🚀 go-pugleaf

Maciej Stachowiak  <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:
>> I'm not so sure of that. All European universities are and have always
>> been funded by the state.
>
>As far as I know, many of the earliest universities in Germany, for
>example, were founded by groups of students and were not initially
>funded by the state.

Oh, really? Who funded them? Their parents? And who funded their parents?
Can't be the taxpayers, can it?

>I believe other intitutions that became universities were founded by
>the Church.

In pre-modern Europe, the Church was at least as powerful, and many
times as harmful to free development of knowledge, as the State. Just
ask Galileo (another state-funded university professor). Or are you
trying to say you want the Vatican to fund FSF? (Imagine what *that*
would do to M-x doctor!)

>> Were it not for public funding of mathematicians, we would have had to
>> extend patents to theorems or else we wouldn't have gotten any new ones.
>
>What public funding supported Euclid? Pythagoras? It's clearly not the
>case that either state funding or math patents are necessary for new
>theorems to be created.

For one thing, math is kind of exceptional in that it takes very little
capital to produce mathematical results (as opposed to modern science).
Besides, IIRC, both of them, as well as such unremarkable characters
as Archimedes and Aristotle, received employment from kings and lords 
of the era as tutors and advisors. Euclid certainly did not live off of
royalties from his geometry books!

>> What? Newton, Euler, Gauss, Poincare, Riemann: all funded by the state
>> or some king, ultimately receiving tax payer's  money.
>
>I'll yield these specific point, because I don't know enough of the
>details of their funding to argue meaningfully.

All of them had professorships in nationally funded universities.

>However, many important theorems were discovered by hobbyists, the
>independently wealthy, those with private patrons, individuals
>supported by charity, etc.

Uh-huh. Name the last important theorem proven by anyone supported by
charity. Hell, name the last important mathematical discovery proven
by a hobbyist. (And before you bring up Einstein in the patent office,
Einstein was *not* doing physics as a hobby; rather, he was doing
patent clerk to get by while trying to get a physics job.) As for
"private patrons," many private patrons of centuries past were feudal
noblemen whose income came off of taxes on their own fief--i.e., the
kind of people who don't exist anymore. They are hardly equivalent to,
say, Bill Gates funding scientists today.

There are many areas of science in which non-professional hobbyists
can still contribute relatively easily: comet searches, behavioral
biology, some areas of archaeology and paleontology, and perhaps even
math (although it looks like most interesting problems that don't
require graduate-level math has already been solved). There are many
other areas, though, which require the kind of capital investment that
few entities other than a government can provide, that do not bring
the kind of instant gratification or name recognition that
corporations often demand out of their money, and yet may possibly
benefit all of humanity at some point in the future. It is
disingenuous to argue that "private entities" will continue to fund
these projects in absence of government funding, when every single
culture that saw significant advancement in human knowledge were ruled
by governments that funded intellectuals. Go ahead, name a few
counterexamples. (And no, the US before the 30's was *not* a
significant contributor to human knowledge relative to Europe.) There
is no guarantee that all these nice people will mysteriously appear
out of nowhere and cheerfully give billions of dollars to research
that will not benefit them directly.

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita               <http://www.submm.caltech.edu/%7Eshimpei/>