October 10, 2021

There is a social force pushing toward billionaires solving society's problems. It couldn't be more misguided. What have the billionaires spent their time doing? Nothing that tells them what the problems or solutions are.

The worst of it is that the problems are not just technical problems; they start with standards problems. Standards shape the direction of proceeding.

After the standards are screwed up, technical problems become overwhelming. That's because it takes standards to approach technical problems properly—knowing what is possible and what is not.

It means standards must be first and technicalities second. History shows that billionaires try to put the technicalities first with standards nonexistent.

The absurd consequence is that billionaires assume they can solve any problem by hiring someone who knows. The small handful of experts they hire start with low standards to take on absurd tasks, and they do it for the opportunity with no concern for or realization of the impossibilities.

Not the least of the problems is that billionaires lack quantitative judgement. They assume that throwing a few million or billion dollars at something is the answer. Society has spent trillions on unsolvable problems, where billionaires assume a few billion is the fix.

Billionaires assumed they could solve the hydrogen fusion problem. They got as far as pouring concrete before giving up. The world spent 70 years, hundreds of billions of dollars on dozens of projects without success. It was awful poor judgement to assume a few experts were going to succeed.

Studying the technicalities only gets billionaires into more trouble rather than less. The first reason is because technicalities cannot be properly learned that way. Secondly, the persons who produce the superficial information are promoting propaganda for causes. Science and engineering cannot be easily summarized for nonexperts; so the attempts tend to come from propagandists rather than reliable sources.

Yet the social trend is to push in those directions, in part due to the glamorization of fake science and engineering. Only fakery can be glamorized on technical subjects, because the real science and engineering are extremely involved and uninteresting to non-specialists.

So real scientists and engineers get shoved out of science and engineering to remove the obstacles to fake science and engineering.

Journalists and organizations produce that result by controlling the realities of society. They have no ability to evaluate technical subjects, but the bliss of ignorance causes them to assume they have it all figured out. Proper standards would prevent know-nothings from trying to evaluate science and engineering. But the bliss of ignorance overwhelms the standards to such an extent that the problem has been recognized throughout human history.

It should be theoretically possible to determine who is a reliable source of information on technical subjects and who is not. But the actual result tends to be the opposite. Fake scientists overwhelm the public, because lies are more impressive than technicalities.

The universal test of competence is to provide explanations. Competent persons produce enough information for people to decide for themselves. Incompetent corrupters never do. Just trust us is the only explanation frauds can produce, because surrounding realities expose them as the frauds that they are.