It argues against a proposed marginal cut in spending on science. In order to portray this as a bad idea, he then argues that in total, spending on science is a good thing.
Similarly, I oppose 10% cuts in military spending because if the military were cut 100% 50 years ago, I'd probably have suffered under communism.
This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".
It's an intellectually dishonest and particularly annoying (yet extremely common) way to argue.
My mistake, it's an actual cut rather than merely a proposal.
> This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".
- come again? The negation of a proposition is not its opposite (for most possible understandings of what an opposite is).
The fallacy of the excluded middle is considering only a small subset of possibilities. It applies here, not with what was explicitly stated, but an underlying assumed view. It is assumed that arguing against spending current amount X of money on science, means arguing for not spending any at all. Obviously that would be bad, because we wouldn't have the current benefits. In fact, we can also spend somewhere in between 0 and X (e.g. X/2) or even more than X. We'll get some non-zero amount of benefits for these, and it's not as clear that it's worse off, unlike spending nothing.
When the vast majority of the people who promote science are just as intellectually dishonest as any other variety of religious fundamentalists, I think it rightfully raises a lot of questions about the true value of the endeavor.
What is more common is the attitude that, for example, we should put off manned space exploration "until we solve all of our problems here on Earth." I have personally witnessed this attitude in high school cheerleaders and DC lawyers.
In the interest of fairness: the opinions of some scientists, whose complete life experience is so far removed from any blue collar work that they've never needed to understand why some people don't know anything about science, are often equally as uninformed. (Note: I'm not suggesting Dr. Plait is in this category.)
Now, what you will find is people with attitudes like
1. Useful sciencey things like MRIs and clean water are important, but a lot of what's going on is just a pointless waste of time and money (seriously, you spent how much to figure out the internal mass distribution of Jupiter?), or
2. Science has done all sorts of bad things to the rainforest and stuff!
3. Yes well, science is very important, but we have major budget problems so it's inevitable that pure research budgets need to be cut, or
4. Why are we spending all this money on [huge science project of little practical utility] when [far more urgent and heartrending problem]
But these are much more difficult arguments than the one which Phil Plait appears to want to have with the imaginary dude in his head.
That is significantly less than the cost of... several single large initiatives that have passed through Congress recently (no doubt if I picked an actual example then I'd wind up with a political argument on my hands...)
I've heard of basic science research (and funding) being likened to growing crops (albeit with different timeframes). You have to spend a lot of time and effort sowing seeds and about 20-30 years later you get to harvest the benefits.
Edit: I think other commenters might be missing the irony in the OP. The author mentions LCD monitors, prescription glasses, medicine, clean water, medical technology, the internet, satellites and computers. After all that, he ends with "What have they [scientists] ever done for me?"
