energy sector are coming, but it's painfully slow.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    You seem very certain that today's tech companies aren't doing any real research, or if they are it won't have a significant impact. How could you possibly know this? It can't be learned from reading the news.
  - driverdan 7y ago
    > All this stuff is decades old and still working it's way through the day to day infrastructure. That's how science has always worked. It's rare to go from research to consumer goods in less than 10 years. Often it takes more.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      Lasers were invented in the early 1960's. And there was a bunch of hype for half a decade. Dozen years later people were referring to lasers as a 'failed' technology. Transistors invented more or less in 1947. Twenty years later in 1967 my parents bought a BW TV, with tubes. LED's. First invented in 1927, practical devices 40 years later in the mid 1960's. Widespread use in lighting, not until 40 years after that.
stcredzero 7y ago
I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). Wasn't just this sort of thing said about the financial world? (That all of the brains were being sucked up by finance, because that's what paid the most for technical and math talent.) I remember talking to coworkers about 15 years ago, quipping that pretty soon, it would all just be enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms, exchanging arcane signals, causing money to move around for inscrutable purposes. Doesn't this fit the way people talking about YouTube and Google talk about "The Algorithm?" It just means that the enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms have also begun to take over media and the culture. It's not just money moving around, commanded by machines for inscrutable purposes. It's now also the information, the connections, and the interactions comprising human culture itself. Supposedly we're not yet at the point of AGI, but somehow we've already built the tools for the not yet existing AI overlords to control all of humanity. (In pAIperclips, this would correspond to "Release the Hypnodrones!") If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. At this point, maybe we need all of the talent just to try and keep the "Hypnodrones" out of the hands of evil hackers?
prpp0ndj 7y ago
Perhaps Peter Thiel should allow his engineers to work on something other than “yet another spying tool” or financial transactions apps. This is like Bezos saying he’s getting into space because the planet is going to hell. “Look at these problems I helped create. Everyone better let me guide us elsewhere.” Thiel won’t openly admit it’s self aggrandizing leaders like him that distract people with babysitting his wealth, instead of allowing them to chase their own novel ideas.
- buboard 7y ago
  doesn't he run thiel fellowships for that?
  - prpp0ndj 7y ago
    I spend a couple hours a week practicing guitar, and dozens of hours doing computer work. I don’t consider myself a guitarist. “Freedom to get stuff done.”, it says on the Fellowship site. For the few young folks that qualify. The raw numbers tell the story better than a stat: some folks, not most folks. Most folks gotta shovel the money onto the pile so bits and pieces can trickle down at the rate he approves. This isn’t limited to Peter Thiel. It’s the same old: kowtow to aristocrats.
    - tlear 7y ago
      Thiel is an immigrant whose dad was a Chemical engineer. Aristocrat he is not..
      - prpp0ndj 7y ago
        That’s a heart warming story. He’s a first generation aristocrat who has gone on at length about the right of the powerful to dictate the outputs of the less powerful. He believes he’s truly unique and above the rest of us, without seemingly considering none of us will lie down and die if an early end should be his fate (I hope it isn’t, of course). Such a smart guy, I suspect he’d agree there’s no causal link between his existence and the rest of us. He leans on convenient emotional frameworks society has carried along for years. Oh of course he does a bit of philanthropy to point at. How gracious of him to hand pick those who should have their minds to themselves! He thinks Elizabeth Warren is dangerous. Says nothing about the doofus in Chief, but the contender with relatively little power. Be afraid of change! It might prove I’m wrong! The common features of an aristocrat: money and indifference of those without money. Or at least that’s my take given his writings. Maybe have a peak and see.
anbop 7y ago
But if you look at the things that were considered "science fiction" back in the day, like video phones, or augmented reality glasses... stuff like Facebook's Portal or Apple's ARKit or Microsoft's HoloLens really do fit the bill. The basic science is done in academia but there's no academic team that would create something as idiot-proof as Facetime.
musicale 7y ago
I'm not sure Apple has ever been known for "moonshots" but they have been great at introducing best-of-breed versions (iPod, iPhone, iPad...) of existing tech products (MP3 player, smartphone, tablet, etc..) and then improving them every year. This is a good thing! Now if they could just start improving the MacBook Pro again...
elamje 7y ago
I have had similar thoughts about big tech companies, but lately I have started to realize the progress they have brought. To name a few: - Google, FB, Amazon basically wrote the book on distributed systems (Read Designing Data Intensive Applications), both from a research perspective and a very well architected, open source solution - Google, FB have profoundly impacted front end development with cutting edge Javascript runtimes and open source front end frameworks - Amazon, Google, Microsoft have basically invented/popularized a way to do computing(Cloud), server management that has enabled tiny tech companies to become giants by outsourcing IT infrastructure - Apple/Google have created devices, OSs, and software that is nearly impossible to live without these days, additionally creating platforms for millions of developers to make a living on(App Store) - Amazon has set the bar pretty high for automation in operations and made 2 day shipping a thing we expect from everyone There are many other things I can’t think of right now, but long story short most of the companies you listed do have crappy parts of their business, but have also made incredible platforms that 3rd parties can leverage to make a ton of money. I caveat all of this by saying that there are some practices that I don’t agree with at all of those firms, but by and large they have gotten so big because they are platforms.
