Weaponized crackpottery and the influence of the Intellectual Dark Web

Professor Dave notes in his latest video that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is parroting Peter Thiel's talking points about the alleged slow-down of scientific advancement, and speculates that Hossenfelder is on the Thiel payroll. Something I've been wondering about for years now.

Thiel is of course known for funding Trump. It's very likely he and his network are behind the Trump administration's attacks on science and academia.

The fact that Hossenfelder has decided to support infamous crackpot and Thiel employee Eric Weinstein - often given credit, if you can call it that, for coining the name "Intellectual Dark Web" - is something she would be more likely to do if she, too, was on the Thiel payroll. 

Although I suppose it's possible she decided to torch her science career out of sheer stupidity. 

I recorded Peter Thiel giving a speech at Stanford in 2022 - and created a transcript - and in his stream-of-consciousness babble, he explains his paranoid belief that there is a nefarious influence preventing scientific advancement, which boils down to, basically, hippies, claiming they were influenced by Charles Manson (my highlighted emphasis):

But but if I had if I had to sort of give a single again steelman idea. The best argument for why, why this has been so slow for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously. Is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know very dystopian very destructive turn in the um, in the in the 20th century and there are you know it, it is, it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist enlightenment age, where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way, all the time. You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component.

Thiel is one of the richest men in the world and has funded race pseudoscience garbage heap Quillette, the main publication of the Intellectual Dark Web. 

You can blame at least some of the insanity of our current political situation on the malign influence of crackpot plutocrats like Thiel.

Physicist Angela Collier explains why the claim that science, or at least physics, has slowed down is bullshit in this video. At minute 0:31, Collier makes a passing reference to Hossenfelder's article Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years.

And on top of Thiel's wacky talking points, propagated thanks to money or stupidity by the likes of Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder, there's the whole TESCREAL crackpottery. But that's a post for another day. But for now, here is a good intro - Peter Thiel's name is dropped at minute 4:25.