Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation

It was rhetorical but he was still wrong - he seems to think science was taken more seriously at that time. It wasn't. Asr already pointed this out - but to add to it even before the "do nothing commission" was started the scientists wrote another letter to the President because he had taken no action on it at all after several months. Then he appointed a commission to do nothing for a good while longer. Then the bureaucracy got started on the org charts and Powerpoints. Er...you get the idea.

In June of 1905, when he submitted "The electrodynamics of moving bodies", he had a PhD in physics and had already published several papers in the same journal. He didn't hold a university post, but he very much a member in good standing of the physics community. I don't see why somebody in an analogous post today would have trouble publishing papers.

The lack of citations is interesting, but I think you're reading too much into it. It shows that scientific publication norms have changed since 1905, but it's not as though Einstein would have been unable to add the appropriate references if the journal had expected it. You might equally well say "the paper couldn't be published today because it's in German, not English".

[See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Academic_career ]

A lot of bubbles over many centuries, perhaps, but without a data series how can one say it's off? After all, we've hit 2 acknowledged bubbles in as many decades (notice that I don't say 'centuries' or 'half-centuries'), and there are more controversial recent ones (commodity bubble with oil or gold? 'Green' stocks? China?) which would push the count up even higher.

I think this is intentional.

I hadn't seen that interview before (link), thanks for the pointer. Yes, this does explain why Thiel's article reads like it's uncomfortably skirting around the issue.

The most recent big innovation in energy is fracking. Clearly this has experienced regulatory headwinds, and a pile of environmentalists are looking for rationalizations to stop it, but on the whole, looks to me like a reasonable rate of innovation in energy, which is in substantial part compensating for the exhaustion of hydrocarbon resources. Doubtless we could do better, but it is not obvious that to me that energy innovation is slower than would reasonably be expected in a mature field.

A good measure of innovation is new therapeutic molecular entities, because one can simply count them. By that measure, innovation in the west and Japan has slowed down drastically and alarmingly, though China and Taiwan are speeding up.

I observe ads by Singapore promising a more favorable regulatory environment for drug development. They don't have a drug research industry and are hoping for one. This suggests the existence of an unfavorable regulatory environment for drug development. It is clear that western development of new therapeutic molecular entities has slowed alarmingly.

Clearly, a proper justification for that claim would have to be given at enormous length, and it would have to involve all sorts of ideologically charged issues. But to try to put it in a nutshell, the government has been meddling in an ever increasing range of things, and this meddling is mostly guided by a mix of bureaucratic perverse incentives and straight-out ideological delusions, each operating in a frightful positive feedback loop with the other. (Mind you, this isn't a statement of some libertarian principle that government meddling is always bad, but purely a factual statement that destructive meddling has been increasing.) At the same time, even the basic and uncontroversial functions of government have been increasingly corrupted by these ever worsening perverse incentives and ideological delusions.

Or to put it another way, what we've been seeing for several generations is a move from government based on custom and precedent to an ideological bureaucratic state. The former was indeed bad in all sorts of ways, but at least it had a decent grip on reality in essential things, as long-standing customs and precedents usually do. The latter, however, is driven by ideology and bureaucratic incentives into constant and ever more severe clashes with reality.

Nobody engages the topic seriously besides perhaps a handful of bloggers on the internet. To talk about the topic intelligently requires rare traits. An extremely broad swath of knowledge about econ and history, and the ability to not be mind-killed by politics chief among them.

It is a ridiculous world we live in.

Everyone brings up the Internet. But the internet has not changed people's lives as significantly as railroads, telegraphs, plumbing, electricity, radio, automobiles, central heating, air conditioning, telephone, or television did. I don't mean it hasn't changed it as much as those things combined; I mean each one of those had more impact on daily life than did the internet.

Cowen argues that studies on what people are wiling to pay for the internet (if they had to) show that it can't be helping that much. It's true that the overall effect is hard to measure though.

I don't think they disagree on all that much

I mean about acceleration/deceleration of technological change.

they're just emphasizing different trends.

That might be one way of putting it.

"SF don't inspire hope anymore" does not imply "SF has collapsed as a literary genre"; I'm not aware of "inspiring hope" being a factor in judging the existence of a literary genre.

However, I think a relevant data point in favor of Thiel's claim is this: where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? That is, a work of hard-core sci-fi (10 on the "Mohs scale" of sci-fi) that's achieved mainstream success and entered the broader culture.