- svachalek 7y ago
  There's a lot going on, but if you go back a few decades the list is more like: radio, television, cars, airplanes, skyscrapers, subways, refrigeration, plastic, aluminum, etc. This is a strange time period, in that technologically things seem to be moving too fast and stalled out at the same time.
- flukus 7y ago
  Front end development if anything has regressed with javascript and front end frameworks, about the only way it's improved is in the questionable cross platform story. The smartphone is obviously a gradual (occasionally not so gradual) improvement on PDA's, app stores existed before them too, although usually belonging to the phone operator or network. We hear about amazon because they're in the tech industry, I bet if you followed the logistics industry as closely you'd see a lot of improvements. Particularly outside of the US where amazon doesn't have the same footprint.
- 7y ago
sanderjd 7y ago
I always feel like widespread high bandwidth cellular networks and ubiquitous smart phones are underappreciated in those sorts of discussions. We just achieved ubiquitous global high-resolution-video level mobile communication. I think this is very likely to go down in history as being on the order of the printing press in terms of technological breakthrough. We're still incorporating the fallout from this into our society. But apparently we're already stagnant!
lph 7y ago
If Peter Thiel is so concerned about scientific progress, maybe he shouldn't spend so much time and money supporting a regime that's openly hostile to science. Just a thought.
- deleted 7y ago
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- davesmith1983 7y ago
  This maybe a surprise to some people but just because you support a group or a person that doesn't mean you agree with or condone everything they do.
  - peanutgal2600 7y ago
    This may be a surprise to some people, but just because you don't condone everything a group does, doesn't excuse you from culpability for the acts they take in your name, with your tax dollars.
- maehwasu 7y ago
  He'd likely argue that, despite the prior regimes' professed love of Science!, the same trends were present before. I.e. the podcast's content wouldn't have changed at all in 2016 vs 2019. Short-term control of the executive branch in the American system is fairly disconnected from the multi-decade incentives that move the directions of scientific research.
  - lph 7y ago
    We've been hearing this "both sides are equally bad" argument from Republican apologists for years, but by now there's a mountain of evidence that it's simply not true. Republican efforts to gut and silence science within the government have done profound damage.
TomMckenny 7y ago
The only corporations targeted are those that are not contributing to the current ruling party more than the opposition. Which is why only a tiny number of monopolies are being targeted. So at best there will only be competition only in those areas dominated by the sliver of companies that happen to offend the current White-house. And new entrants to the field can expect the same treatment. Of course, the companies targeted for breakup may just play ball and change their campaign contribution strategy.
thow_leet 7y ago
Google could fire 80% of their workforce. They are warehousing people to prevent them from innovating in other parts of the economy.
m463 7y ago
what about machine learning?
pmart123 7y ago
Peter Norvig had a point several years ago regarding the power of data. For instance, he mentioned some of the data Google collected could measure the effects of relativity. So in some ways, having the data makes it easier to “discover” something versus one genius toiling away in a room. This seemed to be where the lowest hanging fruit has been, particularly at grasping human or social behavior. Due to the need for data and tooling initially, research and discoveries shifted from academy to corporations. In some ways though, FOSS packages and the cloud are bringing research back into academia. In some ways you could make the argument that the government with the Manhattan project, NSA, etc. has driven technology more than academia for the last 70 years. I think you also could make the argument or an interesting research project could be investigating whether there historically has been cyclicality to theory and then practice, ie french enlightenment movement vs. US founding fathers.
d1zzy 7y ago
> I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). That seems ignorant and simplistic (or maybe just using a definition of "innovation" that is less generic than I have in mind). The vast majority of employees at those companies do NOT work on the main money generating product, it's such a small number compared to the rest that it's a running joke inside companies "hey you guys make the money, we burn it". I feel that there has been made a lot of progress in many areas coming from people working for those companies. Not saying that maybe more progress could have been made if those people worked for smaller companies or for academia but I completely disagree that big tech hiring lots of smart people just automatically means they're all spending time doing some "useless" (to your mind) thing. Some of the very few things I'm aware of: - large improvements to distributed systems - large software building/testing frameworks - maintenance, scheduling, utilization of large datacenter hardware and networks - all sorts of specific features being pushed in open source projects (like the Linux kernel) to support these companies' usecases There's a running theme in most of those things of course, it's all to do with operating large datacenters and that makes sense (and I'd argue that without having had bigtech it would be much less likely to have the business support/money to work on such problems).

