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It's very common to denounce the "digging ditches" fallacy as an absurd way for keynesianists to try to improve work market by offering useless jobs.

I think there is also some kind of useless intellectual work which is used in current bureaucracies and technocracies.

I saw once a movie which was quite subversive, and was trying to question the very basic fondations of our societies.  In a scene, several friends were talking about theirs jobs during a dinner.  One of them was criticized for its job of physician, and for the huge amount of money he was "earning".  At some point, he said something like :

"During our youth, we studied hard to gain our diplomas.  It's normal that we now get a reward for that."

This is a strange conception of economics.  It sounds that for him, a good salary is a right you earn once with some work, and that is perpetually yours after that.  As if intellectual superiority during youth could be a way to obtain a privilegde of being paid every day not for what has been done during this day, but for what was done a long time ago.

Knowledge is not a way to acquire the right not to comply to economic rules.  It is supposed to be a way to accomplish oneself, and hopefully to create wealth while doing so.

Sometimes it seems to me that intellectual elites think that there is just no way to earn one's life decently in a free market.  Therefore, they think they should organize a way to recognize each other by distinguishing smart young people, in order to give them the right to finance their way of life via taxation and thus by the use of public force.

Of course, this is absurd, because all this brain power is not used for what it is, but just as a way to obtain something that can very much be considered as a priviledge.  This is a waste of intellectual resource, but above all, a huge injustice.

PS.  Here in France, for instance, 56% of the GDP directly comes from state spending.   Some polls showed that 70% of young people would like to become a state employee.  And of course, but this is just an impression I've got, it seems to me that as in many countries in the world, the professions that are associated to social success are mostly those who are not related to economics reality (not complying to offer and demand, but to state subvention or direct funding) :  physicians, lawers, teachers and such.

Pphysicians' brainpower are wasted. They should be used for scientific research. Train a diagnostician nurse to do the day to day task.

Lawyers could be useful if they help defend you from evil dudes. However, some lawyers are connected with politicians who make laws for the lawyers to make money from.

Teachers with a "teaching degree" are the most useless kind of teachers. They don't apply the scientific method, look for constant feedback, and generally don't know much else unless they're a professor of some kind. Even so, professors are continuously distracted by the research process and getting grants for their research.

Well, it's mathmaticly impossible for everyone to have a 'secure' government job.  Protesting, striking and rioting is a result of the belief that the government is the primary source of wealth, and it is only by the greed of the elite that said wealth isn't distributed evenly.  There is an old saying in America (and I suspect elsewhere) "there is no such thing as a free lunch".  It means that, even if something is free to you, someone has to pay for it.  In the case of the French, the government gets the money to pay for public largesse from taxing it's own people.  It's a vicious circle, and the strikers are harming the lower classes for the 'right' of living off of the younger working classes for a difference of two years.

This is also why you will not see the same kinds of striking in the US, because once we are out in the streets it's going to be bloody. 

Remember, the French are nuts and prone to collective madness. Gald that they didn't have their own hitler figure. It would be really fricking bad and much worse than the German.

The French revolution is an example of French lunacy.  They even celebrate it! ;)

Well, we had Napoléon Bonaparte, if such a comparaison worths anything.

"useless intellectual work" is what takes us to the moon. Intellectuals need a thinking environment. It's philistine to believe otherwise.

Yeah great :/

Even if that was true, 100 scientists that accomplish great things can not be used as an excuse to pay 10,000 others (amongst them not all are scientists) who actually don't do anything for society.  Or at least, not at a fair price, since they use public force to finance their salary.

In science history, not all great minds were state employees.

Mi ne povas imagi kaŭzon kiu estas pli bonega ol tiu. Sciencistoj estas grava bezono por la estonta mundo. Sen scienco ni havus nenion.

Mi ne volas diri :  "scienco ne estas bona".  Tion mi ne pensas.  Neniel.

