FU Money

FU Money on The Basics Guide

2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Watching @slatestarcodex and others go off line, I’m changing tactics. I need to move to become unfirable and uncancelable. I can’t be vulnerable to my advertisers or even my employer if this pressure can be put on anyone at will.

It’s time to accept saying FU requires FU money.

3:20 PM · Jun 23, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I have been reluctant to put things behind paywalls and all that retail stuff, but I will now set something up to allow direct contributions. Many of you have asked me to do that and I didn’t feel right about it. Well that just changed. I really want Scott & @slatestarcodex back.

3:20 PM · Jun 23, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The individual is outgunned at all times. We cannot easily fight back. But this is ridiculous. So many great people gathered around @slatestarcodex. I want it back.

3:23 PM · Jun 23, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I’ve met @slatestarcodex in San Francisco. Smart, shy and nice as could be. He’s got to be entitled to have a psychiatry practice with privacy sensitivity for gods sakes. The right and ability to earn a living is important.

3:28 PM · Jun 23, 2020

2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

FU money.

6:09 AM · Mar 25, 2021

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin

7:02 AM · Mar 24, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I’m pleased that @Spotify is not doing what @TwitterSafety and @YouTube are doing.

And way to go @joerogan. This informal network requires folks to have each other’s backs. But it’s always a risk with big tech, big pharma & big government on the side of these master narratives.

2:34 PM · Jun 23, 2021

Bret Weinstein

@BretWeinstein

Huge thanks to @joerogan for the "emergency podcast" on #ivermectin, with me and @PierreKory. The censorship campaign obscuring Ivermectin (as prophylactic against SARS-CoV2 and as treatment for COVID-19) kills. Is it about shareholders and EUAs?

1:58 PM · Jun 23, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

And a risk even to someone as large as Joe who has taken a lot of media fire with grace.

As I said to @esaagar & @makosloff, the money from Spotify may actually help freedom to think in public after all.

Oddly, at the moment:

Spotify FU Money > Institutional Academic Freedom.

2:34 PM · Jun 23, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Say that again. But louder. Not buried in a thread.

Let's be blunt: Science no longer needs money. It desperately needs FU money.

Years ago it didn't need FU money because its culture, tenure & institutional protection provided the FU of academic freedom. Now it *needs* wealth.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.

@hubermanlab

If labs can self fund it will change the landscape of science forever.

7:07 PM · Oct 16, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The genius of American Science in particular has historically come from a highly professional but irreverant belief in the individual iconoclast against the group. That culture, now found only in a few hold outs, is being hunted to extinction inside our radicalized Universities.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

In the last year I was forced to give up my hope in our universities being reformed. We have to face facts.

It is far more important that our scientists gain enough wealth to self-fund, withstand law suits, be able to protect and support families, etc, than CEOs have 4th homes.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I have changed my mind. Wealth still works, while universities no lonnger do. Science has provided the technology on which our wealth is based. It is time that science and scientists shift to taking an enormous slice of the wealth and security they have provided to everyone else.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The United States public had a great deal. Scientists had the salary of professional with the freedom of a billionaire to think and express themselves. The US took away the right to IP in exchange.

Without real freedom provided by Tenure, we are forced to switch towards wealth.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

If capitalism finds it abhorrent that scientists should participate in the wealth they created for every other wealthy person, then perhaps I was as wrong about the genius of Capitalism as I was about the genius of US Univ. in their defense of academic freedom.

But I hope not.

3:02 PM · Oct 17, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

High Trust and Dependence

Vs

Low Trust and Independence

with respect to institutional leadership, is the best replacement for our old “Left vs Right” political spectrum that I have found.

Try it for yourself. I found it to be surprisingly efficient.

1:17 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

In particular, it explains my own politics. I am short the leadership and current experts within our institutions but “against burning them all the F down”. Thus the traditional Right & I agree on part of our current crisis, but this identifies why I’m not a natural conservative.

1:17 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I don’t trust @twitter leadership which throttles my account. I don’t trust universities Coked up on DEI zealotry which wants me to give loyalty oaths. I don’t trust Fauci who lies to us. I don’t trust that @EcoHealthNYC hasn’t been taken over by our military. Etc.

1:24 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

But I also know our history. And it wasn’t always like this. Not everyone who has a glass of Chardonnay ends up two weeks later sleeping in the gutter. And I am not having it that all liberalism automatically tends to illiberalism.

So I’m long institutions, short their new evil.

1:24 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

In particular I don’t trust News Services, Universities, Political Parties, Government agencies, that won’t celebrate and hire top heterodox iconoclasts. If you won’t protect Noam Chomsky or Serge Lang in their fields despite their politics, what even are you as a university?

1:34 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So to sum it up, I don’t want institutions run by midwits w/ credentials that want to micromanage our reality. But “Burn it all the F Down!” Only works if it’s restricted to managed reality.

I’m low trust for current leaders/ experts. But open to the hard work of rebuilt trust..

1:43 AM · Oct 30, 2021

Ben Corrigan

@Mangocorona

All are institutions that puport to a higher purpose whilst really just being money making ventures.

6:46 AM · Nov 1, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

@Mangocorona No. Or at least they weren’t very recently. A professor had the salary of a dentist but the intellectual freedom of a billionaire until recently. If we could restore that we wouldn’t need much FU money. But now we do. Because…we blew it on witch-hunting independent thinkers etc.

6:46 AM · Nov 1, 2021

2022

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Having been both in Academe and the private sector, I have learned something I cannot communicate:

A) The more you push science towards markets, the more it fails.

B) The more marketization makes science fail, the more capitalists want to starve it.

https://jacobin.com/2018/07/capitalism-science-research-academia-funding-publishing

12:24 AM · Mar 25, 2022

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Increasingly, the solution to every science problem is seen through markets.

X-prizes for science.
Science DAOs.
Crowdfunding for science.
Micro grants.
Science as a startup.

Anything *other* than recognizing our previous wisdom of insulating science & scientists from markets.

12:30 AM · Mar 25, 2022

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The answer to getting science to work again is a smaller scientific community with the ability to hold minority positions for decades if necessary.

Academic freedom was a lot less expensive when it was guaranteed by institutions. Now it requires FU money from which it’s starved.

12:38 AM · Mar 25, 2022

2024

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

As I have said before, deep painful hearings are the way forward.

And fringe Politico-Biologists Fauci and Collins should have been repudiated.

Make scientists independent again. Let’s get real FU money into the hands of those upon whom we depend for our ultimate ground truth.

3:59 AM · May 8, 2024

Mario Nawfal

@MarioNawfal

🚨🇺🇸BREAKING: HOUSE FINDS EVIDENCE OF COVID LAB LEAK

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has examined classified State Department records that suggest COVID-19 may have originated from a lab-related accident in Wuhan, China.

The records, which were partially revealed through a FOIA request by U.S. Right to Know, also indicate potential obstruction by the Chinese Communist Party in the investigation of the virus's origins.

These findings have prompted calls from Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup for the immediate declassification of the documents to provide a full account to the public.

The Subcommittee seeks a briefing with the State Department before May 14, 2024, to further examine the evidence.

Source: Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, U.S. House of Representatives

11:55 PM · May 7, 2024

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