wpasc 7y ago

I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science. I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated. I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).

opportune 7y ago
>ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  That, or we've already seen where this road leads: our best and brightest talent being used to make rich people richer. Nobody with a high-paying job in finance is losing that job.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Personally I suspect another aspect are ugly aspects of (high school) social order and anti-intellectualism. If the people they look down on start succeeding they get really mad. Virtually nobody complains about bankers and businessmen taking their jobs with outsourcing and wasn't taken seriously. Automation and AI creating more productivity instead of just moving jobs? The "nerds" doing it? "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!" hysterical reactions and rage. If tech becomes involved in an industry suddenly it is the great satan like Tesla, or any of the artificial meat companies and spoken of as not a part of the industry in spite of larger and smaller existing players and even foreign businesses receiving more respect. The mythical long lasting tech-bro insited as everywhere from countless hit pieces which hold homeowners blameless for rising rents along with other business jobs but engineers and programmers solely are clearly the great evil responsible for high rents. It harkens back to deep feudalistic stupid where the peasants and aristocracy distrusted the merchant and miller for making money from working smart and being "anomalys" to the social order. Money not made through serfs or conquest? Clearly deeply unnatural and wrong. Just look at Belphegor - literal demonization of discovery and ingenious inventions. Judging by actions and impacts alone he should be an angel.
taurath 7y ago
Regulation can be freeing, especially anti-trust when it prevents incumbents from getting so large they take over. Things like privacy regulations are somewhat stifling, but over time they can become a lot more easily abstracted. There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API.
- opportune 7y ago
  >There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API. Actually, I can think of lots of reasons. It's certainly possible but it won't ever be simple and well-generalized.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
The problem is, whenever something bad happens, people look to regulation, but they never look at the existing regulation to see how it might have led to this. They always want to add something new rather than fix what's already there. One of the strongest defenses against monopolies is adversarial interoperability, because it blunts vertical integration. It allows a new competitor to replace one piece of the supply chain and still use the rest of it, even if it's operated by the same conglomerate competing with them for that one piece. Because then you can have five companies replace the five pieces one at a time and end up with competition on all fronts, without them having to find each other and coordinate ahead of time before any of them can act. But we now have multiple laws conspiring to prevent that in tech. CFAA, DMCA 1201, EULAs, patent thickets, etc. We get monopolies because we passed laws that thwart competition. So how about we do something about those laws rather than adding new ones, when the incumbents are likely to have more influence in drafting the new ones than the average user or startup founder?