Scientistiuloj estas utilaj cxiam, kiam ili faras sciencon.  Sed se junuloj studas sciencon ne por sciencemo, nek por scienstistigxi, sed nur por akiri rajton je sociala dominaxjo, jen tio estas ne enda.



Se mi devus elekti inter scienco kaj libero, mi elektos liberon.   Sendube.

Eble. Studisto kiu studas por la diplomo kaj la mono, pli ofte studas temojn kiel inĝeniero, kemio kaj IT .ktp Tamen aliaj studas astronomion, matematikon kaj zoologio ne pro la mono. Tiuj laboroj ne havas grandan pagintaĵon. Ne ĝeneraligu!

Ankaŭ mi kontraŭiĝas sciencon por la komeroj. Scienco similas al arto. Sendube vojaĝo al la luno estas pli bone la aferon kiun homaro faris.

La demando estas :  cxu estas akceptinda, je uzi publikan forton prenante laboron de multaj homoj, nur por sendi kelkajn homojn al la lunon ?

Tion mi ne akceptas.

Quick translation for others :

Basically the question is whether or not you would accept someone to tell you :

" I am an officialy recognized scientist, and you're not.  Give me 10% of your savings now because I earned the right not to cope with economic reality.  If you don't agree I'll tell the police and they will take it by force. "


Also : this is not just about scientists.  A young person becomes a bureaucrat by learning by heart many silly and unfair rules.  His only merit as a bureaucrat is to be able to memorize all this crap.

Jes. Ni devas etendi trans al aliaj mundoj. Vojaĝoj al la Luno kondukas nin al Marso. Espere iam ni loĝos sur Marso :) Ni bezonas tion por nia viveco. Aŭ ni uzos tuta da resursoj kaj mankos se etendiĝos ni mem al la steloj.

Eble *vi* devas fari tion.  Sed vi ne povas forci aliajn ulojn je helpi vin je fari tion.  Mi ne kredas en la ebleco je vivi al Marso.

Voli vivi tie estas stulta.  Ni povas *iri* tien, sed neniu volas vivi tie.  La Luno pruvis tion :  ni iris tien, ni plantis flagon, kaj ni revenis.  De pli ol kvardek jaroj ni ne reiris tien.

Vivemi al la Luno estas same stulta ol vivemi al la supra parto de Everesto :  oni volas esti la unua ulo je iri tien, sed neniu volas vivi tie !!

Luno, kaj Marso, estas nenio, sed grandegaj dizertoj.  Neniu volas vivi en dizertoj.

Eble vi esperas oni povos terigi Marson.  Nu, terigu unue la terajn dizertojn, antauxe revi pri tio.

Vi ne pravas. Legu (aŭ vidu) Robert Zubrin, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-XKNK2Eja0
Luno ne estas viva planedo, tamen Marso povas vivteni homaron.

Ni ne revenis al Luno pro politikistoj, kiuj preferas spezi monon por militoj

Pardonu al mi, sed cxi tio, laux mi, estas nur teknocia propagando.  Mi ne zorgas pri la ebleco je vivi en Marso.


Oni povas kredi aux revi pri tio.  Sed ONI NE DEVAS UZI PUBLIKAN FORTON POR FINANCI TION !!!

Viaj revagxoj estas viaj.   Gardu ilin por vi.

Will you guys please start talking in English?  ???

Yeah, at least when I go to the other language forums chrome can detect and translate. I'd have to do it manually here, and that's a lot of work.

But it is really cute that you guys can talk in code like that  :)

Basically genjix is talking about how important it is for human kind to explore solar system.  I'm telling him that it is just some technocratic propaganda, and it should not be founded using taxation.

I also told him that the moon and Mars are nothing but giant desertic places.  And nobody wants to live in a desertic land.

Going to Mars and trying to live there is about as weird as going to the south pole and establishing a permanent camp there.

I suggest trying to build a dyson sphere that absorb the entire energy of the sun instead. With the dyson sphere, we'll build more and more desirable space to live using the entire resources of the solar system.

So we'll have to master interstellar travel because we don't have enough matter in our own solar system to build a dyson sphere.

