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Co-Founder of PayPal Peter Thiel: Society Is Hostile To Science and Technology
dcblogs writes Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, billionaire investor and author, says "we live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in a period where people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it. The easiest way to see "how hostile our society is to technology" is to look at Hollywood. Movies "all show technology that doesn't work, that ... kills people, that it is bad for the world," said Thiel. He argues that corporations and the U.S. government are failing at complex planning.
The man simply doesn't understand the need for conflict in a plot. If you have a movie about a super computer, there needs to be something to work against. The computer takes over or fails spectacularly. This in no way indicates that this is society's view of computers.
They dismiss us as geeks - not least to cover their own failure to master the subject.
Large parts of the nerd and geek culture can be surprisingly anti-science too though. As you say, it is inevitable that most people will not master fields, even those of interest, and one can't physically master them all. But when you take someone who has an ego, possibly for good reason because they do have above average knowledge in some areas, and given them a superficial view of something, they can really run with it at times. Just look at some of the more difficult science topics that end of on Slashdot from time to time, and you can find arguments between people with professional experience and those without.
In my experience doing science outreach, and even just answering questions about my research when someone asks after someone asked what my job is, the geeky and nerdy types can be as bad or worse than general public. Some general public will just have no interest, others have interest but no background and will try to ask questions, and occasionally a rare person or two will repeat some talking point they've misheard to say they think such research is pointless (whereas even those with political disagreements will acknowledge the research could be useful, just disagree on who should pay for it). But when you get to those with enough knowledge to be dangerous, many will stop asking questions and get dismissive. "Oh, what a waste of time, you could just do X instead of trying Y," ignoring that X was tried 50 years ago and shown not to work. Or "I heard of experiment Z, it proved W," when they misremember and I've read and can pull up the actual paper from the research, "But I saw it online/on a documentary/from some guy, why would you or that paper know any better?"
Even those without attitude issues seem to be pretty narrow in interests. I knew someone once, who had read dozens of popsci books on quantum mechanics, was still capable of doing calculus quite well, but never wanted to try looking into any actual textbooks or more serious material on the topic (even trade magazine pieces that are much less dry than a textbook). Laziness and/or fickleness of people's interest applies to everyone to some degree.
Obviously, most of society loves those technologies that make their lives easier.
What people don't love is anything that requires of them a higher level of mental effort. Things like safe password management, for example. Similarly, if being of above-average intelligence means you can more greatly utilize available technological resources to give yourself greater success, then everyone really hates that, and hates you while they are at it. For example, they don't want to have to learn to code, because that's hard. So they dislike the fact that they might have to learn to code (or maybe master Excel or similar) in order to pull the kind of income you can pull.
Lastly, they hate having their favorite myths challenged by scientific progress, especially when understanding why the science behind whatever it is they don't like is actually solid requires them to do a lot of study and hard-thinking (like understanding the philosophical foundation of, and practical necessities that drive, the expensive details of the scientific method (such as the need for control groups and Large Hadron Colliders)). THAT is way too much work, and the people who do this are way too arrogant, and so the things they create will necessarily doom us all, so we would be better off without the lot of it.
The problem with corporate taxation is that it's based on profit, not income. Personal tax is always income based - imagine if you were only taxed on the income you didn't manage to spend each year! If corporate tax was based on income, it would be commensurable (and would presumably also be a much lower rate). Corporate INCOME tax would also make all these tax dodges irrelevant, since they work only because companies manipulate their profit.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s science culture was popular in the US. People looked forward to new discoveries and gadgets and careers in science. Big industry did need to be restrained by environmentalists and that did mostly work in the US. Then young people got seduced by higher paying jobs in finance, an industry that doesnt really create much else than money.
When I travel in China I see the pro-science and technology attitudes of my youth. It i s refreshing.