Kaveren 7y ago

I imagine you could make a convincing counterargument that Big Tech has done plenty of great things for developers at large. We could look to the historical example of Bell Labs under the ownership of AT&T, which brought us the C programming language. Today we could look to examples like Google's Material Design, the Go and Dart programming languages, or Facebook's stewardship of React. You can take the cynical view that people at Google are just trying to get people to click on things, which, true, is their primary business model. But you can equally say that employees of Google (who work on Search) are trying to provide a good search experience to everyone around the world for free. Tangentially, for Amazon, they deliver some of the best customer experience I've seen. I can start a Live Chat session at 3 AM (with a human) when I have a problem. It's not just getting people to buy crap.

executive 7y ago
while AWS delivers some of the worst.

typon 7y ago

Some of the best and most impactful AI research comes from Google DeepMind or Facebook AI research. Those ad clicks are subsidizing a whole lot of scientific advancements.

lanrh1836 7y ago
Google acquired DeepMind...
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  Sure, but Google also acquired Android, Apple acquired Siri, and Microsoft purchased DOS. They were still developed for years under their new companies. At some point, it does become their own project.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    To be fair, DeepMind is still fairly isolated from Google.
samsonradu 7y ago
The broader theory of Peter Thiel is that most of these advancements have been done in the rather unregulated ‘world of bits’, while areas related to physics, chemistry etc. have seen less advancement. Playing Go against an AI opponent while in a 1970s, crumbling, subway system would make for a good analogy.
meowface 7y ago
You're not wrong, but that argument can kind of be used to justify almost anything. "Yeah, what we're doing to make a ton of money right now is skeevy and not adding any actual value the world, maybe even creating negative value, but we promise we're going to spend all of that money on research to advance humanity." Google and Facebook actually did end up doing that, to good effect, but 1) was it worth it? (maybe, especially if we get benevolent superintelligent AGI directly out of it and Google / FB actually agree to not monopolize or abuse it), but 2) how many times should we accept that excuse from companies? If in the next 10 years, a hot up-and-coming new startup begins to grow rapidly and looks like it'll end up in the FAANG tier, should we also trust them when they say their questionable tactics are worth it because they're gonna spend that money on cool science stuff?

Yoric 7y ago

Historically, scientific progress has extremely rarely been made by companies. Most of the time, it's the result of academic research. Most researchers typically have neither time nor inclination to build a company/a product based on their own research, and having great research is no guarantee that the company/product will succeed. So the way research results become visible is typically through publications and teaching. When companies hire graduates who have learnt from researchers, some of these graduates end up in position to "innovate", quite a few years after the actual research has been done. For instance, I'm going to talk about the field that I know best: programming languages (to keep it simple, I'm not talking of VMs or compilers, just the languages). Pretty much everything you see in Java, C#, Python or Go dates back to the 70s (with broader testing and quality of life improvements, of course), Swift gets a few improvements imported from the 80s, but not that many. The only industrial languages that seem to have real innovations are F#, Rust and Scala, which are three cases in which the actual researchers managed to convince (or found) a company to support the language. Anyway, it's really, really hard to measure scientific progress, and if you look at companies to try and gauge it, you're looking at stuff that is typically quite old.

blitmap 7y ago
It has been asserted that the best innovations come from baser instincts - the ability to go to war. Radar came from defense research. I hate this.
- kyrra 7y ago
  As did lots of awesome materials. The material science advancements that happened with WW2 and the space race (fueled by the cold war) are pretty amazing. Nylon among many others came out of those drives. Edit: someone corrected me about nylon. It was invented between 1927 and 1938 my Dupont. But it was still a commercial Enterprise doing the r&d for it. Looks like synthetic rubber and synthetic oil two major ones to come out of world war II https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions-and-innovations-wwii.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions...
  - 7y ago

taurath 7y ago

Do you have a link to the podcast?

akvadrako 7y ago
Probably this: https://podcastnotes.org/2019/07/17/thiel/ https://podcastnotes.org/2019/07/17/thiel/

taurath 7y ago

> create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. I think its not the risk that prevents moonshots, but the consolidation in the industry and the moats that are built around the bigs. The network effect in social media and tech platforms works both to provide more value to users but also to stifle innovation - Amazon's customer is no longer the customer, its the merchant selling on their platform. Google and Facebook's customer is ad buyers. Think about how many new useful features could be built using the networks that are not ad-friendly. I find that Facebook and Twitter to be more like the preventer of socialization, rather than the enabler. They prefer you engage with products, videos and ads than each other, and when engaging with each other not in meaningful ways. The biggest roadblock to innovation that makes an improvement to people's every day lives is that if its not on one of the platforms or ecosystems that already exist it matters little

