Peter Thiel's speech at Oxford Debating Union on technological stagnation, Nuclear weapons, COVID, Environment, Alignment, 'anti-anti anti-anti-classical liberalism', Bostrom, LW, etc.

There's also the Q&A session afterwards, which isn't nearly as interesting or provocative, but it does reflect what the average Oxford debating union member might be thinking. Or at least that's my understanding.

He does raise the interesting point that strong taboos are usually hiding something. 

Robert B. Laughlin, the controversial professor at Stanford, was his example. It seems to have been personal as one of his friends failed to receive a PhD under Laughlin due to the feuding around a very strong academic taboo being broken. 

The implication being Laughlin's students at the time were denied opportunities as revenge, as they were easier targets to take down than a Stanford professor who just won the Nobel prize in physics. 

If true, it's an understandable motivation to then hold a grudge or ponder about conspiracies behind other apparently inexplicable phenomena.

I guess in that sense it does boil down to an ideological fight. 

Can someone investigate their colleagues? Is it permissible to air suspicions openly? Is it acceptable to  claim other professors at the university are hucksters and fraudsters with just circumstantial evidence? 

But if your problem is that they do not teach enough science, or teach the science wrong, the solution is straightforward -- provide better lessons of science online. 

This relates to what Thiel said about fields that call themselves XY science. It's a tell, that this isn't really the right thing. Solving textbook problems isn't science. Science is 0 -> 1. Science is about doing experiments and learning something useful from them that was previously unknown.

The problem is not that children aren't taught enough science in school, it's that they usually aren't taught any. Most children leave school without having done a single experiment in which they learned something useful that was previously unknown.

maybe with some real-life incentives (the five best students each year win actual money), and kids will compete at becoming better scientists.

Science inherently has real-world incentives. If you learn something through your experiments, that is useful, that has real-world value. If there isn't any real-world value, that's a sign that it's not really science but just some game of pretending to do science.

Similarly, what can't we celebrate successful scientists? Dunno, why don't you organize a celebration for those who you think deserve it?

If Peter Thiel would organize a celebration for a scientist, you would get a bunch of journalists thinking about how to write negative articles about that event. That's not going to be a purely positive event for the celebrated scientist.

To borrow Thiel's analogies, the same could also be said by proponents of further developments in nuclear weapons or 'gain-of-function' research of viruses... which raises the interesting question of whether he intended his speech to be partially self-negating one level further in.