Science Fun & Dings

“To fund or not to fund, that is the question Horatio.”
— Mlet by William Stringspeare.

Came across a “science” channel with a new idea for fundamental physics. I like to give such folks a chance. It was not nearly crazy enough, sorry to say.

But the guys introduction — a rant against String Theory — was worth a comment.

@21:0 nah, the heart of the problem is not extra dimensions — the experiments to probe that hypothesis do not exist, but they might one day. The core problem is “capitalism” writ large, and neoliberalism (gutting of public good funding) in particular and long standing false paradigms concerning macroeconomics. Hint: public science and services are not “tax payer funded”. No one can get the state currency to pay a dime in tax until the government first lends or spends. Governments do not spend using “tax payer dollars” — there is no such thing, all currency since antiquity is the IOU of the authority (church, state, temple, palace, etc). So public funding is the exact opposite of what the “tax payer” rhetoric suggests.

I continued:

All good science begins with a wisdom motive, and the ongoing need of worker-scientists to eat to survive, the profit motive then takes over and then enshittification ensues, unless the idea has a competitor. So the core problem is String/M theory has few credible competitors. That is saying something, because String Theory itself is rubbish, as you say. It is the least bad rubbish. If we want serious competitors we need to give other thinkers a salary to do the work.

But science is not in the “let’s fund the right project” business. By definition you cannot know which ideas are going to pan out. So inherently good science is not a capitalist enterprise, it can never be pure capitalist, except by sheer good luck. So funding agencies need to have waaaay more open minds.The key is public finance. The government cannot run out of its own IOU (aka. tax credit, aka. “dollars”), so can always pay the wage for any science nerd, in perpetuity. The cost to the private sector is the real cost of real resources, mainly the labour of that science nerd is no longer available in the private sector, otherwise her wage is bid up. But the currency issuer (government) can always outbid the private sector, whether they should or not is the question (the out-bidding is defined as a price pressure, it can become inflationary if it occurs across a wide spectrum of economic sectors without an increase in currency withdrawal = saving or tax returns)

The State wishes to claim real resources, not its own I.O.U. (aka. “the money”). Thus, the State needs us to need their otherwise worthless currency. How do they force us to need it? They impose tax liabilities. (And most people running governments have no clue this is what they are doing. How does that compare to the brain rot of extra space dimensions?!!!) The tax return is a redemption operation, not a funding operation. Once you understand this, you realize leaving good scientists unemployed is a simple (tragic) policy mistake. The government is the source of all unemployment (defined as people seeking to exchange their goods or labour for the tax credit). Why do governments needlessly leave massive numbers of people unemployed, typically 6% to 10% of the able workforce, and 20% to 40% (in some countries) drastically underemployed? It is a banal evil — the governments do not understand the purpose of their own monetary system. It is a massive waste of human lives, and the real cost of lost output from unemployment in a decade today exceeds the real costs of all wars in all human history. That is how much human productivity has advanced. Think about that! It is a huge f-ing problem that makes String Theory cliques and groupthink dwarf into insignificance by comparison.