My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school.
I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.
On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.
Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence that affirmative action was no longer required and thus ruled against it in new cases.
Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, but national labs do hire foreigners/non-citizens, albeit possibly not from all countries with eligibility for all roles.
I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China.
The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
Well why Americans are not willing to take those PhD offers that pay barely above poverty line for 5 years or so? The answer is obvious, they would rather take a job in industry that pays miles better.
There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
I think it is misunderstanding to think that Phd Salaries will increase to high level if immigrants left. Will NIH or NSF dump 3 x more money? If that is the case are civil servants in USA getting super great salary (a friend works for DMV in NJ and she says pay is awful)
> There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with.
> Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Long flights and leaving friends/family behind? You mean like... most undergrad students in the US? Sitting on a plane is the argument?
I get all that. I grew up in Santa Cruz and wish I could go home but can't because of the cost. I can't imagine having to leave my entire country. I'm not trying to put down immigrants in those positions. I am inspired by immigrants. I am inspired by foreigners who come here.
But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'.
I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive.
H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it).
OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
A good and balanced take, this. Too bad we don't even allow those on the political stage anymore :(
All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
I'm a white American and I've heard a handful of my fellow white Americans say this, but they can't actually show me real world examples or show me how it actually affected them.
It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!"
When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens.
Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
None of this addresses that it's basic human nature. Nor provides any way to improve anything.
"I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?"
Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything.
"Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude."
Pick one of the above. You can't pick both.
"It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this."
It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.
If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.
Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
Is that better than the US response? By the time the Royal Commission started, the total amount the Catholic Church in the US had paid out was approaching a billion dollars (back when a billion dollars could buy you instagram). Dioceses have continued to pay since then and many had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US.
That seems like a more severe response than a single cardinal getting arrested.
There were consequences, but only eventually as the depravity of what was happening became ever more apparent as the list of victims willing to speak out grew.
But in all the places this was happening, it was an open secret that it was happening for years before any meaningful response occurred. The first victims to speak out were not believed and even punished for how dare they accuse the holy priests of such behavior.
Will we see a similar tipping point for climate change where people on mass begin facing the issue head on? It hasn't happened yet.
I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.
Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline.
If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
The anti-science right was a lot easier to ignore when they weren't actually ripping apart the US scientific apparatus, yes. How is that remotely demonstrative of a conspiracy?
> Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
Sure, but again, this misses the point. Regardless of how conservatives talk about science, if Congress keeps on broadly funding research, then scientists can fairly focus on actions over words. It's only when Congress cuts funding that we're forced to reckon with the fact that most Americans don't actually prioritize science.
So: yes, it's the funding cuts that cause the frustration and sadness. But not because this results in a personal job loss, but because this shows how our country is going downhill.
Speaking personally, two of my siblings took government buyouts, but still then moved out of the country. You can be ok with your own personal job loss (particularly when it comes with a fat check), but unhappy with the direction the country is going.
It's kinda weird that you keep making this about the impact to personal finances, rather than the impact to principles. Wouldn't you feel frustration and disappointment if your homeland was acting contrary to your principles?
> It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.
Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.
> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.
Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.
But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!
Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.
The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.
Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.
If the bible cited even 1/1000th as many studies and experiments as the IPCC Reports, it would be a very different book.
> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.
If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:
1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it
2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.
These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!
Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.
Interestingly, the IPCC reports themselves (not the summaries for policymakers) are quite optimistic. IIRC something like, if we do nothing to abate emissions, climate damages in 2100 will cause damage equivalent to ~3% of GDP per year. (With GDP being many times higher than now per capita). Hardly a catastrophic prediction!
I know, right? They bend over backwards to not be "alarmist," even perhaps a bit more than they should. But of course this wins them zero credit from their political opponents, which is an important lesson about politics: seeking middle ground with someone bent on destroying you is a fool's errand.
The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
On one hand we have the IPCC with concrete claims, detailed explanations, piles of survey papers expanding the details, and piles of novel and confirming work behind each survey.
On the other we have adornKey, with vague accusations and smack talk that feel like they came from a LLM, still stuck at gate #1. Sad.
> The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
> The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
Thank goodness honest citizens like "AdornKey" are around to pinpoint the precise reasons why the international community of climate scientists are crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant. I am certainly glad that "AdornKey" made this laser-focused contribution to my understanding.
> It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics. Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled
Wat
I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.
I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.
This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.
Great! But the number of people that actually bother to check some numbers are very small. Even guys that scored well in related tests in university usually don't have the slightest clue how any relevant spectrum looks like, and how the numbers add up.
So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis?
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
He’s probably a bot or paid to post misinformation to muddy the waters. The topic is highly financially charged despite overwhelming evidence on one side.
This will go too far, but if you want to understand things, maybe HITRAN Database is interesting for you. There've been detailed calculations what is going on with absorption. How the absorption spectrums of relevant gases look like is a start. The next question is to check how much potential a gas has (how much energy is available in that spectrum?). HITRAN is an extensive database for the relevant lines. The results are interesting and a bit surprising...
But all this has been explained and cancelled again and again... It's no good topic in any religious environment where nobody has bothered to get basic knowledge about the physics before.
Your numbers most likely aren't exact. But most interesting is what you mean with "other things" and how much this is expressed in numbers. And have you looked up any numbers about methane?
One example is that whenever patents expire on some refrigerants or related process somehow magically at that same exact moment Dupont or other chemical IP behemoth magically find a new one safe for the ozone, the science magically all aligns at that moment, and congress/EPA finds the time to change the law before one iota of generic industry can squeeze out.
