11 ms·

Back to the Future

66 points by hhs 7y ago

mdonahoe 7y ago
Remember when Peter campaigned for Trump?
- asguy 7y ago
  We do,... now what did you think about the article?
  - skore 7y ago
    Thiel actually lampshades this himself: > Warp drive is in fact hard to take seriously because its basic physics are so far beyond the furthest reaches of our knowledge as to debilitate would-be researchers—not to mention reasonable doubts about the friendliness of faraway foreign species. (Some of them, I assume, are good aliens.)
  - rubsh99 7y ago
    Romanticized rubbish. Humanities destiny is to blow itself up or fade with time. Anything it does between now and then isn’t because of elite consensus it must be done but majority consensus not to kill the elites they outnumber mightily. Why NOT build explosive rockets since nothing matters? It’s not because Thiel & elites think it’s a good idea. They’re ideologues about their own importance.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    I think Peter Thiel has too much time on his hands.
  - mdonahoe 7y ago
    I didn't think much of it. It seemed like yet another take on on his usual "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Which he bemoans as bad government or something, but I suspect is a consequence of software eating the world.
  - Yaa101 7y ago
    It is a distraction, Peter Thiel is a very dangerous person to mankind, rather focus on the things he does behind our back.
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      See also: Peter Thiel's "Dark Enlightenment" The article itself is drivel.
thebear 7y ago
The discussion of sterility and sclerosis seems reasonable to me. On the subject of stagnation and repetition, I find that my perception is diametrically opposed to what the author of the book and Peter Thiel say. I am a baby boomer, and I am absolutely blown away by things like 3D printers and rocket boosters returning from space and being reused, not to mention the possibility of quantum computing. As far as the arts are concerned, I believe the difference between the olden days and today is that today, there is way more of everything rather than less. This causes an odd distortion of perception. In the 1960s, you could easily name a few progressive bands, musicians, movies, etc., because there were so few. Today, the stuff you can find on the Internet is vast, but there are no few big names to stand out. Or, more precisely, there are a few big names, but that's the repetitive stuff that the author laments. The new, creative, progressive stuff doesn't have those. Go on the Internet, you'll be surprised!
- eaenki 7y ago
  Quantum computing, like AGI, will be 10 years away, maybe a couple more centuries. 3D printers are pretty insignificant atm. Space x and Tesla are the exception.
skore 7y ago
Ouch, that "Subscribe today" banner should have its fonts either embedded on the page or rendered into paths. Without that, it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb
Traster 7y ago
On Stagnation, I think the argument is very weak. Compare 1970 to today and we don't have any invention better than running water. Sorry what? If you want to compare centuries go ahead- but I think it's almost inarguable that life has changed much more significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900. Information is basically now costless to store, communication with anyone on earth is practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on earth in a matter of days. The idea that we've stagnated just seems frankly absurd to me. Are all those achievements less important than running water? I don't know, running water probably saved more lives - but Alexander Fleming was hardly a slouch in the 1920s. If you want to only compare 1969 to now, I'd like to point out that there's a really obvious problem. We don't have 200 years of hindsight to say "Oh that invention completely changed the world". How are we feeling about Genome sequencing, how about the plethora of green energy generation technologies? How about the Electric Car? The Internet? I just feel like the stagnation assertion is ridiculous.
- honestoHeminway 7y ago
  It feels like that to the exponential expectations we had.
- eaenki 7y ago
  When only two guys were (mainly) responsible for (pushing) what you said, namely SJ and EM with the internet and the electric car+energy storage respectively, it’s telling. Besides it’s just three things. There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles.
  - mdonahoe 7y ago
    The excuse is that Society doesn't care that much about moving our meat sacks around 5x faster, when it can move minds around the planet instantly. Instead of building flying cars, we digitized ourselves.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    > There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles. Supersonic is noisy and probably has cost and safety concerns beyond conventional airliners. Physics and engineering have limited electric air travel. There are also those boring issues like the environment and distractions like poverty, healthcare, and warfare getting in the way too.
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/gjlhN https://archive.md/gjlhN
a_band 7y ago
"As for the world outside of MIT’s PR materials, it appears much the same as it was in 1969—just with faster computers and uglier cars." I this sentiment is actually right, especially when you realize that Thiel has made it clear that he isn't all that impressed with the advances of the last 30 years. We've seen innovation in software but not many breakthroughs in physics and atoms. For example, the predictions of the 50s and 60s about how we would live (flying cars, greater health, space travel, cleaner, futuristic cities) seemed to hope for those breakthroughs. The reality of where innovation happened is much more depressing: pocket computers, information superabundance, and porn. For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it.
- astine 7y ago
  "For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it." This shouldn't be that surprising when you think about the situation just a little bit. Antibiotics are important because they cover a wide variety of diseases that formerly were untreatable. This is the case because they all have the same cause: bacteria. Other classes of disease, such as cancer, aren't so simple. There isn't a single treatment that can reliably cure all forms of cancer and theoretically there really can't be. It's just a fundamentally harder problem. There's a lot a low hanging fruit in basic discoveries but then we hit a wall when we attempt to apply them to more difficult problems. Back in the 50's (I think) there was a fascination with the possibility of weather prediction. It seemed reasonable at the time that because the weather was ultimately a deterministic system we could predict it months in advance just by figuring out the physics and running the correct calculations. Then we discovered chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and we realized that weather prediction was a fundamentally much harder problem than we could have predicted. We simply can't ever measure the atmosphere accurately enough to accurately predict the weather more than a few weeks in advance and even then we have to take a probabilistic approach. There's a similar deal with fast planes as mentioned in the article. Back in the 60s and 70s all the big aerospace engineers wanted to be working on supersonic airliners like the Concord. Decades later, that effort seems to have been a waste of time. It turns out that the physics of supersonic flight present challenges and the economics of intercontinental travel don't really cover those challenges. The changes that have been made to airliners over the last few decades have been instead in terms of efficiency and safety. Even in the military sector, which can throw tons of money at pie-in-the-sky ideas has run into this. The most populous strategic bomber in the US Airforce is still the B-52 which was introduced in the mid 50s. We do have more advanced weapons, but we can't afford them, and we can't afford them precisely because of the changes that make them more advanced. If someone in the late 60s wouldn't believe that we'd not repeat the success of antibiotics or return to the moon, it would have been because of misconceptions about the nature of the problems involved in the 60s rather than because of some form of decadence that settled in after the fact.
TomMckenny 7y ago
Most likey we've done all the low hanging fruit: supersonic flight is categorically more difficult than subsonic yet is a diminishing return given that so much time is just spent preparing for the flight. And, Peter's opinion not withstanding, it is impossible to communicate faster than light which is where we are. But if we have become decadent, it hardly surprising in a society where opinion is give more weight than facts and people are not even willing to preserve their democracy.
triangleman 7y ago
Holy freaking irony, Batman. Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir, the company enabling the current industrial/surveillance complex that will surely prevent "sclerotic" institutions from being reformed? A gay man writing in a Catholic journal about the problem of low birth rates? WTF am I reading? Nonetheless he makes a few good points, but the irony burns!

