4 ms·

The dollar amount is not what matters. What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market, so those $47M are coming from people who (I presume) choose to

by lisper 5y ago

The dollar amount is not what matters. What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market, so those $47M are coming from people who (I presume) choose to buy sweet potatoes of their own free will, and so are manifestly professing their collective belief that they are getting $47B worth of value for their money. Particle physicists didn't raise the money for the LHC by selling a product on the open market, they raised by lying to politicians, who in turn extracted the money from taxpayers. If someone without societal privilege (like Anna Sorokin for example) had done that they would be put in jail. Instead the physicists got tenure despite having delivered essentially nothing of value. That is societal privilege.

kragen 5y ago
Didn't the LHC confirm the existence of the Higgs boson? That sounds pretty valuable to me. What lies are you talking about? Coca-Cola makes US$37 billion a year (almost five LHCs, thus 50 times the average annual budget during the LHC's construction) by making people obese with flavored sugar water. Some of this involves lying, but much of it is just emotional manipulation; vanishingly few of its customers receive anything of value. So far none of its executives have been imprisoned as a result. (Petronas Towers wasn't funded by voluntary contributions, either. Petronas has a state monopoly on oil and gas extraction.) I agree that it would be better to fund basic research like the LHC from voluntary contributions. (I think dominant assurance contracts are a promising attack on that problem, but I don't know if they will succeed.) But if you take traditional academia and taxation as a package deal, I think most people would prefer to live in a world with the 15 recent enormous contributions to society by traditional academia I listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875, including modern agriculture, solar energy, and Linux, than in a society without them and without taxation. These are public goods, and it's a well-known result in economics that markets underprovide public goods; the equilibrium result is that they almost don't provide them at all. Even within the realm of taxation, academic research is hardly the hot spot. Most countries spend almost no tax money on academia. Even in the US, whose federal budget is US$6600B, NIH gets US$42B (0.7%), Pell grants get US$35B (0.5%), NASA gets US$23B (0.5%), NSF gets US$8.3 billion (0.1%, which includes basically the entire particle physics budget), and DARPA gets US$3.4B (0.05%). If you wanted to reduce the US tax burden, most taxpayers wouldn't even notice if you reduced the federal budget by this 1.9%. The rest of the federal budget is literally fifty times as big.
- lisper 5y ago
  > What lies are you talking about? The claims about confirming or ruling out supersymmetry.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Well, so far all the results are consistent with supersymmetry, so in that sense it's provided confirmatory evidence. Are you saying that someone promised much stronger confirmatory or falsificatory evidence?
    - lisper 5y ago
      Any results are consistent with supersymmetry because supersymmetry is not a theory, it is a family of theories, entirely analogous to Ptolemaic epicycles. For any set of data you can contrive a supersymmetric theory that fits that data. But the claim that was made for the LHC was that it would either produce evidence in favor of a particular set of supersymmetric theories, or that supersymmetry would be considered falsified. Neither of those things has happened. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs particularly starting at the 6:20 mark (but the whole thing is well worth watching).
      - kragen 5y ago
        Thanks!
        lisper 5y ago
        You bet.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> The dollar amount is not what matters. Are we gonna be moving goalposts all day? First it was not the pay, you said it was how much inflience they have over society, and that influence was measured in a dollar amount. Now it's the 'lying' and 'collective belief'. What's next, the holy spirit graces them with better afterlife? > What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market.. choose to buy sweet potatoes of their own free will Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money? In the same post you are saying that privilidge isn't about money, but you are also implying that you have no free will without money? What about markets where no person ever bought anything of their own free will, all corporation to corporations markets? For example there is a market for planet destroying coal, for clothes and rare-earth minerals produced with slave labour, etc. Do those industries have more privilidge than academia does? Fine, let's compare it to something that isn't a market -> recommendations of the Doctors and the CDC, or the Catholic Church, or the spending on the road network, or the military. All of them have bigger budgets. There is no way that this logic works. This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilidge is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.
- kragen 5y ago
  > Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money? Yes, because your vote spent other people's money, not your own. > This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilege is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc. College graduates make more money for the same job, are more likely to get the job, and they die older. For college professors this is even more true, at least if we're talking about former professors going into industry in the first two cases. So clearly by your definition traditional academia does have significant privilege. Where I differ from Ron is that I think it's well-earned and not very large in absolute terms.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago

