In terms of funding, I don't think increasing the amount of funding is going to be more than a short-term fix. Seems to me that there's a lot of induced demand: Add more money and it's quickly gobbled up.

While I don't know all the details, it seems to me that we simply have far too many PhD students. I have a PhD, and I feel that a lot of well-intentioned people pushed me towards that before I was wise enough to understand the implications. The cynic in me thinks that some of them were more concerned with advancing their own careers than helping me out, as they need students to advance their careers.

Too much science funding goes towards PhD students in my view. We need to reduce the amount going towards PhD students and increase the amount going towards more permanent research positions. Yes, the total headcount for researchers likely would decrease as PhD students are cheaper than experienced researchers, but I think overall scientific productivity would improve as experience matters, and we'd stop disappointing people who want jobs in science before they waste too much time on it.

I wrote a bit about this earlier today, by coincidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141107

Even beyond formal credentials scientific progress can primarily only be made by relatively fewer workers then ever holding their position or inching upstream against an increasing current flowing downstream.

I think what you will find is that the rewards for STEM creatives who are in position for their abilities to be leveraged by mass media, will always be greater than those without it.

Microsoft started selling CD's as fast as Michael Jackson but for 10X the price.

DOS had already been pulling people away from natural science since the '80's.

Apple mass-marketed pop music to sell hardware.

Google started as an anti-advertising utility but reversed stance to convert a huge user base into a mass market.

Amazon was all about a mass market to begin with.

Facebook is what the National Enquirer would be like if they had gotten the idea to scale an internet concept and had that kind of capital to strategically deploy earlier.

Mass media has such a major component consisting of fiction this is an attraction plain natural science does not possess. Scientific research has such a focus on pure reality that mainstream interest just can not be maintained continuously, as so much relatively unexciting time must pass before progress finally pushes one little bit of reality to actually become better than fiction.

But that's where it starts to get good.

So pretty far right and extremely (in the literal sense) libertarian.

EDIT: anachro->anarcho

Which I interpretted to mean something like Aristotelian philosopher-king style governance. A fairly obvious logical conclusion when one's starting assumption that people (the polis) are fundamentally stupid and corrupt. By the standards of the self annointed philosopher-king, of course.

This is an entirely parallel subject. The monopoly on violence (which is just a concept in the theory of state, not a uniquely libertarian concept) doesn't imply a hawkish foreign policy outlook. Put another way: the libertarian perspective (even the minarchist variants) don't entail the kind of aggression that Thiel publicly advocates.

Being a hawk on China (e.g., extolling the US MIC to take a more aggressive stance in territorial disputes and information warfare) is a very conservative, not libertarian, position.

Notwithstanding Thiel isn't and anarcho-capitalist, he seems in practice to be almost a neoconservative. He describes himself as a "conservative libertarian", but has wrapped himself up in the war state and the surveillance industry, both of which are HIGHLY at odds with any kind of libertarianism. Thiel is much more like Liz Cheney than say Ron Paul.

Are you sure about that? I mean, I believe they don't explicitly argue for it. But the ones I've come across seem to be practically in favor of the sort of wealth concentration and freedom of the rich to do as they please that they seem to be effectively in favor of strong social hierarchy.

In which case, it sounds like they're perfectly ok with authority and hierarchy as long as they see it as "fairly" achieved via amassing wealth in ways that they deem moral, yes?

I'd certainly agree that's a weakness, in that it really seems to undercut the "anarcho" portion.

I mean, anarchy is about removing the central state first and foremost. The economics bit is where these folks differ from the traditional anarchists.