lanrh1836 7y ago
It is risky. Why work at a unproven startup doing something really hard for $150k and equity of questionable value when you can work at a FANG for $350k/year doing less work?
- taurath 7y ago
  For founders I don't think the calculus has changed much. You do it because you believe in it and have the stomach or resources to take the risk. For workers it has changed a bit from 10 years ago. I just call this making hay while the sun shines - I don't think the massive salaries at FAANG will last forever.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If you are a founder who takes on investments, the only thing “you believe in” is an exit strategy. Don’t drink the kool aid. Most founders are not trying to feed starving children.
    - tlear 7y ago

skybrian 7y ago

This is a reductive generalization, sort of like assuming people at Bell Labs were working on telephone equipment, or people at Xerox PARC were working on copiers. How a company makes its money isn't what determines the biggest impact of its research. In the end, it may be some other research area that they never figure out how to make money on at all. Google famously has lots of "moonshots" and publishes lots of research and open source code. It's too soon to say what's going to turn out to be a real advance versus an "illusion".

throwaway2048 7y ago
what google calls "moonshots" is a pathetic joke compared to the real thing. They called 15 million dollars in cancer research investment a "moonshot", as well as the various absurdly low x prizes (vs what they are asking for, and ONLY IF you succeed).
tibyat 7y ago
try: none of it is a real advance.

api 7y ago

Thiel's IMHO bizarre politics aside, I really agree with him on this particular subject. I have believed for quite some time that we entered a kind of minor dark age around the early-mid 1970s. Virtually everything we're doing now from spacecraft to AI to the Internet was invented before 1970. For some reason around that time we largely stopped making major advancements. There are a few exceptions (CRISPR/CAS9, graphene, Li-Ion batteries) but nothing since then compares to the insane rate of progress experienced in the 50s and 60s. We went from horse drawn carts to moon rockets and supersonic aircraft in 50 years with a great deal of the progress happening between 1940 and 1970. That's 30 years of a rate of innovation orders of magnitude beyond anything in human history. I am not certain of the cause. It's tempting to blame proximate things like the rise of neoliberalism, de-funding of basic research, or bureaucratization of science, but I wonder if the cause wasn't something deeper. It really seems to me that everything went off the rails around 1973. Take this graph for example: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/thp_20170926_thirteen_facts_wage_growth_figb.jpg https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/thp_201... Right around 1973 is when the decline of the US middle class really started. The effect just didn't become really acute until after the 2008 super-recession. Here's a few of the ideas I've brainstormed: * Did the collapse of Bretton Woods (a.k.a. the Nixon Shock) break something about the fundamental incentive structure of the economy? * Was the generation that grew up on television less able to think innovatively? Did they start taking power around the early-mid 70s? * Did we get scared? Was the rate of progress during those years so fast that it caused some kind of deep subconscious "future shock" backlash that manifested in things like the luddite wing of the green movement or the rise of fundamentalist religion? * Energy got much more expensive after the oil shocks of the 70s and after US production of the really cheap easy oil peaked. Maybe rising energy costs cut margin from the economy? I'm open to suggestions. I really think "what happened in 1973?" is a historical mystery.

streetcat1 7y ago
So I see two possible explanations: 1) Moore law started at the seventies and its about to end within few years. It might be that we got too lazy? 2) The economy become much more market driven/competitive. I.e. management went from technical to financial. Hence when the goal of innovating is financial , it is much more short term. The reason for optimism today are : 1) Moore law is ending, hence we should see many new hardware architectures and the software to follow. 2) Open source - companies can start innovating without the need to build basic staff.

nikofeyn 7y ago

> create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. this obsession with moonshot ideas is just as damaging as these big companies turning customers into statistics and sucking up talent and feigning innovation. long-term technological development simply does not occur in the united states. EVERYTHING is under accelerated schedules and thus entirely short-term. i do not know of a single entity other than possibly universities, although even they are suspect, in the united states that focuses on long-term research and development goals. there are many long-term investigations that are waiting to be undertaken that are not moonshot ideas. the united states has a real danger of falling behind due to this hyper-focus on short-term results.

buboard 7y ago

yeah say what you want about Thiel, but he has had 20/20 vision in seeing where the trends are going. I also agree with Weinstein's assessment that silicon valley is hiring engineers that are not there to do business. It certainly feels like every redesign of the major apps is becoming needlessly inefficient and uninspired.

deleted 7y ago
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jinfiesto 7y ago

