how state funding corrupts math and science

Economics Political Theory
1

typically thought to be immune from the corrupting effect of government influence, math and especially physics seem to be just as messed up as anything else the state has its grimy hands in. just what are the incentives of a state-funded researcher or theoretician at our many fine institutes of higher learning? are they somehow immune from the social and financial incentives of the establishment because they are engaged in hard science where “someone would have called them out”?

if it is already a widely accepted truism that “science advances one funeral at a time” as old scientists die, why would this be the case if “someone would have found their errors”?

from another thread:

2

I’ve been saying this for a long time. Also that empiricism is no better in anything else than economics. I studied much science, nuclear physics and such, from about age 11 and only started on economics when I was 19. I found nothing new in economics. Just different compartments on the same rotting, sinking ship.

State funding adds to, is not necessary to create the problems. It is an intrinsic tendency from status seeking. Everyone wants to invent some hocus pocus, be promoted, market the “product”, advertise with celebrity reps, fear losing their power, etc. You are either smart/lucky enough to stumble through the fog or be doomed to be lost in it.

3

Can’t the same therefore be said to this Miles Mathis and his own arguments?

4

Yes, cranks like Mathis are egoist maniacs, attention whores who sometimes manage to find some followers like a cult.

5

I will only comment on Miles Mathis’ mathematical theories since this is my area of expertise.

His “arguments” against mainstream mathematics demonstrate that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. He seems to be totally unfamiliar with modern university-level mathematics (or he lacks the intelligence to understand it).

For instance, in the essay that Zangelbert Bingledack links to, Mathis “refutes” the definition of the absolute value of a complex number:

“If z = x + yi and x,y are real numbers, then |z| = √(x2 +y2).”

Mathis claims thaf if one “solves” for i, one sees that i cannot be a constant:

"Let x = 1 and y = 2

i = .618

Let x = 2 and y = 3

i = .535

Let x = 3 and y = 4

i = .5"

These computations assume that z is a real number, which it does not have to be. For example, if z is a complex number with absolute value |z|=√5, it does not follow that z=√5 (and even if we assume z to be a real number, it could be -√5). In other words, Mathis’s mathematical knowledge is high-school level at best.

Mathis also doesn’t understand how the real numbers can form a subset of the complex numbers, which in turn are defined as ordered pairs of real numbers. The point is that there is a monomorphism (i.e., an injective homomorphism) from the field of the real numbers into the field of the complex numbers. Hence, the field of the real numbers is isomorphic to (i.e., has the same algebraic structure as) a subfield of the field of the complex numbers. This means that we can “identify” any real number with a complex one if we are only interested in the structure of these number fields. Math majors typically learn this in their first weeks, but Mathis doesn’t seem to be very good at abstract thinking.

6

I recommend you the works of Leopold Kronecker on irrational numbers.

http://www.archive.org/details/werkehrsgaufvera01kronuoft

http://www.archive.org/details/werkehrsgaufvera02kronuoft

http://www.archive.org/details/n1werkehrsgaufvera03kronuoft

Maybe you (and your teachers) should go back to school and read him… you follow a Statist curricula didn’t you?

7

I think even elementary schoolers could measure with a string that pi is something less than 3,5.

^ I don’t read german, what are we supposed to look for? We already know he was a great mathematician.

8

Let me ask you a question.

How is it that the state has an interest in us using their money…but no interest in us using their formulas?

Their money is dishonest, and they benefit from it and achieve power, control and lie, manipulate and do whatever is necessary to maintain that dishonest money, even giving Nobel Prizes for economists who are completely wrong.

But suddenly in science, with it’s big influence on so many ways in our lives… then suddenly the state becomes honest and gives orders to achieve and show the peasants nothing but the whole truth?

9

I don’t care about any of that whining. Mathis and other cranks have not written anything yet that makes sense. As a counter you linked to Kroenecker as if it was supposed to prove something, but it still does not say anything.

10

scineram vs player…

Hmmm…

Not sure who to cheer for.

11

How, in your opinion, does the state benefit from lying(?) that pi=3.14… instead of (the “actual”?) 4?

Is your claim that ‘the state’ has been in on this scam starting with Euclid, through Newton, and all the way to Heisenberg and beyond?

Would you allow for the possibility that everyone (including the state) may actually be right when they tell you you’re not Napoleon?

Z.

12

If I were paranoid, I would say that Player is a CIA agent trying to make anarcho-capitalists look bad.