Should I bother googling "Dyson Sphere" ?  Or can I just ignore that ?

Or parallel universe travel! Imagine the possibility of using exotic matters to construct our dyson sphere!

I assure you it's not propaganda- it's quite possible given our current technology. Mars Direct would place the first habitating humans on Mars for the cost of $55 billion over 10 years. NASA's current budget is $13 billion and luckily they've now set Mars by mid 2030 in their scope.

Unlike the Moon, Mars has an atmosphere which you use to create rocket fuel and oxygen, water, minerals for plastics and metals, earth-like day of 24 hours and 0 deg celsius at the tropics (higher deep in canyons!). It's truly the next step and well within our grasp.

$10 billion / year is a drop in the ocean compared to the annual war budget of $650 billion (plain disgusting), so it's sad to see you attack science that's helping us spread forth to other worlds and expanding out as a race. Stay on Earth and our resources will run dry. We attack our neighbours for what limited resources there are because we will see them as competitors for survival- a rascist world compared to the resource abundant one where humanity is global brotherhood pooling our brains to come up with new creative solutions.

An asteroid hits the Earth and we all die out. Nice while it lasted.

It doesn't help us to spread in any way.  It tries, but so far it has been a fantastic failure.  And if $10 billion / year is that little of an amount of money, why don't scientists just finance it themselves, instead of stealing it from non-scientists ?  And as far ar war budget is concerned, this is not an excuse.  A bad doesn't justify an other bad.

When I see how humans are unable to just put some solar cells in Sahara for instance, or to explore resources in deep oceans, to me it just stupid to announce they want to go to Mars.  This IS propaganda, you just don't realise it.  They will spend trillions of tax money to go there, they will put a nice flag on the surface, and then they will eventually come back to Earth, litteraly.

There is almost no resource on Mars.  Water ?  Maybe.  Minerals ?  Sure.  But most of the energy we use comes from the Sun (and we don't have to go to Mars to get it) and from fossilized biomass.  Now, here is some news for you :  THERE IS NO BIOMASS ON MARS !   It is nothing else than a huge desertic place.  Show me you can fertilize the Sahara, and then I might take you seriously when you talk about going to Mars.

And again, I'm still waiting for you to justify why you would have the right to force me, via taxation, to work in order to help you to fullfill your silly dreams.

Human is a life form and as any life form it tends to spread.  But as any life form it is designed to spread in a earth-like environnement, not a huge 0°C cold, irradiated, 1% thick atmosphered, unoxygened, nolifed land.


Well this is a nice allegory of life, because I have an other big news for you :  we will all die anyway.

Don't worry about what could happen in a few billion years.  You will probably die in less than a century, anyway.  You'd better start living with this idea.  Enjoy present life, carpe diem, and don't live in fantasy.

We actually know how to do this, it's just that it would take more resources than it could produce in return; a net loss, particularly when compared to other inhabited areas of the planet.  A series of space mirrors in a polar orbit would be a much easier means of opening up productive agricultural land.  That said, food isn't the main reason that humanity would consider permanent occupation of Mars or the Moon, and neither is living space.  H3 would be a major Moon export for example, and if the Sahara (or the South pole) had an economicly viable volume of H3 to be collected, there would already be a permanent settlement there.  In the case of H3, any atmosphere is counterproductive.

I also very much doubt we need energetic resources that bad.  I mean, it's true that we are currently facing environmental and energetic difficulties, mainly due to our recent dramatic demographic increase.

But this is only temporary.  Most countries have already entered demographic transition phase, so that we can very much predict that there will be a drastic decrease in human population, not even due to wars, social unstability or whatever, but only because of the decrease of natality due to contraception and rise of feminine condition.  Some people even think it could lead to human extinction.  Anyway, this will cause major social problematic situations, and will require a full refundation of societies, but it will also make the need of resources a problem from the past.