I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.
Ozone is an interesting topic. CFCs seem to be very potent climate gases. But I haven't checked any calculations about them, yet. I'd love to see a good analysis of the absorption-spectrum. Adding something new to the atmosphere has a lot of warming potential - but the question always is how fast it reaches a level of saturation. For ozone and CFCs years of media coverage haven't brought any insight. Having 3 different updated versions of Dupont-products in the atmosphere could be good or bad - most likely people haven't bothered to check, yet... But they're all full of furious knowledge. People "know" that banning CFCs "cured" the ozone hole - but they don't ask why it shrunk too early, and why the situation hasn't changed at all for decades now...
I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.
Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.
How about you get 1$ from me for every paper you found there that answers my question - and I get 1$ from you for every paper that is not relevant to my question?
Your original claim was that people haven’t bothered to check. When someone pointed out there are tens of thousands of papers on the subject, you changed the question to find papers that answer my specific question.
Those are not the same claim. You went from arguing that the research doesn’t exist to arguing that you haven’t personally seen research that satisfies you.
The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
>The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.
>Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.
This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.
> defending politicians as customers of scientists
I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.
> ... demanding politically convenient science.
and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.
> ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.
There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.
> What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts
The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."
Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary
Such is life in fascism. This is why we used to try to avoid fascism. It sucks.
Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.
You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
> To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
I mean, yes, there's some shoddy ideology-as-science at various universities but those people all still have jobs. That's not what got cut by DOGE, apparently.
> Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.
From TFA (more like 10th graf after a lot on the NASA project):
> research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,”
That sounds like science to me, they're trying to quantify health outcomes relative to community environment. Later research can use the figures, just like with your black hole observations.
One could say that maybe they should measure low-income communities in general with race as a dimension, but that doesn't make the whole thing "bad science".
Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process. Thanks for reminding me that you quoted that, I'm just not understanding the objection from then until now.
Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".
I don't follow. Are there not sciences that primarily study a type of human relationship? Economics, for instance, which covers our financial relationships with each other.
Having mingled and worked at length with PhD-level folks in both STEM and the social sciences, rest assured: social scientists are some of the smartest researchers out there, almost to a frightening degree. So your dismissal is genuinely chuckle-inducing to me.
The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
> The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences
This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.
> work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing
Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth.
Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outcomes? Perhaps confounding factors?
Do you have a specific example of a wasteful STEM research project that was cut?
My (perhaps wrong) impression was that wastefulness was given as the reason for making the cuts, but that the cuts were done broadly and indiscriminately [1].
In other words, the actions don't match the stated goal of reducing wastefulness. They seem more like a punishment for the members of all scientific institutions, and deterrence for curiosity-driven research.
[1] For example, the cuts to the STEM grants & projects didn't seem attached to any evidence of said projects' wastefulness.
Like that program to study the mating patterns of sterile flies in Panama, right? They cut that because it was a $300k waste of money. Do you know what happened after they cut it? The US got a $300m infestation of those flies.
How does it feel to spread miss-information on internet? The Panama barrier was broken by screwworms 2 years before the cuts. It was dumb decision but didn't directly cause current infestation.
Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done? Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
> Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done?
Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.
> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.
> I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
The keywords search cuts were not exactly skillfully enacted.
> Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
Well, assuming that this is not an apocryphal story, and that there's no other relevant missing details (e.g. "research into silly topic X also used the word engendered"), etc., then that's dumb. I'm not going to argue about hearsay.
I will say this: before you believe such claims, you should verify them. They're often misremembered or completely made up. In particular, I'm not sure how anyone would know what keyword search was used to target their grant for review.
Thank you for providing your perspective. I really hope HN has a 'pre-vouch' button as I know your comment will be flagged in no time, even though it's quite articulated.
> while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel
There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
> randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold
You ignore the political and economic system within which the scientific system sits.
> if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor
Again, your normative standard for what is legitimate.
> simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas.
They're trendy for a reason. Science is, at it's core, questioning things because someone cares about it.
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research.
Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all.
This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can also tell "good research" thanks to years and years of advanced training, which I have used here to tell you that most of this stuff you like is bad.
> Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
If you can't do the experiment, you don't deserve scientific funding. Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority. Unfortunately, advanced training is not unique to you, and so, you don't get a singular say on what's good or bad.
> so let's not have any standards at all.
Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
> Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
And there's your actual point. You hate that science is so affected by the politics of those who control the funding.
But that's always been the case. Wars have done more for physics than curiosity.
> That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority.
How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you...
Anyway, I'm just telling you that I actually do have enough experience to know the difference between a good question and a bad one, and I'm applying that experience here.
> Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
No, your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times. Here, I'll quote you:
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
Reducing uncertainty is great. I'm all for it. Sometimes it's even worth paying for. Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
> How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you
A problem of authorization can be solved with delegated authority. I'm saying your use of it is as evidence for your reasoning is weak. Those are two different problems.
> your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times.
Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all." You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
> You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
You're placing words in my mouth. I didn't say I like the research, I'm saying I don't like your grounds for dismissing it. I don't dismiss your expertise but I reject it as sufficient evidence for your argument.
> Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
If you cannot see the hubris here, if you cannot see how unscientific it is to conclude (reductively) the results of an experiment before the experiment, then we are at an end. Let's move on.
> Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all."
No, I concluded that from a process of deduction, but fair enough. You're arguing that nobody can be qualified to critique the thing you support.
> You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
It's just another way to try to arrive at the same place through the back door: my standard is wrong, because it's "normative" (or "political", or whatever other word you use in the next post), but your standard is (again, for some reason) not those things.