Back to the Future

66 points by hhs 7y ago

mdonahoe 7y ago

Remember when Peter campaigned for Trump?

asguy 7y ago
We do,... now what did you think about the article?
- skore 7y ago
  Thiel actually lampshades this himself: > Warp drive is in fact hard to take seriously because its basic physics are so far beyond the furthest reaches of our knowledge as to debilitate would-be researchers—not to mention reasonable doubts about the friendliness of faraway foreign species. (Some of them, I assume, are good aliens.)
- rubsh99 7y ago
  Romanticized rubbish. Humanities destiny is to blow itself up or fade with time. Anything it does between now and then isn’t because of elite consensus it must be done but majority consensus not to kill the elites they outnumber mightily. Why NOT build explosive rockets since nothing matters? It’s not because Thiel & elites think it’s a good idea. They’re ideologues about their own importance.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  I think Peter Thiel has too much time on his hands.
- mdonahoe 7y ago
  I didn't think much of it. It seemed like yet another take on on his usual "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Which he bemoans as bad government or something, but I suspect is a consequence of software eating the world.
- Yaa101 7y ago
  It is a distraction, Peter Thiel is a very dangerous person to mankind, rather focus on the things he does behind our back.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    See also: Peter Thiel's "Dark Enlightenment" The article itself is drivel.

thebear 7y ago

The discussion of sterility and sclerosis seems reasonable to me. On the subject of stagnation and repetition, I find that my perception is diametrically opposed to what the author of the book and Peter Thiel say. I am a baby boomer, and I am absolutely blown away by things like 3D printers and rocket boosters returning from space and being reused, not to mention the possibility of quantum computing. As far as the arts are concerned, I believe the difference between the olden days and today is that today, there is way more of everything rather than less. This causes an odd distortion of perception. In the 1960s, you could easily name a few progressive bands, musicians, movies, etc., because there were so few. Today, the stuff you can find on the Internet is vast, but there are no few big names to stand out. Or, more precisely, there are a few big names, but that's the repetitive stuff that the author laments. The new, creative, progressive stuff doesn't have those. Go on the Internet, you'll be surprised!

eaenki 7y ago
Quantum computing, like AGI, will be 10 years away, maybe a couple more centuries. 3D printers are pretty insignificant atm. Space x and Tesla are the exception.

