A libertarian perspective on science funding

What a bizarre Twitter conversation. I have stirred up the Aubrey de Grey cultists who have been arguing at me that de Grey and his SENS foundation are doing great work and must be supported. When I ask why, there’s one point they constantly bring up: he recently got $25 million dollars of funding! Therefore, it must be worthy work.

If he’d received funding from NIH, then yeah, I’d be predisposed to suspect that there must be some core ideas that survived peer review by qualified scientists (peer review is not perfect, I hasten to add…it’s just better than no peer review). However, that $25 million came from some cryptocurrency donations called “Pulse Chain Airdrop, whatever that is, not scientific review, and all of the funding is coming from wealthy donors who have no scientific qualifications at all. So they’re trying to tell me that it is an unmitigated good that billionaires are supporting science — my concern is that this is about billionaires dictating what science gets done.

And then, this jaw-dropping statement:

As long as the scientists being paid to do the research are capable and knowledgeable, the scientific literacy of the funders themselves are pretty irrelevant.

Also realistically, the funders likely do understand the research on a basic level, otherwise, why would they find it?

Two points:

Scientists aren’t employees being paid to achieve a specific goal by a wealthy patron. This is a disastrous approach to funding science, especially since they admit that the scientific literacy of the people holding the purse strings is irrelevant. Right now science funding is weakly isolated from the ignorant with power; congress gives a block of money to scientific institutions that then determine by peer review how it is disbursed. Relying on authoritarian rich people to decide what science is worth pursuing is a huge step backwards.

I doubt the funders actually understand the research. Why would they fund it? Because some charismatic gomer promises them that their money will work to help them live forever. They don’t know how, but the con artists are good at babbling sciencey words. It is such a naive assumption that rich people only spend money on things they understand at a “basic level”, especially when you realize that Jeff Bezos is rumored to own a $400 million dollar yacht (at least, someone owns that beast). $25 million is a crumb, and for that, we want to allow billionaires to dictate what science should be done?

I think I spy a libertarian non-scientist who thinks expertise is irrelevant.

It begins

Last night was a bad night — I’m feeling rather battered and my face is sore. Where did they insert that endoscope again? Oh, right, there were some minor problems with anesthesia so I got manhandled a bit while unconscious. I’m feeling it. Bottom half is doing great, but the top half, back and face, were run through a mangler. The aches are already easing up, though, so I’m not worried about it.

I was also advised to go gently on meals, despite being ravenous. I was a good boy yesterday, so it was nothing but soup and toast. There are still strange rumblings and squelchy noises coming out of my guts, so that was a wise decision, but today I surrendered to my hunger and started the day with a mushroom omelette and giant cup of coffee. That should help.

Feeling better already, except…the university has begun its ominous slouch towards opening. Yesterday was the official opening convocation, which I missed for obvious reasons, but today begins with a two hour division meeting (we’re going to talk about budgets and assessment and other such minutiæ ; strangely, there is nothing on the agenda about the pandemic challenges we have to face), followed by a one hour biology discipline meeting, followed by me having to spend some time finishing the genetics lab cleanup so the next lab class can move in for the Fall.

Then I’d better get those class syllabi out to the students. I meet with my new advisees on Monday. They better be wearing masks!

So far, it looks like this school year is starting with an assumption of total normalcy, while ominous horror-movie music has begun rising in my head, and I just know we’re going to reach a crescendo with screeching violins next month. No way am I going to split up and go into the basement in the coming month.

I yet live

Colonoscopy done. All is normal. Feeling woozy from the propofol, may just take a nap.

Except there is one emergent side effect. The nurse warned me afterwards that there’d been one small hiccup: I stopped breathing.I guess that happens with propofol, and that’s one reason there’s an anesthesiologist present at all times. He got my breathing restarted, but had to clear my airways, and that involved grabbing my lower jaw firmly at the base and strongly pulling upwards. I was in no real danger, but the nurse cautioned me that I might be feeling some aches.

Boy, was she right. My jaw and upper back are just wrecked right now, and I’m ruined for even the easy work of sitting at the computer for a while. I think I’m going to have to lie down for a while.

But thanks, Anesthesiologist Jacob, I think I’d prefer some temporary joint aches over not breathing for an hour.

T. Ryan Gregory predicts the future!

This is my prediction, too. I have no confidence that we’ll make it through the semester without some radical revision in our plans.

I’ll testify to the burnout problem personally — the stress and uncertainty take their toll. Also, the declining confidence in university administrations is real.

Gregory, by the way, has announced that he’s on the market for a new position already, so if you’re at a university that isn’t saddled with an out-of-touch, blithering administration (are there such things) you might be able to snap him up.

Also, Terry Pratchett wasn’t a bigot

I was going to post this video, but Charly beat me to it. The YouTuber Shaun posted an excellent discussion of the recent gender critical freakout: they tried to claim that Terry Pratchett would have favored their intolerant anti-trans bullshit. Neil Gaiman, Pratchett’s coauthor, responded; Pratchett’s own daughter, Rhianna, was horrified that anyone would abuse his memory in that way. I agree. How anyone could read Pratchett’s work and think he wasn’t completely accepting of trans folk is a mystery, unless it’s just that they never read his books at all.

Shaun (and Charly) recommend his book Monstrous Regiment as far more illustrative of his views — it’s about a regiment of diverse women who all enlisted in the military by pretending to be men. You can’t find a clearer example of a refutation of a phony authorial interpretation. To be honest, I found it to be one of the weaker Discworld books…but it’s often because it gets rather heavy-handed in its dismissal of forced gender roles. It is not at all subtle, which makes it even more ridiculous that GC/TERFs would think Pratchett would take their side.

