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This is something I never understand when this discussion comes up. Why think Thiel is right about science not living up to its potential? Peter Thiel knows better than the best chemists/economists/statisticians/physicists/etc what kind of world-changing discoveries they could be making but aren't? Why think this?
Peter Thiel is pretty smart, he topped a maths competition in California, made a couple of multi billion-dollar companies in the STEM sector. Who better to talk about the innovation/science process than a man who did it personally?
'If you're so smart then why aren't you rich' carries a certain weight to it. If those chemists/statisticians/physicists and especially economists were so smart, why don't they have nine-digit net worth? Likewise with Musk, he clearly knows things others don't. Regardless of whether he's right about other matters, he clearly knows how to innovate and make things.
Wait a minute. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Peter Thiel founded or helped found a number of successful companies, yes. How did this advance the frontier of our understanding of the world? What original research has Thiel done to contribute to our body of scientific knowledge?
I also don't see how his winning a maths competition is relevant. You could almost certainly take the best mathematician alive today ask them a bunch of questions about cutting edge research in, say, chemistry and they would not know the answers. Raw G is no substitute for domain specific knowledge, which as best I can tell Thiel lacks regarding the fields he critiques.
Surely the obvious answer is because smart people can want to do things with their intellect other than maximize their wealth. In general, looking at history, the smartest minds have not been the richest. People like John Nash or Ronald Fisher or Srinivasa Ramanujan did not end up particularly wealthy by the standards of what were possible in their time, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that richer people were smarter.
Science is totally worthless without implementation. Who cares about whether we understand the world in and of itself, what matters is real capabilities. If prayer were more useful than maths in making things happen, we would be praying rather than calculating. Thiel implements, he uses science to make things happen. Making things happen is what we care about, that's why they get the big bucks.
Not all rich people are smart but rich people who start highly successful science-based companies are reasonable sources on discussing the transformative effects of science. They've been there, they've tried transforming science into outcomes and succeeded (which is more than many scientists can say). Maybe Thiel doesn't know so much about quantum chronodynamics, though I expect he's smart enough to learn. But what he does know is what he's talking about. He's not saying 'X-rays scatter according to Thetaman's law', he's not making a technical claim but an implementation claim about cultures of organizations, human resource management, academia, innovation as a broad process.
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Most very smart people aren’t rich, and most very rich people aren’t very smart, even though they’re certainly smarter than average. Great wealth is a product in many cases of charisma and luck as well as (usually) intelligence.
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I think a lot of people have a misconception that science is about making big discoveries, when it's mostly incremental and the big discovery follows lots of uncredited work.
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