You don't like what I'm saying, so you reject my ability to say it. And when I catch you in this fallacy, you'll slip back to arguing that all research might be relevant to someone somewhere, and who are we to judge anyway, man, and blah blah blah. You're obviously just being big-brained and magnanimous.
Well, your deduction was unsound. And continues to be unsound. You can critique anything as long as you know you can be wrong too.
> Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
You're hand-waving. Your stance is political but not irrelevant. Your stance is philosophical (resting on chosen assumptions) and not empirically irrefutable.
Not acknowledging that is why you fail to convince.
You've made this argument about you and your ability to "catch" people. You have no argument that stands on its own construction.
A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data.
Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.
Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.
I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.
Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.
> Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research.
I mean...not to be too flippant, but they don't. They're busy with hard problems to actually get people out of poverty, and don't have to worry about pesky partisan politics getting in the way. Plus, like, Mao is not that far in the rear-view mirror, y'know? It would be at least a little bit ironic to spend a lot of time researching that question.
Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation.
(Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)
> So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
Just because the medical system hasn't adapted to the (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research doesn't mean it's not valuable or should be stopped. The takeaway from SDOH is that social determinants are by far more powerful forces on people's health than actual medicine.
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
> (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research
I'm telling you, these same "astounding" findings were around 20 years ago. I learned about them when I was an undergraduate. They haven't changed.
Things can be astounding and still be old news. Quantum mechanics were astounding in 1930. Doesn't mean we should firehose money into standard model research. The world moves on.
> You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research, and so I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?
> I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research,
Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".
Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.
> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".
Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.
Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.
These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.
You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?
> Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.
This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.
OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.
> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
> This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao. There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
> I don't know [how to mitigate health disparities]! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
Huh? I didn't claim to have all the answers lol, you did.
> Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao.
OK, cool. Let's not do more of that, then. I just said that I could see the difference between the questions, and that they're not likely to get funding elsewhere, not that we should absolutely fund more black hole space telescopes.
> There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
No. Not in the same class as "are poor people sicker than rich people", or "does gravity cause things to fall down". Next question.
I understand you personally are of the opinion that it's bad research, but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
> but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
Why not, I pay taxes too and I want researchers to study things you don't like. I don't want to fund the military, should they get their funding from Lockheed? Lord knows they have enough...
Exactly: You and every other tax payer is entitled to have an opinion on how the money is spent, so why your original comment about "topics you don't personally like"?
> It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
Note: There is always some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled literally all through the entire course of scientific history.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
> America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research
This sounds very bad! But since I'm not arguing in favor of technical decline and irreparable harm, it doesn't mean that my argument is wrong.
> let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose,
I'm confused: is science funding a welfare state for people who want to be scientists, or is it a meritocracy by which we fund the development of science?
> and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut,
Well...yes.
> when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Erm, so what? I can't have an opinion on bad science?
You're not making the decision either, but apparently you're allowed to have one.
The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.
If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
> The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Well golly. Mind numbing!
> Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
What "false beliefs" are those?
> The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from.
You literally just bragged that you were a member of countless NBER meta-science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors.
Tell me more about how the "universal lesson" is that you don't pick and choose. We do it all the time.
You just don't like my opinion, but you can't argue on the merits, so you resort to this stuff.
> You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from.
Great. I'm not doing that.
This isn't hard: there's such a thing as derivative, bad science that is unlikely to lead to novel results. It's fair to critique research on those grounds. "Social determinants of health" is a perfect example of this kind of science. I don't even disagree with the conclusions. I just think the science is terrible and shouldn't be funded. It's not just this area: observational nutrition research is generally abysmal science, and shouldn't be funded, yet is common. There's a replication crisis across the sciences, with certain fields being overrepresented.
This is not an imaginary problem.
Arguing that we don't filter science for quality, is of course, dumb and wrong. We do it all the time. It's just that some fashionable fields are able to bypass this test, because some folks substitute politics and indignance for logic.
> You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
You know, for a person who wants desperately to appeal to scientific authority, you resort to personal insults a lot. You'd think, if you were truly on the winning intellectual side of this, you could deal with the actual argument.
There is a far deeper problem, a systemic and foundational one; and unfortunately the whole system and all its components are all so vetted to the current rotten and distorted system that no amount of good intentions or personal dedication or will can overcome it. Unfortunately for us all we are at the precipice of a chasm and the forces of nature are upon us.
Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
> prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is great news. It was "unheard of until now" because everyone before this madness started ~ 2010, was sane enough to not put DEI criteria in grant allotments.
I'm glad something is finally being done about these appalling discriminatory practices. The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
Let's take this moment to welcome real science back.
Research in progress to address these issues was cancelled by DOGE because "melanin content of the skin." "Do your own research" if you care to, or fuck off.
> "Do your own research" if you care to, or fuck off.
Oh yes, the false moralizing fake outrage trick. Very good. But now that we addressed your attempt at diverting the issue:
People in this thread are complaining about canceling DEI initiatives targeting the melanin levels of the researchers, not of the test subjects. In fact, the lengthily answer from the grandparent that you praise, says exactly that.
Sorry if it was too simple to call out your attempt at confusing the subject of the discussion.
Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?
Inclusion Plan
Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies.
The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators
It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders.
Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
Oh, if that's really your complaint about this all businesses, then yeah, let's all work together to clearly separate the DEI terms that apply to people and those that are actually scientific (like the diversity on crops someone mentions below).
Then we can more easily get rid of these discriminatory measures in practice (the real DEI ones) and keep the false flags.
Is that fine for you? Or that was just some red herring you were trying there?
> Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
Since this can only mean the DOGE witch hunt we all clearly remember, I think Elon Musk was paying for it? But now it's just taxpayer money (if there is anything left after "contributing" to all of Trumps many funds).
> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
It's called meritocracy. That's how society used to work: people applied and the best ones got the job.
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse" instead of more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
You know you can't just put one topic into the grievance bucket (science funding), shake it around, then pull out a different topic (orchestral hiring practices) and expect to have a conversation, right?
Seems like you didn't read the thread properly, but who transformed this subthread into a discussion about DEI, was someone else.
Now, I know that people that defend these discriminatory practices love to put them all into tiny boxes and prevent any proper comparisons, but what can I tell you, I just the kind of person that doesn't change their principles based on the target.
So yeah, in a discussion about DEI, when someone complains that area A has too many "white men" and that's due to discrimination, it's completely valid to point you that when people with the same ideology tried to impose blind testing in area B, they ended up hiring even more of those, very awful, "white men" because it turn out they were the best ones for the job and where already being discriminated against.
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
In a previous project I ended up talking with a scientist who couldn't shut up about how she was 1/4th Indigenous and how many grants that could open for our collaboration.
If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany. That someone was doing this in 2022 was extremely off-putting. That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
A research system can adapt to lower funding if the rules are stable. What it can't adapt to is grants being frozen, staff disappearing mid-project, forbidden vocabulary changing
the recent drama about science funding to me highlights one of the main problems with our grant-based distribution system: which is that it is unsurprisingly very frail to fast-moving changes in government and society at large.
science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.
these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that.
But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.
From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.
[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
Unironically parroting uniparty lines is moronic. Sure there are problems with the Democrats, but both-sideism is at this point being wilfully blind.
As an external observer to US politics it would be great for the country to move past the two-party system, but to say they are the same is ridiculous.
You have to remember that many of us are worried about the effects on everyone but the people pulling the levers are only worried about effects on themselves, and (at least in the short term) they are absolutely benefiting (e.g. enriching) themselves, regardless of how much damage it does to everyone else.
Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and star creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.
I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah
The article buried the lede. DEI was the bridge too far that lit a massive tinderbox among the electorate who wanted the vast majority of what happened with DOGE, to happen. DEI was the appetizer, and once the teeth starting biting it found a lot more than anticipated (USAID). The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.
tbf I don't think Chinese citizens are faring any better than the West reporting on the ground, it's also possible there are numerous problems coalescing at the same time for humanity on a global scale.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
The fact that people think the current state of chaos is a consequence of recent developments clearly tells us more about why it is in chaos than those types of people have the capacity to hear or understand.
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
Yeah, while it's particularly bad lately, I'm remembering Richard Hofstadter's book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", which one the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for tracing the religious, cultural, and economic roots of american anti-intellectualism.
This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get funding, something that is unacceptable.
I don't think you're going to win much sympathy when you've demonstrated you can't distinguish between generically "jews" and "Israel."
You can hate the genocidal Israelis and how far the AIPAC/Israel lobby has crawled up the ass of nearly the entire US political apparatus without being a neo-nazi that wants to stomp out the Jewish faith.
Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
For a Chinese century you'd need there to be anyone in China in a century. With the one child policy they have run out of young women and are running out of middle aged men. The Chinese, and Asian, population pyramids make Europe look young and vibrant.
The US situation is mitigated by both Russia and China deciding to make massive, foolish maneuvers at the same time as ours. However neither can match how stupendously we are lighting our future on fire in every possible dimension.
China is undergoing a 2008 style financial crisis due to real estate speculation and deflation due to very weak domestic spending.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
Not is but the obvious one was COVID policy during 2020-2022. It triggered the closest thing to a domestic unrest you can get in China after 1989, a large exodus of middle class, and an almost 50% crash in their real estate market. The last one is very deadly and still ongoing because that is how China financed its growth for decades.
I don't see that happening. The US debt will hinder any big expense that could keep it in any game long term.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
It is absolutely a Chinese century. Even the comment above isn’t wrong per se - great power competition is normal during the interregnum, ie as Arrighi described it - one hegemon is rising while another is declining. But eventually one of them does rise and the world conforms to that - ie America in post WW2.
> Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
And kill the savings of what remains of the middle class. Probably they will do it though, as it is a slow thing and is not felt by the average Joe like a tax hike or loss of benefits. So the policians won't trigger an outrage by doing so.
hyperinflation is very fast, but I think they'll do it, by accident because they don't know how anything works, but I think it's impossible to accurately predict when.
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
Look at GDP growth in the US vs EU over the last 10 years or so if you want to talk about innovation. Europe has been stagnating economically and real productivity growth is critical to a modern economy. The large hadron collider does some impressive research, but it doesn't move the sort of innovation in practical machinery and infrastructure that powers a modern economy.
As an European, yeah, we probably are doing really good with basic science, but what about innovation when it comes to productivity? Why there is no AI lab (apart from Mistral) in EU? Why there is no European model (and hasn't been probably ever) in the pareto fronteer? Or any other really innovative company in the last while (I believe Spotify was the last European unicorn that transformed the landscape in the market they operate into).
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
> The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
There used to be a time when you came across accounts from 100 years ago - and you'd just be flabbergasted by the whimsical stupidity when laid out so plainly.
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
Policy doesn't matter any more. Every case is judged as an individual case. Elon hasn't had his citizenship stripped because he's powerful and the president likes him, that's it.
Am scientist.
