Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is about the politics of science funding, specifically using the example of "mittening" -- a made-up concept referring to putting mittens on every person on Earth.

In the first panel, someone argues that nobody wants to fund a "pointless megaproject" that costs 450 billion dollars, which is "less than a quarter the cost of mittening every person on Earth." In the second panel, another person counters that a population of 8 billion people could be mittened for around $4 per person with economies of scale driving costs down. A third person asks "Why is this relevant?"

In the following panels, a scientist explains that scientists frequently argue projects should be funded because "the cost is trivial compared to what we spend on mittening" -- suggesting that comparing any expense to some enormous but irrelevant baseline makes it sound cheap. The scientist admits this framing is dishonest because it conflates absolute cost with relative cost. The final exchange has someone saying "I feel like your point is both correct and stupid," to which the scientist responds: "To be clear, I am in no way arguing for or against mittening."

The comic satirizes a common rhetorical trick used in science funding advocacy and policy debates generally: comparing the cost of your preferred project to some much larger expenditure to make it seem trivially cheap. Scientists and advocates frequently say things like "this costs less than what Americans spend on pizza every year" or "this is a fraction of the military budget." While technically true, these comparisons are intellectually dishonest because the existence of larger expenditures doesn't automatically justify smaller ones. The invented concept of "mittening" makes this absurdity crystal clear by using a comparison so ridiculous that the rhetorical trick becomes obvious. The comic is also self-aware enough to acknowledge that pointing this out is both correct and unhelpful -- hence the scientist carefully distancing themselves from having any opinion on mittening itself.