13

This is irrelevant to me. But, I can’t understand anything he says.

14

this is exactly backwards. Miles Mathis, Bill Gaede, Gabriel LaFreniere…the men you had to come to an anarchist forum to hear about, who have no paid university position, who are blacklisted in all manner of journals, who are ignored by just about everyone, who have virtually zero chance of ever achieving any kind of note or funding? what power, promotion, marketing, or celebrity status do they have?

anyway, the attention whoring critique is entirely the wrong one to bring up when someone questions authority, tradition, and establishment views—anti-statists of all people should recognize that. the critiques to bring are of their ACTUAL ARGUMENTS, as only one person in this thread has done. only then can the conversation begin.

15

Player, you are barking up the wrong tree here, and people will dismiss you for it. the “state” isn’t some acting entity. “it” doesn’t necessarily have a goal or agenda. it can nonetheless end up creating bad incentives.

consider the incentives on a typical government-funded scientist or mathematician. like all others whose main revenue stream is from the state, they will naturally tend to prefer arrangements where more money and power accrues to them, rather than less. what makes more money, solving problems finally and easily in a way that many people can understand and hence get in on, or creating endless abstractions and complexities that only a handful of people in the world even claim to understand and hence keeping competition out, keeping most of the real problems unsolved, and creating endless new fields and subfields for which more money can be asked for? a math or physics department is like a bureaucracy; these fields grow out of control on wasteful and often ridiculous programs, foot-dragging is a virtue, and failure is the best way to get more money—provided it’s done in a spectacular and tantalizing way that no one can understand in order to criticize.

i don’t endorse Mathis as i haven’t read enough of him yet, but his general critiques of the social situation are entirely on point:

Yes, modern physics has become a neo-scholasticism. It is the avoidance of real questions in the pursuit of trivial methodology. It is the memorization of an endless list of names and manipulations in lieu of understanding mechanics. It is the setting up in some black data hole and extemporizing on an endless string of evermore ridiculous hypotheses instead of looking at known physical problems closer at hand. It is the knee-jerk invocation of authority and the explicit squelching of dissent. It is the hiding behind tall gates and a million gatekeepers, and euphemizing it as “peer review.” It is the institutionalized acceptance of censorship and the creation of dogma. Grand Masters like Feynman say “shut up and calculate!” and everyone finds this amusing. No one finds it a clear instance of fascism and oppression. An internet search on “against Feynman” or “Feynman was wrong” or “disagree with Feynman” turns up nothing. The field is monolithic. It is completely controlled and one-dimensional. All discussion has been purged from the standard model, and all debate has been marginalized. Any non-standard opinion must be from a “crank” and blacklisting is widespread. Publishing is also controlled, both in academia and in the mainstream. Einstein already found science publishing too controlled for his taste in the 30’s, refusing to work with Physical Review. What would he think now? Can anyone imagine his early papers getting published in the current atmosphere?

16

"

this is exactly backwards. Miles Mathis, Bill Gaede, Gabriel LaFreniere…the men you had to come to an anarchist forum to hear about, who have no paid university position, who are blacklisted in all manner of journals, who are ignored by just about everyone, who have virtually zero chance of ever achieving any kind of note or funding? what power, promotion, marketing, or celebrity status do they have?

anyway, the attention whoring critique is entirely the wrong one to bring up when someone questions authority, tradition, and establishment views—anti-statists of all people should recognize that. the critiques to bring are of their ACTUAL ARGUMENTS, as only one person in this thread has done. only then can the conversation begin."

I dont know about that… I know Miles Mathis has made some money on his book and he has decent reviews too…

17

i am not defending Mathis as i don’t fully understand his claims. however, what can it mean to add a real number to a complex number? you say that complex numbers are “defined as ordered pairs of real numbers”. Mathis is claiming that the “+” symbol is misleading in the z = x + yi definition, because normal addition has no allowance for adding a real number to an ordered pair. how does one add a real number x to an ordered pair (0,y)? the obvious answer is that the real number was not actually a real number all along, but itself an ordered pair: the ordered pair (x,0). then they can be added, although this is not straight addition of real numbers but now vector addition of ordered pairs. why not make that explicit from the start? why start off calling x a real number and not an ordered pair? what has transpired is a subtle redifinition of “real number”, to be charitable, or to be uncharitable it is an equivocation between x and (x,0).

not to mention that the redefinition of a real number, even if accepted, would end up making your definition of a complex number absurd. viz: in the complex number scheme a real number is an ordered pair (x,0), but you say complex numbers “are defined as ordered pairs of real numbers”. hence here is your complex number ((x,0),y). uh oh, we have a problem folks! looks like you MUST equivocate to make this work! but i am open to being shown wrong, as i hope you are as well.

