Interestingly, funding fundamental research is one of the key areas where Peter Thiel's views diverge from the majority of libertarians. He's said a fair amoun

Interestingly, funding fundamental research is one of the key areas where Peter Thiel's views diverge from the majority of libertarians. He's said a fair amount on the necessity of funding fundamental research. He has significant complaints about the volume of researchers, but that's quite different from what you've suggested. My view of his positions would be that he favours earlier aggressive weeding leading to smaller graduate programs, fewer postdocs, fewer tenure track positions and potentially fewer tenure positions, but the positions that exist getting higher per capita funding to do quality work on important problems. He's likely close to assuming deterministic-optimism if you believe the best research is far closer to random we're probably currently funding in a fairly effective way. However, if you believe there are 10x scientists in the way there are 10X programmers, and also believe that 10X scientist strongly correlates with being successful in other fields, then we're probably funding in a system that strongly encourages those 10x scientists to work outside academia and potentially outside of science entirely. We probably agree a lot on political philosophy: I believe markets are the best mechanism for solving many problems, but there are many problems they suck at and the purpose of government is to intervene in those problems. Fundamental research falls into one of the major categories of problems markets are poor at solving: high value creation with zero-to-little value capture results in markets being unable to create the high value. Other interesting categories include severe negative externalities, and prisoners-dilemma type issues where we often need incentives to break getting stuck near individual 'optima' that lead to societal suboptimal solutions.