skore 7y ago

Ouch, that "Subscribe today" banner should have its fonts either embedded on the page or rendered into paths. Without that, it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb

Traster 7y ago

On Stagnation, I think the argument is very weak. Compare 1970 to today and we don't have any invention better than running water. Sorry what? If you want to compare centuries go ahead- but I think it's almost inarguable that life has changed much more significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900. Information is basically now costless to store, communication with anyone on earth is practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on earth in a matter of days. The idea that we've stagnated just seems frankly absurd to me. Are all those achievements less important than running water? I don't know, running water probably saved more lives - but Alexander Fleming was hardly a slouch in the 1920s. If you want to only compare 1969 to now, I'd like to point out that there's a really obvious problem. We don't have 200 years of hindsight to say "Oh that invention completely changed the world". How are we feeling about Genome sequencing, how about the plethora of green energy generation technologies? How about the Electric Car? The Internet? I just feel like the stagnation assertion is ridiculous.

honestoHeminway 7y ago
It feels like that to the exponential expectations we had.
eaenki 7y ago
When only two guys were (mainly) responsible for (pushing) what you said, namely SJ and EM with the internet and the electric car+energy storage respectively, it’s telling. Besides it’s just three things. There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles.
- mdonahoe 7y ago
  The excuse is that Society doesn't care that much about moving our meat sacks around 5x faster, when it can move minds around the planet instantly. Instead of building flying cars, we digitized ourselves.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles. Supersonic is noisy and probably has cost and safety concerns beyond conventional airliners. Physics and engineering have limited electric air travel. There are also those boring issues like the environment and distractions like poverty, healthcare, and warfare getting in the way too.

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/gjlhN https://archive.md/gjlhN

a_band 7y ago

"As for the world outside of MIT’s PR materials, it appears much the same as it was in 1969—just with faster computers and uglier cars." I this sentiment is actually right, especially when you realize that Thiel has made it clear that he isn't all that impressed with the advances of the last 30 years. We've seen innovation in software but not many breakthroughs in physics and atoms. For example, the predictions of the 50s and 60s about how we would live (flying cars, greater health, space travel, cleaner, futuristic cities) seemed to hope for those breakthroughs. The reality of where innovation happened is much more depressing: pocket computers, information superabundance, and porn. For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it.

astine 7y ago
"For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it." This shouldn't be that surprising when you think about the situation just a little bit. Antibiotics are important because they cover a wide variety of diseases that formerly were untreatable. This is the case because they all have the same cause: bacteria. Other classes of disease, such as cancer, aren't so simple. There isn't a single treatment that can reliably cure all forms of cancer and theoretically there really can't be. It's just a fundamentally harder problem. There's a lot a low hanging fruit in basic discoveries but then we hit a wall when we attempt to apply them to more difficult problems. Back in the 50's (I think) there was a fascination with the possibility of weather prediction. It seemed reasonable at the time that because the weather was ultimately a deterministic system we could predict it months in advance just by figuring out the physics and running the correct calculations. Then we discovered chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and we realized that weather prediction was a fundamentally much harder problem than we could have predicted. We simply can't ever measure the atmosphere accurately enough to accurately predict the weather more than a few weeks in advance and even then we have to take a probabilistic approach. There's a similar deal with fast planes as mentioned in the article. Back in the 60s and 70s all the big aerospace engineers wanted to be working on supersonic airliners like the Concord. Decades later, that effort seems to have been a waste of time. It turns out that the physics of supersonic flight present challenges and the economics of intercontinental travel don't really cover those challenges. The changes that have been made to airliners over the last few decades have been instead in terms of efficiency and safety. Even in the military sector, which can throw tons of money at pie-in-the-sky ideas has run into this. The most populous strategic bomber in the US Airforce is still the B-52 which was introduced in the mid 50s. We do have more advanced weapons, but we can't afford them, and we can't afford them precisely because of the changes that make them more advanced. If someone in the late 60s wouldn't believe that we'd not repeat the success of antibiotics or return to the moon, it would have been because of misconceptions about the nature of the problems involved in the 60s rather than because of some form of decadence that settled in after the fact.

TomMckenny 7y ago

Most likey we've done all the low hanging fruit: supersonic flight is categorically more difficult than subsonic yet is a diminishing return given that so much time is just spent preparing for the flight. And, Peter's opinion not withstanding, it is impossible to communicate faster than light which is where we are. But if we have become decadent, it hardly surprising in a society where opinion is give more weight than facts and people are not even willing to preserve their democracy.

triangleman 7y ago

Holy freaking irony, Batman. Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir, the company enabling the current industrial/surveillance complex that will surely prevent "sclerotic" institutions from being reformed? A gay man writing in a Catholic journal about the problem of low birth rates? WTF am I reading? Nonetheless he makes a few good points, but the irony burns!