by lisper 5y ago

kragen 5y ago

Didn't the LHC confirm the existence of the Higgs boson? That sounds pretty valuable to me. What lies are you talking about? Coca-Cola makes US$37 billion a year (almost five LHCs, thus 50 times the average annual budget during the LHC's construction) by making people obese with flavored sugar water. Some of this involves lying, but much of it is just emotional manipulation; vanishingly few of its customers receive anything of value. So far none of its executives have been imprisoned as a result. (Petronas Towers wasn't funded by voluntary contributions, either. Petronas has a state monopoly on oil and gas extraction.) I agree that it would be better to fund basic research like the LHC from voluntary contributions. (I think dominant assurance contracts are a promising attack on that problem, but I don't know if they will succeed.) But if you take traditional academia and taxation as a package deal, I think most people would prefer to live in a world with the 15 recent enormous contributions to society by traditional academia I listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875, including modern agriculture, solar energy, and Linux, than in a society without them and without taxation. These are public goods, and it's a well-known result in economics that markets underprovide public goods; the equilibrium result is that they almost don't provide them at all. Even within the realm of taxation, academic research is hardly the hot spot. Most countries spend almost no tax money on academia. Even in the US, whose federal budget is US$6600B, NIH gets US$42B (0.7%), Pell grants get US$35B (0.5%), NASA gets US$23B (0.5%), NSF gets US$8.3 billion (0.1%, which includes basically the entire particle physics budget), and DARPA gets US$3.4B (0.05%). If you wanted to reduce the US tax burden, most taxpayers wouldn't even notice if you reduced the federal budget by this 1.9%. The rest of the federal budget is literally fifty times as big.

lisper 5y ago
> What lies are you talking about? The claims about confirming or ruling out supersymmetry.
- kragen 5y ago
  Well, so far all the results are consistent with supersymmetry, so in that sense it's provided confirmatory evidence. Are you saying that someone promised much stronger confirmatory or falsificatory evidence?
  - lisper 5y ago
    Any results are consistent with supersymmetry because supersymmetry is not a theory, it is a family of theories, entirely analogous to Ptolemaic epicycles. For any set of data you can contrive a supersymmetric theory that fits that data. But the claim that was made for the LHC was that it would either produce evidence in favor of a particular set of supersymmetric theories, or that supersymmetry would be considered falsified. Neither of those things has happened. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs particularly starting at the 6:20 mark (but the whole thing is well worth watching).
    - kragen 5y ago
      Thanks!
      - lisper 5y ago
        You bet.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

> The dollar amount is not what matters. Are we gonna be moving goalposts all day? First it was not the pay, you said it was how much inflience they have over society, and that influence was measured in a dollar amount. Now it's the 'lying' and 'collective belief'. What's next, the holy spirit graces them with better afterlife? > What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market.. choose to buy sweet potatoes of their own free will Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money? In the same post you are saying that privilidge isn't about money, but you are also implying that you have no free will without money? What about markets where no person ever bought anything of their own free will, all corporation to corporations markets? For example there is a market for planet destroying coal, for clothes and rare-earth minerals produced with slave labour, etc. Do those industries have more privilidge than academia does? Fine, let's compare it to something that isn't a market -> recommendations of the Doctors and the CDC, or the Catholic Church, or the spending on the road network, or the military. All of them have bigger budgets. There is no way that this logic works. This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilidge is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.

kragen 5y ago
> Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money? Yes, because your vote spent other people's money, not your own. > This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilege is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc. College graduates make more money for the same job, are more likely to get the job, and they die older. For college professors this is even more true, at least if we're talking about former professors going into industry in the first two cases. So clearly by your definition traditional academia does have significant privilege. Where I differ from Ron is that I think it's well-earned and not very large in absolute terms.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago