The Science of Grifting

Or... Other People's Money, Physics Edition

Many moons ago, I attended a medical school graduation ceremony to celebrate, yes, someone I know becoming a doctor. The valedictorian's speech was a jarring exception to a mostly harmless and typically banal ceremony. The student used her bully pulpit and captive audience as an opportunity to demand greater government funding of medical research.

"Young and stupid" were the adjectives that came to mind during that speech, and after a few disapproving comments amongst ourselves after the event, it mostly faded from memory.

My memory being a disorganized mass of snippets ranging from Saturday morning cartoon songs to TV jingles to restaurant anecdotes to, yes, recollections of narcissistic valedictory speeches, a meme I encountered pulled that episode from the unfathomed depths.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, who some time back completed his transformation from notable physicist to smarmy media-thirsty scold, utterly debased himself by sharing that particularly drecky bit of condescending smug.

I won't parse all that's wrong with Gottesman's observations here - you should be able to sort that out for yourselves. The blog-spiration this meme offered was the Other People's Money aspect of "science."

Scientific research costs money. That money comes from myriad sources, ranging from investors (individual and corporate) pursuing a "better mousetrap," universities doing work that attracts the best minds, the best students, and yes, the biggest donors, research hospitals that shunt some of their revenues to that work, and, of course, the government.

Absence of any authority in the Constitution to spend tax dollars on research is, of course, no obstacle to it happening. For that, we can likely thank Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who in 1937 wrote two opinions that turned the General Welfare Clause into a "do whatever you want" loophole. But, again, that's an aside to today's point.

My takeaway from the Other People's Money valedictorian and the Other People's Money (OPM) meme-share is that scientists are incentivized toward socialistic thinking. That the nature of what they do, and the dependence on wealth created by others, gives them reason to rationalize upward. To conclude that they have a greater moral entitlement to OPM than its owners if those owners aren't using it as the scientists deem best. And, to conclude that it's OK for government to point guns at other people in order to fund the pursuits they deem worth pursuing.

There are many gimmicks that grifters use to pull money from others. Confidence men "give you their confidence" - they draw you into their schemes by making you feel worthy. Boiler-room hustlers play to people's greed and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), then use bully tactics to make their marks feel stupid for resisting.

Socialists act much the same way. They appeal to our grubbier emotions, but mask those appeals with fake "logic" and moral preening. They convert the politics of envy into "fairness," "injustice," and "others' selfishness and greed." They elevate those grubby feelings by framing their arguments as being of higher morality. They pretend to care about others, and convince you that you would prove you care about others by supporting their ideas. They call taking money from some to give to others "charity." Many even convince themselves of the uprightness of this all. In essence, they are conning themselves as well as us. That cures the moral dissonance that a rational person would feel in claiming greater control of others' money than the people who earned it.

Tyson has become a parody - a pompous preener rather than a physicist who knows how to stay in his lane. In doing so, he affirms an Orwellian observation.

And a Menckian one.