I'm curious how he expects people to study "how to cure aging" without first becoming "knowledgeable in biology". Scientific breakthroughs are rarely made by people who aren't familiar with the existing state of the science they work in ("past knowledge").

There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that past knowledge (Einstein spent about 10 years studying physics in a sort of unofficial study group before he set off in his own radically new direction). But surely you have to pick up at least the equivalent of an undergrad science degree worth of past knowledge somehow. Thiel sounds sort of like a messianic-futurist religious figure if he really thinks otherwise.

It's possible it'll work anyway, because presumably his grants don't actually require people who receive them to refrain from studying past knowledge. ;-)

edit: It looks like that quote is actually from William Andregg, not Peter Thiel. Andregg doesn't seem to take it too literally, though, because his own company's job openings have pretty detailed past-knowledge requirements ("The chemist should have a deep theoretical as well as practical familiarity with essential analytical techniques such as NMR, LCMS, elemental analysis, UV-Vis, and others. An understanding of surface chemistry/analysis, and experience working with nucleic acids in monomer, oligo, long, single stranded, and double stranded forms would also be valuable.").

> There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that past knowledge

And the amount of damage done by universities is now so severe that I've switched from telling people "Don't try following in my footsteps" to telling them "Okay, maybe you should get the hell out of school."

I guess I haven't found much outright damage myself, though maybe I got lucky. Whether it was the best or most cost-effective way to learn stuff (not counting the employability value of the degree) is another question, but my comp. sci. degree imo was a reasonably useful way of learning some CS basics. Some of the choice of topics was arbitrary and would've been different at another school, but it's all stuff I should eventually have learned anyway.

That's interesting. What do you recommend they do instead? [I know you're an autodidact, and so am I - apparently you're a lot better at it than I am though]

What if someone has a good mentor in a field that helps them along to way in selecting what to study? For the most part someone who isn't a graduate should be able to access the same papers as people doing post grad, given enough motivation and a bit of guidance I don't see why they couldn't get to the top for their field.

It's romantic to imagine you can make breakthroughs without a solid grounding, so the image is promoted, and occasionally you get people like this with a handle on a lot of money who subscribe to the image.