I used to think this, but I've come around somewhat. The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening. Obviously no kind of exponential growth is sustainable, even at a low rate. The best minds are getting sucked into this at least partly because the work is necessary to keep the economic wheels spinning. If we give up on having an average % of yearly growth, we're committing to living in an economy that's a zero or negative sum game. So yes, we are stagnating scientifically, but it's not necessarily for no reason. The longer we keep running the economy as is, the more smart people are going to have to be allocated to figuring out how to keep up with the exponential growth our system demands. Unfortunately, no one seems to have cracked steady-state economics, so it looks like we'll be doing this for the foreseeable future... Additionally, I don't know how we're supposed to keep up with this absurd need for exponential growth without leaning hard on technology (at least if we presume we don't want to wreck the planet more.) I feel like big tech is actually doing something important with regard to growing the economy disproportionately with the physical resources they consume.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> The economy as a basic premise is expected to grow at least 3% a year or bad stuff starts happening. That isn't really a thing. The 3% growth aligns closely with population growth (including immigration), and that's where it really comes from. If the average company makes widgets and the population grows by 3% then they hire 3% more people and sell 3% more widgets to 3% more customers, and the company is worth 3% more. The unsustainable thing is really unlimited population growth, but steady state populations don't require some kind of cataclysm. They work a little differently, in particular people have to on average work longer before they retire because there are fewer working people to support them in retirement, but it's hardly mass starvation and nuclear war. And even the drawbacks are offset by things like automation -- not as good as both automation and population growth, but still probably not worse than your grandfather had it. The real problem is that there is no iron law that says people have to spend their working hours on pie-growing activities like automation and honest medical research instead of pie-stealing activities like adtech and patent trolling, so if we have rules and institutions that make the latter more profitable, that's what we get.

johnvaluk 7y ago

I think it depends on what your definition of "We" is. As a species, the scientific progress humans have experienced in the last century is unparalleled. But the United States is falling behind because we are not doing enough socially to promote careers in STEM and health.

dredmorbius 7y ago
STEM and heathcare training are hugely overemphasized, hence the poverty wages claimed by many such fields. It's the delusion that market mechanisms can create sustainable socially beneficial (vs. unsustainable and. socially parasitic) business models within these domain that's the problem..

alevskaya 7y ago

Science hasn't stagnated yet. As someone with a long career in physics/biology, this attitude only reflects the myopia and ignorance of the people that hold it. We're in the middle of a revolution in our understanding of biological systems and our ability to engineer them. But because that field is so technical and intrinsically slower-paced people discount it in these discussions because they don't know anything about it. There's much more to science and technology than "tech" companies.

Gibbon1 7y ago
> There's much more to science and technology than "tech" companies. Specific observation of mine is actually important tech takes decades to make it's presence felt. That's a totally different world than "tech companies" that are mostly fronts for ad dollar scams, casino's for international crooks, and laundromats for central bank money. Lets talk solar panels, first developed in the 1950's. Variable Frequency drives first developed in the 1980's. Lithium Ion batteries developed in the late 1970's. All this stuff is decades old and still working it's way through the day to day infrastructure. I feel like there are a bunch of biological and agricultural science stuff is coming, massive changes in the energy sector are coming, but it's painfully slow.
- skybrian 7y ago
  You seem very certain that today's tech companies aren't doing any real research, or if they are it won't have a significant impact. How could you possibly know this? It can't be learned from reading the news.
- driverdan 7y ago
  > All this stuff is decades old and still working it's way through the day to day infrastructure. That's how science has always worked. It's rare to go from research to consumer goods in less than 10 years. Often it takes more.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Lasers were invented in the early 1960's. And there was a bunch of hype for half a decade. Dozen years later people were referring to lasers as a 'failed' technology. Transistors invented more or less in 1947. Twenty years later in 1967 my parents bought a BW TV, with tubes. LED's. First invented in 1927, practical devices 40 years later in the mid 1960's. Widespread use in lighting, not until 40 years after that.

