The key missing piece to Thiel's analysis of the design vs. statistics dichotomy is the fact that it's best to have both: a strong vision combined with a lot of

The key missing piece to Thiel's analysis of the design vs. statistics dichotomy is the fact that it's best to have both: a strong vision combined with a lot of low-risk experiments to shape your understanding of the best path to achieving that vision. From what I understand, Apple does exactly this: they do a lot of prototyping before settling on a product design, even though the broad strokes of what they're trying to build are clear from the get-go. I expect the future of product development to keep moving in this direction as prototyping becomes progressively less expensive. Speculating on history a bit: the transition from determinate to indeterminate beliefs happened because people figured out that a lot of strong proclamations about the future turned out to be very wrong. So the pendulum swung the other way for a while, and now we're finally starting to settle on an equilibrium between the two.