18

Note: When I refer to the state I don’t mean the official puppets and actors, but the elites who benefit and set the policy.

Of course the state creates wrong incentives and so on, and it’s filled with good-hearted people, but it’s also true it’s a big magnet for dishonest groups who will benefit and will want to continue their sucking and position. The lobbies, corporations, cartels, banking/medical/military cartels and long historically continued orders being the leaders and the unions parasiting entities sucking too but not ruling. In few words, the state-connected with inside knowledge and connections, and still a pyramid, few know “true” history and who were really genius and who were media-created distractions.

Note; I don’t endorse Mathis, he is dead-on and goes to the core of many important matters. He has a brilliant mind and sees inner-contradictions brightly, but he still uses standard paradigm of considering history as true and the official geniuses like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein as clever, self-made men who advanced science. I call half of them fakes, ghost of history who didn’t exist to begin with, only in literature and faked “ancient” documents, and the other half either mis-interpreted and their works and words manipulated or directly fed ideas that were deemed neccesarry to be given to the public.

To sum up, I consider Kepler, Newton and Einstein to have stopped the development of science, either voluntarily or being misrepresented.

What matters is not how many lies have you detected between those told to us, but the state of mind that puts you in a way to discovering them.

It’s like having wealth and having the ability to create wealth.

The biggest discovery is an algorithm to achieve knowledge, is freeing oneself of the prejudices we are raised with and moving to a state where you question everything or almost everything and where you are aware of the axioms and assumptions you are using.

We usually think in ‘this’ create ‘that’ and therefore ‘that’ can only be created and explained by ‘this’ and those who don’t see it are idiots.

There may be other ways to explain ‘that’, and maybe you are not seeing you are trusting an assumption which is wrong or not proven.

Most lies are not even conscious lies on purpose but old lies continued and not questioned.

I believe even the fall of the states would be an acceptable loss for the powers that be, because the state is not the root of all evil but a symptom and one of many maximizers of their power and control.

Because brute force can be substituted with self-censorship.

It’s like the tale of monkeys in a lab, who get a electric discharge when they do something, the new ones will be stopped by their peers, but future generations will just self-censor themselves without knowing why, they will have been raised/told/stopped by previous monkeys. That is, that ‘meme’ will be implanted, attached like a parasite forever. Even when the discharges are no longer active.

The state is not just violence and coercion, it’s a re-programming of our thinking patterns.

It conditions people to think in ways and not question or forget things. The best propaganda is not one that tells you ‘buy this!’ but one that creates a seed in you that will make you think ‘Mmh I think I need that’ and this thought will carry a lot of weight because you will think it’s truly yours.

Basically ‘be a pain in the ass’, question everything, quarantine everything you’ve been told and start from zero.

You will run to insult anybody who says, ehm, for example, that Columbus didn’t reach America in 1492.

And as I explained before with propaganda, you will believe it’s you questioning that guy…but the truth is that you are a loudspeaker repeating the meme created by the 1492/Columbus originators. You will be 100% sure, certain, betting your mother that it happened, deep down you surely believed that. But from where does the opposition and urge to attack someone who questions 1492/Columbus comes from? Does it come from our experience? We weren’t there. Does it come from people we trust that were there or saw it? Neither. Does it come from our knowledge of the original documents and ancient evidence of the exact dates and epoch of the travels? Not. We haven’t verify that fact, we have no knowledge or evidence on either side, so, what makes us act immediately and puts our mind into an attacking position to something we don’t know, haven’t researched and only ‘know’ by faith/trust into what they told us? When you think about it there are no reasons to act as we do, it’s not us acting, it’s not free will, it’s indoctrination.

I know there was a Franco, a Churchill, a Bismarck, a Washington? Maybe. The farther away you go, the less evidence there is. Even recent ‘evidence’ is daily proven bogus, like WMD. Imagine if the only documents future generations have on Irak was the Colin Powell discourse… well.. we got the Spanish Kings ‘documents’, they could have easily said they had been long ago when other powers wanted to go and told their troops…“hurry up, put a lot of flags and make it appear as if we have towns there, we have to give the impressions we’ve been there for so many years! Hurry!” Stalin itself purge who knows how many people from photos, archives, he made them disappear, as if they never existed! How can we trust the state to give us accurate honest information?