stcredzero 7y ago

I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). Wasn't just this sort of thing said about the financial world? (That all of the brains were being sucked up by finance, because that's what paid the most for technical and math talent.) I remember talking to coworkers about 15 years ago, quipping that pretty soon, it would all just be enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms, exchanging arcane signals, causing money to move around for inscrutable purposes. Doesn't this fit the way people talking about YouTube and Google talk about "The Algorithm?" It just means that the enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms have also begun to take over media and the culture. It's not just money moving around, commanded by machines for inscrutable purposes. It's now also the information, the connections, and the interactions comprising human culture itself. Supposedly we're not yet at the point of AGI, but somehow we've already built the tools for the not yet existing AI overlords to control all of humanity. (In pAIperclips, this would correspond to "Release the Hypnodrones!") If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky. At this point, maybe we need all of the talent just to try and keep the "Hypnodrones" out of the hands of evil hackers?

prpp0ndj 7y ago

Perhaps Peter Thiel should allow his engineers to work on something other than “yet another spying tool” or financial transactions apps. This is like Bezos saying he’s getting into space because the planet is going to hell. “Look at these problems I helped create. Everyone better let me guide us elsewhere.” Thiel won’t openly admit it’s self aggrandizing leaders like him that distract people with babysitting his wealth, instead of allowing them to chase their own novel ideas.

buboard 7y ago
doesn't he run thiel fellowships for that?
- prpp0ndj 7y ago
  I spend a couple hours a week practicing guitar, and dozens of hours doing computer work. I don’t consider myself a guitarist. “Freedom to get stuff done.”, it says on the Fellowship site. For the few young folks that qualify. The raw numbers tell the story better than a stat: some folks, not most folks. Most folks gotta shovel the money onto the pile so bits and pieces can trickle down at the rate he approves. This isn’t limited to Peter Thiel. It’s the same old: kowtow to aristocrats.
  - tlear 7y ago
    Thiel is an immigrant whose dad was a Chemical engineer. Aristocrat he is not..
    - prpp0ndj 7y ago
      That’s a heart warming story. He’s a first generation aristocrat who has gone on at length about the right of the powerful to dictate the outputs of the less powerful. He believes he’s truly unique and above the rest of us, without seemingly considering none of us will lie down and die if an early end should be his fate (I hope it isn’t, of course). Such a smart guy, I suspect he’d agree there’s no causal link between his existence and the rest of us. He leans on convenient emotional frameworks society has carried along for years. Oh of course he does a bit of philanthropy to point at. How gracious of him to hand pick those who should have their minds to themselves! He thinks Elizabeth Warren is dangerous. Says nothing about the doofus in Chief, but the contender with relatively little power. Be afraid of change! It might prove I’m wrong! The common features of an aristocrat: money and indifference of those without money. Or at least that’s my take given his writings. Maybe have a peak and see.

anbop 7y ago

But if you look at the things that were considered "science fiction" back in the day, like video phones, or augmented reality glasses... stuff like Facebook's Portal or Apple's ARKit or Microsoft's HoloLens really do fit the bill. The basic science is done in academia but there's no academic team that would create something as idiot-proof as Facetime.

musicale 7y ago

I'm not sure Apple has ever been known for "moonshots" but they have been great at introducing best-of-breed versions (iPod, iPhone, iPad...) of existing tech products (MP3 player, smartphone, tablet, etc..) and then improving them every year. This is a good thing! Now if they could just start improving the MacBook Pro again...

elamje 7y ago

I have had similar thoughts about big tech companies, but lately I have started to realize the progress they have brought. To name a few: - Google, FB, Amazon basically wrote the book on distributed systems (Read Designing Data Intensive Applications), both from a research perspective and a very well architected, open source solution - Google, FB have profoundly impacted front end development with cutting edge Javascript runtimes and open source front end frameworks - Amazon, Google, Microsoft have basically invented/popularized a way to do computing(Cloud), server management that has enabled tiny tech companies to become giants by outsourcing IT infrastructure - Apple/Google have created devices, OSs, and software that is nearly impossible to live without these days, additionally creating platforms for millions of developers to make a living on(App Store) - Amazon has set the bar pretty high for automation in operations and made 2 day shipping a thing we expect from everyone There are many other things I can’t think of right now, but long story short most of the companies you listed do have crappy parts of their business, but have also made incredible platforms that 3rd parties can leverage to make a ton of money. I caveat all of this by saying that there are some practices that I don’t agree with at all of those firms, but by and large they have gotten so big because they are platforms.