It would be a massive accomplishment to have a human settlement on Mars. The boon to science and living standards would be incredible from the challenges that need to be solved. Suddenly we'd be abundant in rare resources- everyone on Earth would be rich from Mars-Earth trade. It's the new frontier of exploration.

And it's not a flag on the surface exercise. Any mission to Mars would require people staying on the surface a minimum of 6 months as the window to fly back to Earth does not happen often. In fact many (Buzz Aldrin included) argue it should be a one-way mission.

I'm not sure how you can argue against "Useless intellectual work", when the internet you're using is a product of that. A society needs to support it's artisans and thinkers to have a healthy vibrant culture. The single movers among the thousand sheep make the payoff worth it.

Oh my god.  You are hopelessly brain-washed.

My initial post is not against science or technological progress.  Please read it again.

This is an exercise in the Broken Window Fallacy. Basically, you're assuming that something won't develop if DARPA did not fund the internet. Something else entirely could have develop -or- something similar to the internet.

Let us note that we cannot predict technological trajectory of an alternative universe.

Some people think a lot of things about the future, but if history is of any value it tells us that those who make distant predictions have a terrible track record.  I'll stick with the long term trendline in my own assumptions, which is decidedly more people with longer lifespans.

+1

We might also take bitcoin as an example.  Satoshi's white paper is the smartest document I had read in years.  And yet, correct me if I am wrong, but Satoshi is not a State employee, nor is bitcoin any part of a government project.

Let's be clear about one thing, no one person should get to decide what is "worth it" for the rest.  It matters not how worthy the cause, not even if the very survival of the entire human species depends upon it with an absolute certainty.  If you are advocating for the taxation of others to fund your ideal project, you are advocating for the legalized theft of the rightful property of others.  Whatever it is, if it is truly worthwhile, someone will fund it voluntarily.  The day that an H3 fusion reactor breaks the parity barrier, the funding for a permanent settlement on the Moon will appear; with or without the aid of any government.  There are hundreds of tabletop reactors, with hundreds of experimental engineers, trying to find the key to making that leap.  If it can be done, it will be done within my lifetime; and another moonshot will come in short order.

Longer lifespans doesn't do much for human reproduction.  Whether a woman lives 60 or 110 years, she will have the same amount of babies, and this will probably be below replacement rate.  If you like to folow long term trendline, don't look at total population number, but look at this rate.  In every countries, natality is sliding below replacement rate.  Longer lifespans only hides this phenomenum, giving the impression of a growing population.   But it's not growing :  it's aging.  And after getting old, all these people will just die, leaving behind them a dramaticly smaller number of people.  And don't think it would be good news, you would be very wrong, imo.

Actually, we don't know that, we can only assume.  Satoshi is a very private character.  We don't even know if his name is real.  For all we know, he could be another teen genius in the vein of "DVD Jon"; wisely prohibited from too much online interaction by his 'rents.  Actually, now that I think about it, he never was one to post on the forum often; but he does seem to have dropped off even from that level since the school year has started.

Hmmm....

+1, creighto.

Couldn't say it better.

Eliminating aging would rank on par with human colonization, perhaps even more important than human colonization. At least, that's my opinion. I would be happy to donate a small sum of my money into anti-aging research every month, with bitcoins.

Not in all countries, that is mostly true in Western European nations.  That said, even that much is statistical noise in the trendline of human history.  There have been more dramatic setbacks to that trendline than the relatively recent reproductive habits of a couple of generations of wealthy and self-absorbed white people.

When the future belongs to old people, you're not going to care much about breeding. I expect some kind of chaos and instability within a couple of decades in these countries.

I thought that too, until I read a book from some french demographs "Essai de prospective démographique".  Main author is Pierre Chaunu.  According to their studies, even if indeed it's in western countries that the phenomenun is the more acute, developping countries do also follow this line, in an alarming rate.  Many of them have already a natality rate below replacement rate.  And yet, their population is growing rapidly, which gives a false impression of a vivid population, while it is only aging.  Contraception may be a recent invention in human history, but it is of a huge importance, probably very much underestimated, imo.