We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
Reading this article, I think Elon Musk is a genius. He's truly smart. He's cutting the budget of his smartest competitor, NASA, so that when national scientists and engineers are thrown out onto the streets, they'll end up at SpaceX.
Not only that, but real innovations like cancer treatments require decades of unprofitable 'basic science' grunt work. Musk and his friends don't care about saving humanity 30 years from now. He talks about going to Mars with nonsense lies to fatten his own pockets. And by filling the science advisory committee with VCs instead of scientists, he has turned science in America from a 'pursuit of truth' into a 'Silicon Valley VC portfolio.'
Elon Musk is a genius. He will destroy the growth engines that could produce his future competitors, and he will reign forever.
The smart thing about Elon Musk and his friends is their ban on international cooperation among scientists and their word censorship. They seem to think that viruses like Ebola will enter the country by getting a Trump card issued. Clearly, smart people like them cannot understand ordinary people like us. To them, it's only natural that everything comes through a visa, so they probably think viruses come through visas too.
Elon Musk's lecturing about border etiquette for viruses can be described as a kind of elite duty. Indeed, injecting morality into something immoral is 'noblesse oblige.
First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9.
What DOGE has actually struck is not the procurement budget for launch vehicles, but the destruction of the internal engineering capability to design them. The benefit of destroying that capability, in turn, greatly favors SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't want NASA to be a smart partner that builds its own rockets; it wants NASA to be nothing more than a giant wallet that just pays money.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
To be clear, DOGE's strategy is not actually for America.
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but he hasn't been part of this administration for a while. And also i'm not quite sure you have his views on NASA funding (one of his main customers) right, you're just making them up.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
You guys can't see it can you? You're just in the filter bubble. Let's take this quote from the article, shall we...
>“The most passionate and creative scientists are very intuitive and very driven by emotion and curiosity,” says Gregory Feist, a psychologist at San José State University who studies scientists. “Until Trump, they’d been able to keep political questions out of mind.”
See, that's a filter bubble state of mind. "Driven by emotion" evidently means calling anyone who disagrees with you a "science denier." You were being politcal all along. Now that the people you spent the last 30 years insulting are in charge, they want blood for all the bad things you said to them. Only now is it "Oh no! I don't like being political!"
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." You bit the hand that feeds you and you stopped getting fed. Whether you like it or not, both sides, the red and the blue, are your government. If you attack either, you're attacking your government. That's not a wise decision when your government pays your salary. You can't just let someone like James Hansen run off at the mouth for decades and not expect blowback.
No, this isn't correct. The Scopes Monkey Trial would like a word.
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...
But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.
Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
I never said half the country is irrational. I specifically called out that people in power do not care to live in a shared reality with the rest of us. They lie directly [1][2], or dismantle the institutions that would be able to push back on their lies [2][3]. Countless examples of this in the last few years.
I do think a non-trivial portion of the population has opinions that have unfortunately diverged from what a board of climate scientists or epidemiologist would say is the appropriate state of affairs, and yes this is a problem we all need to figure out how to correct.
Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel.
The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
Valuations are often an absurd fantasy. The notion is that Musk could find a buyer who would be willing to pay that based on the value of each share he owns. It’s not real money. He can borrow against it but not too much, and he will have to find a way of paying the lender back without selling stock. The money is not real.
If he dumped all of his shares the value of them would essentially go away, like with any commodity.
He gets to exercise power based on his valuation, and in that sense, it is real. He is now known as the world's richest person and first one point five trillionaire, even if he doesn't have one point five trillion dollar bills in his closet. He gets people to suck up to him for fractions of it - "do X for me and I'll give you shares worth a million"
No, no, they're definitely correct. There's no hard limit on the amount of money created. Excess money creation just results in inflation.
More to the point: Congress is being profligate in other spending, and miserly w.r.t. science, so it does indeed look like the science cuts are not motivated by fiscal responsibility.
Your quip about "basic economic theory" doesn't really address the point they're making.
Um, "basic economic theory" would include the processes that create money and the limits on them, which can be disabled, and what happens if the limits are disabled
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what had accumulated prior to ever electing him.
Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.
Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
Honestly, yes. I would expect that, or at least whichever party controls Congress to defund efforts that would seek to hurt them. The real abberation is that university funding has gone unscathed for so long. It's said too much and honestly I hate it, but consider the hypothetical: what if 80% of professors expounded right wing ideologies for about, 60 years? Would you not expect some kind of backlash?
Eh, I think there's a bit of a logical jump between "professors hate Trump" and "professors are expounding left-wing ideologies".
Yes, most professors are opposed to Trump. But when you're talking to a professor of, say, metallurgy, he's not using his classroom to rant against Trump. He's using his classroom to teach students about metallurgy, which is a pretty dang useful service to a modern industrial economy. Professor's personal political views aren't interfering with the economic and scientific value he's providing to the country.
Which is why the universities and research centers have largely been untouched until now. Until Trump, both sides could recognize that even if there was political disagreement between the professors and the politicians, the professors were still doing important work.
Trump took it personally, and on that personal basis he's now eroding our scientific and technological future. We're eating our seed corn, here.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I wonder who makes assumptions that these differences are marginal and refuse or deny any studies that conclude otherwise. The left version of climate change if you will.
What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites?
Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
> Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.
There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.
So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.
ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal
I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
> I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups
I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.
> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.
No matter how noble your intentions are, if you reject science then you're anti-science. Leftists need to learn to admit that about themselves instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too.