svachalek 7y ago
There's a lot going on, but if you go back a few decades the list is more like: radio, television, cars, airplanes, skyscrapers, subways, refrigeration, plastic, aluminum, etc. This is a strange time period, in that technologically things seem to be moving too fast and stalled out at the same time.
flukus 7y ago
Front end development if anything has regressed with javascript and front end frameworks, about the only way it's improved is in the questionable cross platform story. The smartphone is obviously a gradual (occasionally not so gradual) improvement on PDA's, app stores existed before them too, although usually belonging to the phone operator or network. We hear about amazon because they're in the tech industry, I bet if you followed the logistics industry as closely you'd see a lot of improvements. Particularly outside of the US where amazon doesn't have the same footprint.
7y ago

sanderjd 7y ago

I always feel like widespread high bandwidth cellular networks and ubiquitous smart phones are underappreciated in those sorts of discussions. We just achieved ubiquitous global high-resolution-video level mobile communication. I think this is very likely to go down in history as being on the order of the printing press in terms of technological breakthrough. We're still incorporating the fallout from this into our society. But apparently we're already stagnant!

lph 7y ago

If Peter Thiel is so concerned about scientific progress, maybe he shouldn't spend so much time and money supporting a regime that's openly hostile to science. Just a thought.

deleted 7y ago
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davesmith1983 7y ago
This maybe a surprise to some people but just because you support a group or a person that doesn't mean you agree with or condone everything they do.
- peanutgal2600 7y ago
  This may be a surprise to some people, but just because you don't condone everything a group does, doesn't excuse you from culpability for the acts they take in your name, with your tax dollars.
maehwasu 7y ago
He'd likely argue that, despite the prior regimes' professed love of Science!, the same trends were present before. I.e. the podcast's content wouldn't have changed at all in 2016 vs 2019. Short-term control of the executive branch in the American system is fairly disconnected from the multi-decade incentives that move the directions of scientific research.
- lph 7y ago
  We've been hearing this "both sides are equally bad" argument from Republican apologists for years, but by now there's a mountain of evidence that it's simply not true. Republican efforts to gut and silence science within the government have done profound damage.

TomMckenny 7y ago

The only corporations targeted are those that are not contributing to the current ruling party more than the opposition. Which is why only a tiny number of monopolies are being targeted. So at best there will only be competition only in those areas dominated by the sliver of companies that happen to offend the current White-house. And new entrants to the field can expect the same treatment. Of course, the companies targeted for breakup may just play ball and change their campaign contribution strategy.

thow_leet 7y ago

Google could fire 80% of their workforce. They are warehousing people to prevent them from innovating in other parts of the economy.

m463 7y ago

what about machine learning?

pmart123 7y ago

Peter Norvig had a point several years ago regarding the power of data. For instance, he mentioned some of the data Google collected could measure the effects of relativity. So in some ways, having the data makes it easier to “discover” something versus one genius toiling away in a room. This seemed to be where the lowest hanging fruit has been, particularly at grasping human or social behavior. Due to the need for data and tooling initially, research and discoveries shifted from academy to corporations. In some ways though, FOSS packages and the cloud are bringing research back into academia. In some ways you could make the argument that the government with the Manhattan project, NSA, etc. has driven technology more than academia for the last 70 years. I think you also could make the argument or an interesting research project could be investigating whether there historically has been cyclicality to theory and then practice, ie french enlightenment movement vs. US founding fathers.

d1zzy 7y ago

> I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). That seems ignorant and simplistic (or maybe just using a definition of "innovation" that is less generic than I have in mind). The vast majority of employees at those companies do NOT work on the main money generating product, it's such a small number compared to the rest that it's a running joke inside companies "hey you guys make the money, we burn it". I feel that there has been made a lot of progress in many areas coming from people working for those companies. Not saying that maybe more progress could have been made if those people worked for smaller companies or for academia but I completely disagree that big tech hiring lots of smart people just automatically means they're all spending time doing some "useless" (to your mind) thing. Some of the very few things I'm aware of: - large improvements to distributed systems - large software building/testing frameworks - maintenance, scheduling, utilization of large datacenter hardware and networks - all sorts of specific features being pushed in open source projects (like the Linux kernel) to support these companies' usecases There's a running theme in most of those things of course, it's all to do with operating large datacenters and that makes sense (and I'd argue that without having had bigtech it would be much less likely to have the business support/money to work on such problems).