Great short talk by Peter Thiel:

Some particularly good bits from the first half:

I always am very uncomfortable with these sort of categories of … extreme optimism, extreme pessimism. I think those are somehow the wrong categories. … And I think they’re actually weirdly the same. Extreme optimism … says that you don’t need to do anything. The movie of the future will go on its own. It’s sort of automatic, accelerating progress and all you have to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. And then extreme pessimism is that … nothing you can do will make a difference. And the truth is always, I think, somewhere in between, or at least it’s best for us to believe that it’s somewhere in between and that … instead of being in emotive denial (that everything’s great) or acceptance (that everything is awful) and both denial and acceptance are code words for laziness, for not doing anything, because there’s nothing you can do — nothing you need to do. It’s best to be somewhere in between and to think: It actually matters. Things are always up for debate … and we should be fighting, and we should be figuring out … how to continue to have this healthy and free country in which we live.

3:42

In a democracy, what 51% of the population believes is probably better, and there’s a certain bias towards majoritarianism, and if you have 70% of the population [that] believes something it’s even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99.9%, you’ve gone from a democracy to North Korea. And it’s this very important question that one needs to always needs to come back to. Where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds, and where’s that dividing line between majoritarian democracy and where do you get to the sort of totalitarianism of North Korea. And it’s hard to define where that line is, but I want to suggest that in all kinds of contexts we’re far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.

5:32

We’ve had all these derangements of science, where … in the name of “science” we’ve done these rather unscientific things. And I often think that … when people use the word “science” it’s often a tell of the opposite … that the things that are actual science like physics and chemistry, you don’t need to call them “physical science” or “chemical science” because you don’t need to protest that much like, you know, Lady Macbeth. But when you call things “climate science” or “political science”, that’s sort of a tell that they’re not quite scientific.

…

I’ve come to think that one way to think of a healthy “science” is that it has to fight a two-front war against excessive skepticism, and against excessive dogmatism. So excessive skepticism is if you can’t believe in anything: I don’t believe I’m here, I don’t believe the audience is here, nothing is real, everything is imaginary. That’s probably not an attitude that’s conducive to science. And of course, excessive dogmatism, at the other end of the spectrum, is … the 17th century church telling you that the Aristotelian view of the universe was correct and therefore the Earth couldn’t possibly be moving. And that’s excessive dogmatism, and that’s also very bad for science.

10:05