If there were an ancap revolution, would the state report it honestly? If you were an ambitious prince who attacks his father…would you tell it like that, or would you say you are fighting for freedom against the tyranny of far away lands who kill us with taxes? If you are the aristocracy and end controlling the state you will have capabilities to control the flow of information and how things are told.

An example, go to ebay, search for old maps of North America, previous to 1772. What will you see that doesn’t make sense if we work with the standards assumptions, that is official history?

A massive big empty half country on the West of North America, and half of Canada is empty, undiscovered! White! Unknown!

It makes no sense at all, unless you question the secondary data you are using you won’t be able to make sense of it.

If Columbus was in the Caribbean in 1492… it can not be possible that in almost 300 years no one reached Northern than California or the Western Half of Canada, South America was known, rounded, explored, but North America not?

The pilgrims were there for centuries but didn’t ventured to the West until the early XIX? Why?

North and South America were obeying colonies for centuries until they suddenly realize they could easily win independence from over-extended far-away Europe, why wait?

We’ve been raised to take things for sacred, hide them and use this assumptions without realizing we are using them.

One of them is chronology. Atheists argue over Christ existence…but none of them goes away enough to stop and analyze all the variables they are using.. what if we are looking in the wrong place? or what if it didn’t happen so many years ago but at a different time? What if someone mistranslated it and it happen in a different place?

Many will attack me from saying that there is a big world-wide multidisciplinary group of historians who argue that maybe the problem to explain many things in history…is one of the assumptions we are using… chronology, the line of time extending for several thousands years ago where we put all the events and civilizations. It was miscalculated or manipulated for whatever political reasons.

I support that view and I would urge all of you to wait a second and think ‘Why do I feel anger and urge to go to criticize that?’

Have you done critical research on that matter, or are you just re-stating the official viewpoint believing it’s yours. How can it be yours if you haven’t discovered or researched or critically analyzed it? I have.

Bernanke tells one thing to the public and another in private, he runs to find the price of gold in private, but he calls it unimportant in public.

What is so strange about applying the same standards to other areas/subjects under the control/influence of the state?

Maybe advanced military designs use different physics and they want to keep their supremacy by discouraging research on the theories behind that technologies and instead want other countries and civilians to focus on dead-ends or ‘approved/controlled technologies’. They put backdoors on our computers, on Operating Systems, on ISPs.. they "recommend’ some cryptographic algorithms (maybe because they know how to crack it?) Even if some of their low-level agencies use it, it could be an “approved risk” to convince others to use it.

If I were the government I would hire immediately the best minds and scientist, the US and the Soviets did import the best German and Japanese scientist, and keep it classified.

They are succeeding in making any interest in chemistry or physics a sign of lab-terrorism.

My position is simple and easy and it’s the position any libertarian should follow. It’s not trusting the state even to say the time.

19

player, i guess the final argument is always “someone would have called them out”. for math and physics there is the intimidation factor of hard math, which is an excellent way to keep people out. what is keeping people out for historical claims? (if you answer please start a new history thread for this to keep from derailing this one)

20

The question is, if they had been called… would you notice it? How would you know they had been called?

Not through the media! Yes, in fact, they were called but if no one is listening or looking…

It’s the opposite, the fear factor is the fear to stand alone and criticize a genius, the psychology… if nobody said anything… maybe it’s me that I’m dumb and don’t understand his theory, everybody thinks the same and are afraid of speaking.

They prefer to stay silent instead of risking being shown to be an idiot or a lazy who didn’t understand that brilliant theory, they may loose their job! They listen to the higher ups, the authority figures, respected, and say the same, that’s the safe bet!

An example, Newton, a hero…until he said something forbidden, when he did that he was called senile, old man and criticized.

What did he said? One of his books, ordered by a royal princess was leaked, a work of more than ten years of calculations, asked by someone who “knew” what was going on and hired one the best minds of the time.

This is the book you have never heard that Newton wrote:

Newton’s Revised History of Ancient Kingdoms - A Complete Chronology

Newton was asked by royalty to make his own research on the real datings of “ancient” civilizations.

They were caught faking and manipulating history with their hands on it, Newton was an insider and was scared to hell when they publish his book. Still, it wasn’t too radical, he was pretty conservative in his criticism. My point is, almost nobody read the originals! Or research criticism!