I think that "Demographic winter" is a serious hypothesis that should not be ignored.

We can already see that happening.  It was working age population demands that prompted these very same European nations to open up their immigration laws under the, now provably false, assumption that immigrants from a distinctly different racial, religious and cultural background would be willing to assimilate into the host culture.

I thought it was the host culture's unwillingness to assimilate was the critical factor.

I wasn't suggesting that anyone ignore it.  Regardless of the long term trendline, the short term has very real effects upon us now.  I was merely highlighting the greater perspective.

Certainly not.  Many of these same nations openly oppose the development of 'parallel cultures', Germany's opposition to homeschooling being a big example.  They go out of their way to help immigrants assimilate, in ways that the US does not.  There are just some cultures that cannot coexist without some degree of 'culture clash'.  We in the US are accustomed to some degree of 'culture clash' being a self-described "melting pot", but that contributes to our higher overall crime rates.  Europe is getting there faster than they can adjust, and that could be it's undoing.

http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/16/baby-bust

I found a very interesting article that call our hypothesis into questions.

Let just say we have to wait and see what happen.

There is deep seated fallacy in the collective consciousness of Jewish/Christian/Islamic societies regarding the morality of money.

The widespread view is that money is somehow related to effort and that those that put in the most effort are morally deserving of the most money.

This approximation might have been applicable to  some extent in an agrarian society of 2000 years ago, but in the modern information economy it is not even approximately true.  Those who make the most money are of course not those who put in the most effort but those who generate the most marginal utility, and this ability is becoming increasingly decoupled from effort.

A famous formulation of this fallacy is Marx' Labour Theory of Value, but there are several other versions of it on both sides of the political spectrum. It's a meme that remains surprisingly robust even in 2010.

I have always found it absurd how unproductive members of society who have made leisurely pursuits their life goal are despised by mainstream opinion, while equally unproductive members who outwardly project the image of effort for effort's sake, are respected.
 

Oh, I'm all in favor of people choosing to pursue leisurely pursuits, provided they don't expect other people to work like dogs to make it possible.

Yep, exactly.

I don't get your point.

I didn't want to talk about any morality of money.  What I am saying is that nowadays brains are not used to produce wealth, but only to gain the right to enslave people (I'm exagerating a bit to make my point clearer).

In a extreme version of this, society would be divided in two parts :  people whom intellingence would have been detected during youth with IQ tests, and other "dumb" people.  The formers would have the right not to work in life.  They would just collect the fruit of the labor done by the latters.  This fruit of labour would be stolen via organized force.

That's not the lesson that Bastiat taught. You're missing the point.
.
Destroying windows mean that window maker benefit, but the shoemakers would have to spend it on replacing window rather than buying shoes. The lesson here is about the fact that "making work" doesn't mean increased productivity or greater wealth to society and individuals as a whole.

On the contrary, I am not against academia, or dynamic innovative culture, or any of that stuff. What I am merely against is coercion.

I believe that we should fund academia, if such is a good thing in the first place, with money voluntary donated or paid from the people.

Then do it.  With YOUR money.  YOUR work.  Don't force people to do the same.

You can't make laws on assumptions like that.  You can't say :

"If we don't do this, then that will happen, and it would be not good."

It would be too easy.  This is almost similar to blackmailing.  It reminds me the banking system, crying for some money from the government : "If you don't give us 700 G$, it's gonna be the end of the world...".  Are we supposed to just believe it and comply ??  No way.

Your predictions about what would happen if we do or do not something, are no justification for taxation.   Therefore I won't even try to explain to you why I disagree about your belief in government being necessary for scientific progress.  It would be irrelevant.

Yeah, as if taxing rich people was the solution for all problems in the world...

Yes, it is easy to come up with ways to spend money earned by others, then taken from them by force.

+1

Free healthcare is not a free lunch.

Even so, taxing the rich is just as evil in taxing the poor.

Some rich people actually contribute to the economy, ya know?