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
It is far worse than "this administration", the population in general are vastly undereducated, to the degree they do not even realize how serious this is.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
Science, or more specific to what we're talking about, public research which happens mostly in universities, has turned political long before this administration.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
> realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
What happens right now is vastly different than before. Of course there are different priorities in funding for each administration, but those are usually more gradual shifts and especially don't cancel running grants arbitrarily.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
Just lies upon lies. Always the same weak rhetoric of "it's both sides!". The truth is that science didn't get more political, the right is just going in a direction orthogonal to material reality.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented
Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.
> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.
---
It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.
Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
They want the 1850s.
I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.
On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence that affirmative action was no longer required and thus ruled against it in new cases.
The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
> Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Long flights and leaving friends/family behind? You mean like... most undergrad students in the US? Sitting on a plane is the argument?
But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'.
I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive.
H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it).
OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!"
When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens.
Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
"I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything.
"Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude." Pick one of the above. You can't pick both.
"It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this." It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
Given the massive pay gap with industry and scarce funding, it's natural lots of innovation has shifted to industrial labs.
Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
That seems like a more severe response than a single cardinal getting arrested.
I'm pleased to hear a response was made and hope Eddy_Viscosity2 sees your comment.
But in all the places this was happening, it was an open secret that it was happening for years before any meaningful response occurred. The first victims to speak out were not believed and even punished for how dare they accuse the holy priests of such behavior.
Will we see a similar tipping point for climate change where people on mass begin facing the issue head on? It hasn't happened yet.
We can talk about Indian coal companies (Thermal), global steel demand (Metallurgical), US natural gas extractors, etc.
Still, at least we have the vast areas untouched by modern man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
Sure, but again, this misses the point. Regardless of how conservatives talk about science, if Congress keeps on broadly funding research, then scientists can fairly focus on actions over words. It's only when Congress cuts funding that we're forced to reckon with the fact that most Americans don't actually prioritize science.
So: yes, it's the funding cuts that cause the frustration and sadness. But not because this results in a personal job loss, but because this shows how our country is going downhill.
Speaking personally, two of my siblings took government buyouts, but still then moved out of the country. You can be ok with your own personal job loss (particularly when it comes with a fat check), but unhappy with the direction the country is going.
It's kinda weird that you keep making this about the impact to personal finances, rather than the impact to principles. Wouldn't you feel frustration and disappointment if your homeland was acting contrary to your principles?
It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.
Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.
> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.
Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.
But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!
Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.
The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.
> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.
If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:
1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it
2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.
These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!
Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.
The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
On the other we have adornKey, with vague accusations and smack talk that feel like they came from a LLM, still stuck at gate #1. Sad.
> The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
Thank goodness honest citizens like "AdornKey" are around to pinpoint the precise reasons why the international community of climate scientists are crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant. I am certainly glad that "AdornKey" made this laser-focused contribution to my understanding.
Wat
I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.
I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.
This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.
Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
I’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.
But all this has been explained and cancelled again and again... It's no good topic in any religious environment where nobody has bothered to get basic knowledge about the physics before.
That ignores all the other things that happen besides co2 forcing alone.
I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.
I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.
Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.
Those are not the same claim. You went from arguing that the research doesn’t exist to arguing that you haven’t personally seen research that satisfies you.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.
>Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.
This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.
> defending politicians as customers of scientists
I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.
> ... demanding politically convenient science.
and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.
> ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.
There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.
> What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts
The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."
Whoops, keyword match.
Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
I didn't malign all social sciences.
> Do you think we have it all figured out?
No.
I mean, yes, there's some shoddy ideology-as-science at various universities but those people all still have jobs. That's not what got cut by DOGE, apparently.
No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.
But I appreciate the subtle insinuation!
> research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,”
That sounds like science to me, they're trying to quantify health outcomes relative to community environment. Later research can use the figures, just like with your black hole observations.
One could say that maybe they should measure low-income communities in general with race as a dimension, but that doesn't make the whole thing "bad science".
Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".
This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.
Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth.
Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outcomes? Perhaps confounding factors?
My (perhaps wrong) impression was that wastefulness was given as the reason for making the cuts, but that the cuts were done broadly and indiscriminately [1].
In other words, the actions don't match the stated goal of reducing wastefulness. They seem more like a punishment for the members of all scientific institutions, and deterrence for curiosity-driven research.
[1] For example, the cuts to the STEM grants & projects didn't seem attached to any evidence of said projects' wastefulness.
Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.
> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.
Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
The keywords search cuts were not exactly skillfully enacted.
Well, assuming that this is not an apocryphal story, and that there's no other relevant missing details (e.g. "research into silly topic X also used the word engendered"), etc., then that's dumb. I'm not going to argue about hearsay.
I will say this: before you believe such claims, you should verify them. They're often misremembered or completely made up. In particular, I'm not sure how anyone would know what keyword search was used to target their grant for review.
I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
> repeating things we already know
Not a terribly scientific stance.
> while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel
There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
> randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold
You ignore the political and economic system within which the scientific system sits.
> if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor
Again, your normative standard for what is legitimate.
> simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas.
They're trendy for a reason. Science is, at it's core, questioning things because someone cares about it.
Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all.
This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can also tell "good research" thanks to years and years of advanced training, which I have used here to tell you that most of this stuff you like is bad.
> Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
If you can't do the experiment, you don't deserve scientific funding. Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority. Unfortunately, advanced training is not unique to you, and so, you don't get a singular say on what's good or bad.
> so let's not have any standards at all.
Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
> Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
And there's your actual point. You hate that science is so affected by the politics of those who control the funding.
But that's always been the case. Wars have done more for physics than curiosity.
How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you...
Anyway, I'm just telling you that I actually do have enough experience to know the difference between a good question and a bad one, and I'm applying that experience here.
> Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
No, your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times. Here, I'll quote you:
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
Reducing uncertainty is great. I'm all for it. Sometimes it's even worth paying for. Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
A problem of authorization can be solved with delegated authority. I'm saying your use of it is as evidence for your reasoning is weak. Those are two different problems.
> your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times.
Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all." You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
> You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
You're placing words in my mouth. I didn't say I like the research, I'm saying I don't like your grounds for dismissing it. I don't dismiss your expertise but I reject it as sufficient evidence for your argument.
> Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
If you cannot see the hubris here, if you cannot see how unscientific it is to conclude (reductively) the results of an experiment before the experiment, then we are at an end. Let's move on.
No, I concluded that from a process of deduction, but fair enough. You're arguing that nobody can be qualified to critique the thing you support.
> You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
It's just another way to try to arrive at the same place through the back door: my standard is wrong, because it's "normative" (or "political", or whatever other word you use in the next post), but your standard is (again, for some reason) not those things.
You don't like what I'm saying, so you reject my ability to say it. And when I catch you in this fallacy, you'll slip back to arguing that all research might be relevant to someone somewhere, and who are we to judge anyway, man, and blah blah blah. You're obviously just being big-brained and magnanimous.
> Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
You're hand-waving. Your stance is political but not irrelevant. Your stance is philosophical (resting on chosen assumptions) and not empirically irrefutable.
Not acknowledging that is why you fail to convince.
You've made this argument about you and your ability to "catch" people. You have no argument that stands on its own construction.
> I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
I expected your comment is upvoted, as HN community generally does to 'you don't know what you're talking about' kind of comment, so no.
Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.
Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.
Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.
I mean...not to be too flippant, but they don't. They're busy with hard problems to actually get people out of poverty, and don't have to worry about pesky partisan politics getting in the way. Plus, like, Mao is not that far in the rear-view mirror, y'know? It would be at least a little bit ironic to spend a lot of time researching that question.
Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation.
(Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)
I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
I'm telling you, these same "astounding" findings were around 20 years ago. I learned about them when I was an undergraduate. They haven't changed.
Things can be astounding and still be old news. Quantum mechanics were astounding in 1930. Doesn't mean we should firehose money into standard model research. The world moves on.
> You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
No. Next question.
Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?
Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".
Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.
> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".
Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.
Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.
These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.
You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?
This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.
This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.
OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.
> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao. There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
> I don't know [how to mitigate health disparities]! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
Huh? I didn't claim to have all the answers lol, you did.
OK, cool. Let's not do more of that, then. I just said that I could see the difference between the questions, and that they're not likely to get funding elsewhere, not that we should absolutely fund more black hole space telescopes.
> There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
No. Not in the same class as "are poor people sicker than rich people", or "does gravity cause things to fall down". Next question.
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
This sounds very bad! But since I'm not arguing in favor of technical decline and irreparable harm, it doesn't mean that my argument is wrong.
> let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose,
I'm confused: is science funding a welfare state for people who want to be scientists, or is it a meritocracy by which we fund the development of science?
> and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut,
Well...yes.
> when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Erm, so what? I can't have an opinion on bad science?
You're not making the decision either, but apparently you're allowed to have one.
Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.
If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
Well golly. Mind numbing!
> Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
What "false beliefs" are those?
> The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from.
You literally just bragged that you were a member of countless NBER meta-science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors. Tell me more about how the "universal lesson" is that you don't pick and choose. We do it all the time.
You just don't like my opinion, but you can't argue on the merits, so you resort to this stuff.
> You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from.
Great. I'm not doing that.
This isn't hard: there's such a thing as derivative, bad science that is unlikely to lead to novel results. It's fair to critique research on those grounds. "Social determinants of health" is a perfect example of this kind of science. I don't even disagree with the conclusions. I just think the science is terrible and shouldn't be funded. It's not just this area: observational nutrition research is generally abysmal science, and shouldn't be funded, yet is common. There's a replication crisis across the sciences, with certain fields being overrepresented.
This is not an imaginary problem.
Arguing that we don't filter science for quality, is of course, dumb and wrong. We do it all the time. It's just that some fashionable fields are able to bypass this test, because some folks substitute politics and indignance for logic.
> You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
You know, for a person who wants desperately to appeal to scientific authority, you resort to personal insults a lot. You'd think, if you were truly on the winning intellectual side of this, you could deal with the actual argument.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is great news. It was "unheard of until now" because everyone before this madness started ~ 2010, was sane enough to not put DEI criteria in grant allotments.
I'm glad something is finally being done about these appalling discriminatory practices. The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
Let's take this moment to welcome real science back.
Here is a scientific outcome that directly impacts the quality of medicine a majority of American citizens receive: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Research in progress to address these issues was cancelled by DOGE because "melanin content of the skin." "Do your own research" if you care to, or fuck off.
Oh yes, the false moralizing fake outrage trick. Very good. But now that we addressed your attempt at diverting the issue:
People in this thread are complaining about canceling DEI initiatives targeting the melanin levels of the researchers, not of the test subjects. In fact, the lengthily answer from the grandparent that you praise, says exactly that.
Sorry if it was too simple to call out your attempt at confusing the subject of the discussion.
Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies. The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders. Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
Then we can more easily get rid of these discriminatory measures in practice (the real DEI ones) and keep the false flags.
Is that fine for you? Or that was just some red herring you were trying there?
Potato monocultures fed literal millions for a good while, Shirley it can't hurt to see grain cropping go that way.
