FU Money
2020[edit]
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.
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.
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.
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.
2021[edit]
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.
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?
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.
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.
If labs can self fund it will change the landscape of science forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
All are institutions that puport to a higher purpose whilst really just being money making ventures.
@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.
2022[edit]
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
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.
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.
2024[edit]
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.
🚨🇺🇸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
2025[edit]
What is the plan for making our scientists wealthy, free & secure…so that we have no Tony Fauci / Claudine Gay situations again?
I understand there’s a Tech Plan.
I have heard there is a NatSec plan.
I believe there is a DoD plan.
Yet without science, there’s no US Golden Age.
The products created by our steel manufacturers form the very foundation of our country.
Under President Trump, we are going to rebuild our nation with skilled American labor and innovation. The New Golden Age of America is here!
Why is wealthy a requirement? That seems superfluous to say the least.
@SacrdCowTipping No one needs FU money like a top scientist.
See Fauci situation above.
Ah - your prose could be read 2 different ways. I see what you are intending.
Those with FU money endowing chairs at universities, are not using that FU money to shove heterodox dissidents down the open throats of decaying western Universities.
You have tremendous latitude to negotiate the terms of a chaired Professorship.
And it costs only like 2M-10M. For the price of your third Bugatti, you can invade *every* faculty meeting in the university you bitch about constantly on @X. Think about that the next time you are flying Tetterboro to Van Nuys. A great use of FU money.
Ask yourself:
Why aren’t you saying FU on behalf of us all?
You could name a football stadium. Or you could turn around your Alma Mater and western civilization by getting your Medical Doctors, your Economists, your Virologists, etc inserted where they can edit real journals, write op-eds, stand up to woke lunatics, speak out on behalf of reproductive mutilation of our children, get at the origin of COVID, etc.
Often it take 1 voice. For 100m you could endow 20 professorships.
Q: If you have 10 figures, have you even considered this once while constantly complaining about the woke-communist revolution ruining your children’s future? One professorship in the area making you crazy? Call up your Alma mater and see what happens. You can always say no.
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