I didn't say anything about the poor being lazy scroungers. That's YOUR words. I don't have anything against helping the poor and so on.

But, I am against stealing. Taxation is a form of stealing. It's wrong, period. Like I said, it doesn't matter if you tax the poor or the rich. Nobody deserve to have their property being stolen, no many how selfish you are or how rich or poor you are.

To be clear, for the benefit of our resident trust fund baby who travels the world meeting poor people; taxation is by it's nature, the use or threat of force to compel someone to support a social structure that they would not do so otherwise.  This may be a neccessary evil, but it is still evil; so the ideal answer for society is to limit the government to a set few functions that can only be performed with the use of collective force.  Aid of the poor is not one of those functions, as there are other solutions that have been successful in the past.

It is ignorace of the nature of governments, that they are constructs that are developed (even in democratic societies) to manage and direct the "legitimate" use of violence, that is leading to the breakdown of civil society in Europe as well as the United States.  This is the only purpose of armies, courts and law enforcement anywhere in the world; the only difference between such a government in a modern Western democracy and a third world dictator is who gets to decide what is a legitimate use of that force.


As such, governments everywhere are notoriously bad at managing social support networks, (because it's it beyond their realm of expertise) while generally being quite effective at the functions of government wherein controlled violence is the primary objective, such as warfighting and border defenses.

That's interesting, but not uncommon for children of wealthy origins to rebel against what their own family represents, and their actual family members.  It doesn't negate my statement.  I was being factious, as I have no knowledge of your background, but just because you may have rejected your family doesn't mean that there isn't a trust fund waiting for your return to the family fold.

I see it more like a maintenance fee for a condominium that happens to be a regional monopoly.

A condominium is a voluntary contract. It only bounds those who voluntarily accept it.
There's nothing voluntary in the state.

"Useless intellectual work" I don't believe in that.

Science is like a random-search. The more scientists you employ, the more discoveries they will make. But it's hardly a goal directed activity, because a big part of science is exploring. You can't predict in advance which scientist will stumble upon that big discovery that will change the future. So you need to employ a lot of bright people, even though a major part will not ever do a discovery that will make history, but will (if lucky) just produce some incremental advances.

A good example is the discovery of microwave, the military were not exactly looking for a way to heat meals. But one smart researcher accidentally discovered the effect (the chocolate he had in his pocket heated up for some strange reason), and deduced how it works.

That's how science works. And this makes it very hard to unify with the complete goal-directedness and competition of a free market.

(Another thing is that an advance in science might take ten, fifty or even hundreds of years to make it into an actual commercially feasible product. Example of these are advances in theoretical physics... they might allow for space travel, exponentially faster CPUs, at SOME point in the future)

It is not a random search. Myriad factors conscious and unconscious, human and otherwise determine what is explored and how. When a small group redirects massive amounts of funds either to their own desired research or to research that merely sounds productive we end up with inferior and less knowledge than if people had the freedom to determine for themselves when and how their resources should be deployed.

"Useless" isn't quite the right word though. You can steal and put something to some use. But there is undoubtedly huge loss when the people who have the ability to create resources are stripped by force of their ability to allocate those resources where they think they will be most productive.

This is very much NOT my point.  Please read my initial post again.  Or maybe I should rewrite it.

What I call useless is the intellectual work which is dedicated not to actual research, but only in the determination of the smartest people.  Once those smart people are detetected, they are given high social status, without any real requirement for them to do any real actual scientific research.  This is a waste of good brain power, and it is a very wrong basis for society.

We end up with different knowledge and technologies, probably.

Maybe there would be some kind of electro-mechanical internet precursor.

The point is we don't know. They take the resources, stuff gets made/invented. Of course some of it is good and useful. But we have no idea what was sacrificed because it never came into existence because the resources were redirected.

With no cost comparison good decisions cannot be made. This is really just the socialist calculation problem.

I agree, even if that was not really my point.  Motivation, initiative and will are highly important in any human activity, including scientific research.  Clearly intellectual energy would be much better used in a liberal manner.