Since this can only mean the DOGE witch hunt we all clearly remember, I think Elon Musk was paying for it? But now it's just taxpayer money (if there is anything left after "contributing" to all of Trumps many funds).
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse" instead of more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
Now, I know that people that defend these discriminatory practices love to put them all into tiny boxes and prevent any proper comparisons, but what can I tell you, I just the kind of person that doesn't change their principles based on the target.
So yeah, in a discussion about DEI, when someone complains that area A has too many "white men" and that's due to discrimination, it's completely valid to point you that when people with the same ideology tried to impose blind testing in area B, they ended up hiring even more of those, very awful, "white men" because it turn out they were the best ones for the job and where already being discriminated against.
What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
It is not, however, based on who can claim to be the biggest victim. It is based on a simple statistical analysis of demographics.
If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany. That someone was doing this in 2022 was extremely off-putting. That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.
these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.
From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.
[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
The whiplash cuts are stupid, short-sighted and causing major damage
The bullying tactics around protests and immigration are villainous and are eroding one of our greatest institutions
Science and higher education have fallen short of their ideals and need reform
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
If Vance somehow gets the reigns and/or 2028 it will be even worse because Vought will get even more power/control
* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing
As an external observer to US politics it would be great for the country to move past the two-party system, but to say they are the same is ridiculous.
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and star creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.
I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah
"How Much Is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs through Effective Oversight" (2017) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/contro...
For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.
Disclaimer: I'm not from US
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
These problems are not new.
The same people crying that “Trump is a fascist” go on in tangents on how Jews control the world and vote for candidates with actual Nazi tattoos.
It would be just the usual Silly Season if it wasn’t so serious to be this detached from actual reality.
You can hate the genocidal Israelis and how far the AIPAC/Israel lobby has crawled up the ass of nearly the entire US political apparatus without being a neo-nazi that wants to stomp out the Jewish faith.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
Seems to be playing out.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-in...
I mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
[0]https://www.statista.com/topics/11662/debt-in-china/
[1]https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...
I would assume majority of US middle class' savings are in the real estate or securities. Why would hyperinflation kill these?
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
More efficient than any foreign actor
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
Not only that, but real innovations like cancer treatments require decades of unprofitable 'basic science' grunt work. Musk and his friends don't care about saving humanity 30 years from now. He talks about going to Mars with nonsense lies to fatten his own pockets. And by filling the science advisory committee with VCs instead of scientists, he has turned science in America from a 'pursuit of truth' into a 'Silicon Valley VC portfolio.'
Elon Musk is a genius. He will destroy the growth engines that could produce his future competitors, and he will reign forever.
The smart thing about Elon Musk and his friends is their ban on international cooperation among scientists and their word censorship. They seem to think that viruses like Ebola will enter the country by getting a Trump card issued. Clearly, smart people like them cannot understand ordinary people like us. To them, it's only natural that everything comes through a visa, so they probably think viruses come through visas too. Elon Musk's lecturing about border etiquette for viruses can be described as a kind of elite duty. Indeed, injecting morality into something immoral is 'noblesse oblige.
The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
[1]https://www.medianama.com/2024/09/223-google-files-antitrust...
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
>“The most passionate and creative scientists are very intuitive and very driven by emotion and curiosity,” says Gregory Feist, a psychologist at San José State University who studies scientists. “Until Trump, they’d been able to keep political questions out of mind.”
See, that's a filter bubble state of mind. "Driven by emotion" evidently means calling anyone who disagrees with you a "science denier." You were being politcal all along. Now that the people you spent the last 30 years insulting are in charge, they want blood for all the bad things you said to them. Only now is it "Oh no! I don't like being political!"
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." You bit the hand that feeds you and you stopped getting fed. Whether you like it or not, both sides, the red and the blue, are your government. If you attack either, you're attacking your government. That's not a wise decision when your government pays your salary. You can't just let someone like James Hansen run off at the mouth for decades and not expect blowback.
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...
But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.
Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
Realest comment in this entire post
If you support US Science, you need to say "more rightly pointing out that..."
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568492.
* by "this" I mean posting ideological clichés and internet tropes - This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
I do think a non-trivial portion of the population has opinions that have unfortunately diverged from what a board of climate scientists or epidemiologist would say is the appropriate state of affairs, and yes this is a problem we all need to figure out how to correct.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/06/california-s... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0z9nmzvdlo [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3xrrzdr0o [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
If he dumped all of his shares the value of them would essentially go away, like with any commodity.
Try harder to engage in dialog. Basic economic theory contradicts your claim. You need a much stronger logical argument to have any credibility.
More to the point: Congress is being profligate in other spending, and miserly w.r.t. science, so it does indeed look like the science cuts are not motivated by fiscal responsibility.
Your quip about "basic economic theory" doesn't really address the point they're making.
Wealth on the other hand....
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
American politics are so absurd.
Yes, most professors are opposed to Trump. But when you're talking to a professor of, say, metallurgy, he's not using his classroom to rant against Trump. He's using his classroom to teach students about metallurgy, which is a pretty dang useful service to a modern industrial economy. Professor's personal political views aren't interfering with the economic and scientific value he's providing to the country.
Which is why the universities and research centers have largely been untouched until now. Until Trump, both sides could recognize that even if there was political disagreement between the professors and the politicians, the professors were still doing important work.
Trump took it personally, and on that personal basis he's now eroding our scientific and technological future. We're eating our seed corn, here.
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rBNtOCCSSRc
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.
There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.
So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.
ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.
> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
(Eugene T. Gendlin)
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
These are basically the same thing! /s
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.
> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.
---
It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.
Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.