Snake Oil Salesman/Quotes

Remember: People still sell snake oil. They just put pictures of leaves on the bottle now.

—8 Health Foods That Are Bad For Your Health

We'll drink, a drink, a drink,
To Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink,
The saviour of the human race.
For she invented Medicinal Compound,

Most efficacious in ev'ry case.

—Lily the Pink, Scaffold

So let's look at how the fraud works in detail. Let's say you are a student working on one of the project groups working in this area - for example, there is one at Yale. Let's say you have some cool idea, for something everyone used to think was absolutely impossible - let's say, a type system in which one can write a provably-correct garbage collector. Quelle surprise! Of course, the resulting type system is expressed in the form of an 80-page proof, and the idea that any programmer would actually learn and use any such thing makes about as much sense as putting a Wal-Mart on top of Mount Everest and issuing pitons to the "greeters." But never mind all this. The idea is cool.
So it goes to the professor, who knows how to write grants, and it gets folded into the next grant proposal. A type system is of course essentially a security system - it ensures that your program will behave properly, and not be infected by viruses and such. And Congress is concerned about computer security, which, as we know, is part of national security. With a large quantity of skillful grantsmanship, and various euphemistic ambiguities at all levels, Aunt Gladys's tax dollars end up funding Feizhuang Zhu's type system, Prof. Smith's group gets its funding bumped by 10% and can take on another grad student or even a postdoc, and all is well in Mudville.
Except, of course, for the fact that the whole thing is basically a criminal enterprise […]

— Mencius Moldbug describes over-the-counter Snake Oil Recipe industry.