Colonoscopy prep day!

Good morning, everybody! It’s colonoscopy prep day, and I am so excited!

For you young’uns out there, this is a rite of passage you get to enjoy once you turn 50, or maybe earlier if you have risk factors. This is a process where a doctor invasively scrutinizes every inch of your colon to screen for cancer, and you get to do it every 5 years (or in my case, every 3 years because last time they found a few harmless polyps). So today is the day I get ready for an outpatient trip to the local hospital.

Everyone will tell you the prep is worse than the procedure, and it is. You have to completely empty your bowels so the doctor’s view isn’t impeded by, umm, shall we call them Deplorables? Today I’m purging the Deplorables.

First thing, I’m fasting. No solid foods at all today. I made some pineapple jello yesterday, and I get to have clear broth, but otherwise, it’s all drinking down fluids and nothing else. I do get to drink all the coffee I want, so I will.

I have to take 4 Dulcolax pills this morning, a stool softener.

At 3pm this afternoon, I get to fill up this jug with four liters of water, and start drinking it. I’m supposed to finish all four liters by 6pm. Chug, chug, chug!

It says “lemon flavor”. This is only sort of true, if your lemonade tastes more like watery mucus. I will cope. This is really the worst part of the worst day. Well, maybe the worst part — I do get to spend the rest of the evening expelling Deplorables.

Then, as of midnight, I go dry. No water, nothing, shall pass these lips, and prep day will have passed.

Tomorrow I go into the hospital at 8:15. I get to strip naked and put on one of those chic hospital gowns that opens at the back, and the nurse will stick a needle in my arm, and Dr Sam will walk in and tell me to lie on my side and bring my knees up to my chest, and then deliver the magic drugs and a veil of darkness will fall over the unspeakable events that ensue. He’s going to stick a tube up my butt with a small flashlight and a camera at the end, and also little snippy scissors so he can chop out anything he wants to take a closer look at.

By 10am I’ll be groggily putting my clothes back on and my wife will drive me home, where I’m told I’m supposed to be lazy all day. I can do that! I might also be hungry.

Why am I doing all this? Consider the payoff matrix. It’s the only rational thing to do.

I get a colonoscopy I don’t get a colonoscopy
I have cancer I catch it early! I have to get cancer treatments, but I have a better chance of not dying, and the treatments won’t be as debilitating as if I let the cancer grow. I have cancer, but I don’t know it. It grows until the unpleasant symptoms become noticeable and require more serious intervention. Or I die.
I don’t have cancer Yay! And I know it! Relax, resume my decadent lifestyle until the next colonoscopy. I’m OK! But do I know for sure? I do not. I might have to hold some reservations, rather than plunging into my life of careless hedonism.

As you can easily see, all the possible outcomes from the decision to get a colonoscopy are positive, while all the outcomes from shirking my responsibilities range from negligible concerns to dire, horrible consequences.

We even have graphic examples right here on Freethoughtblogs!

Caine’s Journey.

The Fight, ©Caine, all right reserved

Caine died of this terrible disease in 2018, after a long struggle.

Iris discovers a serious problem.

Fortunately, Iris is surviving, but read her account of her travails: no one wants to go through that. I don’t want to experience that.

So, yeah, get your butt checked regularly. It inconveniently wrecks a day, but that’s better than wrecking your life.

Ken Ham adds another flag

Answers in Genesis is fond of a peculiar metaphor: portraying secularism and Christianity as two castles in a bitter war. You can find lots of cartoons at their site illustrating this binary worldview, but the latest adds a new flag to the array of banners flying from “secularism”.

Yep, “Pedophilia” is new. These guys think that if you’re not Christian, you’re a pedophile…conveniently ignoring all the Christian preachers who’ve been exposed as sexual abusers. As summarized by William Trollinger:

One other thing about Ham’s fortress image. In Righting America at the Creation Museum Susan Trollinger and I argue that Ham and AiG and the Christian Right hold to a radical binary. In this binary the world is divided into two groups, Christian and Secular. Each group is identified with a set of linked terms that necessarily are the opposite of the other group’s set of linked terms.

So, according to this image, to be secular is to be a racist pedophile who supports the killing of babies and the disabled, and who suffers from gender confusion. To be Christian is to be “color-blind,” anti-pedophiliac, life-affirming, and very clear on the gender binary and one’s place within it.

What’s going on here? Do secularists have a reputation for raping babies or being racist? No, this is just propaganda. If you’re wondering where it came from, the answer is obvious.

Referring to the image displayed here, which Ken Ham has circulated via Twitter and Facebook, a friend asked if, by adding the “pedophilia” flag to the “secular worldview” fortress, Ham “is trying to appeal to QAnon” devotees?

It seems obvious that the answer is yes.

That site then links to an insane video filmed at Ken Ham’s Ark Park by a rambling QAnon devotee — it’s a maddening mess by a guy wandering around ranting at a camera, with the permission of AiG, blithering on about God wanting Trump to have two terms, etc. AiG has been suspiciously quiet about it all, not publicly speaking out for or against QAnon, while it’s clear where their sympathies and pocketbooks lie. It’s Q that has been demonizing Democrats, liberals, and anyone sane by accusing them of being pedophiles who drink the blood of children, and now AiG pops up and libels secular folk as pedophiles? It’s not hard to see who they’re catering to.