Anyone Else Staying Up For The CERN Announcement About The Higgs Boson Tonight?

[Ben Kenobi]

And once again, Ben fails to grasp the concept of representative democracy. Of course we get to decide what to do with your money.

And where does this authority come from? The constitution?

[Ben Kenobi]

I see you fall in the "moron" category who thought there would be a tax refund if the US had decided not to fund LHC.

Less government spending = Tax refund.

As for the "should/how should" nonsense, I was making a relative statement of the utility of LHC vs other government spending. Your response is irrelevant to that topic, so you shouldn't have quoted it.

Again, just because the government could waste it on other spending doesn't justify wasting it on the LHC. That's like arguing it's ok to blow your paycheck on gambling because you didn't blow it on hookers and blow.

[Ben Kenobi]

Because the state can use violence to stop some people from manufacturing certain things, so certain forms of knowledge can be made excludable. There's no feasible way to keep the results of a scientific experiment out of the minds of people who didn't help fund the experiment so the free rider problem can't be solved in this way.

If you read the founders, they explain why. They believe that the establishment of a patent office will provide free market incentives for inventors to invent more things and give the US a leg up on creative developments and R and D. It's clear that the founders envisioned science as a private, not a public endeavour and that the best thing the government could to to assist it is to create a patent office.

[Aeson]

Less government spending = Tax refund.

No.

[Kuciwalker]

And once again, Ben fails to grasp the concept of representative democracy. Of course we get to decide what to do with your money.

You are actually a worse sophist than Ben. No one cares that the government has the practical and even legal ability to do these things. We are claiming that they are BAD IDEAS you stupid ****.

[MikeH]

This is a great illustration why building the LHC now was a terrible idea. They had to invent entirely new technologies! Whereas if we just wait then many of those technologies will in due course be invented anyway (assuming they actually have any useful applications outside of physics wankery) and the LHC would be much cheaper.

Er... yes and this is exactly what we did. It's a 50 year old theory we waited until we could test it relatively cheaply.

[Jon Miller]

The history of invention has had it that many of the most important have come from military/exploration/science pushing the way and not the other way around.

But I am not even defending the LHC or basic science on those grounds.

I am defending it on the grounds that a lot of people are interested in it, and that having mass government experiments like LHC is a more effective way to go about it than private investment. Not only does this (experiments like LHC) cause more scientific advancement than what would get funded (cold fusion, teleportation, astronomy, string theory, etc), it also allows more to be spent on education/applied development (as the experts recognize those as important).

I do agree that research could be done more efficiently.

Removing 50% or more of theorists would be reasonable (man power wise), and probably switching ~50% of experimentalists for engineers would to.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

I am defending it on the grounds that a lot of people are interested in it,

This isn't even true. Almost no one actually knows what the Higgs Boson is. A small fraction of those actually care beyond finding the newspaper article mildly interesting.

More people are interested in Game of Thrones than the Higgs Boson. It would have been a more effective use of the billions of dollars to spend them on that show.

Not only does this (experiments like LHC) cause more scientific advancement than what would get funded (cold fusion, teleportation, astronomy, string theory, etc), it also allows more to be spent on education/applied development (as the experts recognize those as important).

This reads to me as an argument against the LHC - it leads us to fund even more LHC-like things!

[Asher]

Hahaha. PWNT.

He doesn't understand the graph.

[Jon Miller]

This reads to me as an argument against the LHC - it leads us to fund even more LHC-like things!

It saves us from funding cold fusion/etc.

The military is more likely to make research investments that don't advance science than scientists are. The general public has a difficulty seeing the difference between science and quackery.

Actually, the military generally funds some basic science, but it is a lot less efficient than the research councils/etc (and is much more likely to be quackery, and has a lower number of applications per $ spent I believe).

JM

[MikeH]

More people are interested in Game of Thrones than the Higgs Boson.

Would like to see you try support that with some evidence. GoT is a tiny cult show watched by very few people. Higgs is the biggest Physics discovery of my lifetime.

Anecdote (not offered as evidence): Higgs Boson openly discussed all this week at work by people with no science background who have never heard of Game of Thrones. LHC has featured as front page headlines on all news sites I visit many times and every time it does it becomes the water cooler topic of the day.

[giblets]

If you read the founders, they explain why. They believe that the establishment of a patent office will provide free market incentives for inventors to invent more things and give the US a leg up on creative developments and R and D. It's clear that the founders envisioned science as a private, not a public endeavour and that the best thing the government could to to assist it is to create a patent office.

This doesn't refute anything I said. Patents are for inventions, not basic science.

[Kuciwalker]

Would like to see you try support that with some evidence. GoT is a tiny cult show watched by very few people.

GoT is watched by millions of people who pay enough for the privilege to justify a ~$100m/season budget, and many more who pirate it.

Anecdote (not offered as evidence): Higgs Boson openly discussed all this week at work by people with no science background who have never heard of Game of Thrones. LHC has featured as front page headlines on all news sites I visit many times and every time it does it becomes the water cooler topic of the day.

And a week or two from now no one will care.

[Kuciwalker]

It saves us from funding cold fusion/etc.

So your argument is that absent the LHC, those funds would have been directed towards even more worthless science? Its virtue is in being the least bad option available? Bull****. There are plenty of things we could spend the money on, such as robotics or AI, that plausibly have ACTUAL VALUE.

[Lorizael]

I'm still waiting for you to tell me how you deduced my revealed preferences regarding my political philosophy given the approximately nothing you know about my economic choices.