Does it matter whether there is hope or not in the stories? We are less hopeful about this precisely because things haven't been nearly as impressive in the last fifty years as we thought they would be. A story set fifty years in the future with big Mars and Moon colones won't look hopeful, it will look at best overly optimistic, and possibly naive.

Moreover, this may actually be a signal that the genre has reached real maturity, that it isn't just gee-whiz look at that stories.

The claim that the genre has collapsed simply isn't born out when one looks at how popular Greg Egan, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Cory Doctorow are among others. The genre is in fact much more successful now. Fifty years ago, book shops didn't have separate sections for science fiction. Now they have large sections. Science fiction also is one of the most popular genres judging by the sales of used books. Science fiction is also far more accepted as a literary genre by academia, to the point where there's a separate area of study devoted to it. I have to wonder how much of what you are seeing is just the decline in average quality that occurs when a small thing becomes popular.

Just because the genre conventions have changed from your preferred form doesn't mean that the genre has collapsed. This sounds a bit akin to fans who when something in their favorite franchise changes become convinced that it has been Ruined Forever. (Not linking to TVTropes for obvious reasons).

A great proportion of science fiction has always been predictions that science will kill us all. Are the cynics stealing market share from the doomsayers, or from the hopeful?

Curiously, what are their names?

Hmm, that essay is interesting. But it has clear problems. One part that jumped out at me:

But to grasp just how far our current mindset is from being able to attempt innovation on such a scale, consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks [ETs]. Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on re-entry.

At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible Shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the Shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Viewed as a parable, it has much to tell us about the difficulties of innovating in other spheres.

The idea here is interesting. But by the time the shuttle was already being designed there was some understanding of the dangers of space debris (although Kessler's seminal work would not have been done for a few years). The problem of having very large objects in near optimal orbits would have been obvious. And since the shuttle flew at a fairly low orbit, one would actually have these deorbit and renter soon after launch anyways without giving them a massive boost. Spent fuel containers are also not optimal for later storage. They don't have the same characteristics that one generally wants unless one modifies them massively. So even if one could boost them even higher for free, it isn't at all clear you'd want them for construction without massive amounts of changes. Sure it might have been nice to have it as an option, but the main reason the shuttle didn't succeed was that it had so many different jobs it had to do. For example, the military wanted it to be able to launch into a polar orbit and come back down after a single orbit.

This also doesn't seem to appreciate at the time how incredibly innovative an actually reusable space plane was. It was perfectly reasonable in 1970 for this to be innovative. The fact that all the shuttle replacement proposals are basically copies of the shuttle or minor variants seems to be a much stronger argument that there's a real problem.

This seems like an interesting idea but it exaggerates things. First of all, I think that everyone thought that there was a large amount of overlap between research being done in the both the US and the USSR (look at the space programs for example). Second, the USSR did do a lot of very good research on their own (look for example how many Nobel and Fields medal they won as a very rough metric).

A quick and dirty estimation: the US shows 331 Nobel Prizes, France shows 58, Germany shows 102; Russia shows 27. Russia is also notably larger than either France or Germany, which it trails badly, and would have been the great majority of people in the Soviet Union.

This table of Fields medal winners shows only 3 for the USSR and 18 for the USA over the period in which the Soviet Union existed.

I think that this belief isn't misplaced. The cost and tech issues seem to be more relevant. Being Daniel Boone in space is really expensive.

The locus here is not "being" but "playing"; "playing Daniel Boone in space" conveys the notion of an unserious, wasteful endeavor. It turns out that people are not actually all that eager to waste those resources for the "thrill of adventure" or "to be pioneers" or the like; yet much of the popular science and science fiction seems to assume this motive, possibly because it was first vigorously marketed to young males at a time when Westerns were a dominant narrative mode.

Asimov wrote an essay for the World Book Encyclopedia in which he laid out what he thought was going to happen.

Asimov was, however, a biochemist and a writer. He wasn't an aerospace engineer or an important physicist; he certainly wasn't someone in a position or with expertise to actually know the feasibility of what he was discussing. In most respects, he was more a member of the media than a member of the sciences; he is certainly more remembered that way, no?

I can't supply evidence in the space available! These are complicated topics that cannot be explained or justified briefly. It's merely an invitation for people to consider an alternative, but coherent viewpoint (hence all the links). That is why I did not claim these analyses to be true but merely described them as Mencius Moldbug's opinion.

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LW uses Markdown syntax, so, there is another syntax for writing links:

[Markdown syntax](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax)