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dwa3592 3 hours ago [-]
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.
agumonkey 58 seconds ago [-]
russia: brain drain
usa: brain drain
where is everybody going ?
itsamario 3 minutes ago [-]
When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. -Confucius
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
drak0n1c 2 hours ago [-]
There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
I'm surviving on consulting income for a wide variety of clients right now in this space, and let me tell you it's brutal and extremely difficult to get entry to this space for people that don't have a wide network and lots of industry experience. Academic experience typically doesn't count.
In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
Schlagbohrer 1 hours ago [-]
Did you mean to write, high interest rate environment?
doctorpangloss 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it's so much that talented people are being locked out, as much as it is that communities everywhere, not just industry, are requiring a level of people skills that academic people lack but nonetheless thrive without.
wholinator2 40 minutes ago [-]
Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
doctorpangloss 7 minutes ago [-]
do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing?
i like academics, don't misunderstand me.
mothballed 26 minutes ago [-]
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awesome_dude 24 minutes ago [-]
Academic's, FTR, have to have a huge amount of people skills. Their job isn't just to discover, it's to share.
You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.
Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work
dwa3592 2 hours ago [-]
We are not convinced that we will be happy in the industry and part of it is the visa issues. She currently has a valid visa until 2029 but she just doesn't want it anymore.
text0404 44 minutes ago [-]
A lot of people in academia are mission driven - they don't care about the money, they care about the application of their work to benefit humanity and don't want to exist as a cog in a private corporation's profits. I think this mentality of "scientists just want to get paid a lot of money" is contributing to the anti-science views that are so pervasive in America these days. Some people are motivated by more than just profit.
1 hours ago [-]
avs733 2 hours ago [-]
Why assume that this is about finding a job?
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
kjkjadksj 1 hours ago [-]
You are a fool if you think these companies are hiring enough to meet the labor needs. So many Phds I know are looking for work and yes they’ve applied to probably 500 jobs mostly in industry.
lmf4lol 2 hours ago [-]
where to?
ArmadilloGang 2 hours ago [-]
My family is looking at Missouri to Spain.
Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.
Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.
Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.
rbtprograms 3 minutes ago [-]
americans pretending they aren't immigrants by using the term expat always cracks me up
simojo 2 hours ago [-]
From what I understand, Spain has their own set of politics worth losing sleep over; perhaps as an expat you won't be as attached though.
crystal_revenge 1 hours ago [-]
Most American ex-pats don't really understand that the thing that makes ex-pat life so attractive is that, for most of people's lives, being American in a foreign country has traditionally conferred a wide range of benefits (this is most clearly exemplified by the way Americans living in a foreign country refer to themselves as "ex-pats" not "immigrants"). The ex-pat solution assumes American exceptionalism as its foundation.
Historically Americans have benefited from income asymmetry and a fairly wide-spread desire by foreign nations not to cause too much legal trouble for US nationals abroad.
I have quite a few friends that do live, quite happily, abroad. But the common pattern for them is a.) fluency in the native language b.) historical association with the country c.) fairly large cash reserves so they can ignore any economic problems these countries are facing.
jorblumesea 7 minutes ago [-]
expat is usually synonymous with fire/retire early. most people move to spain or portugal and see their purchasing power multiply.
Aurornis 54 minutes ago [-]
Most places have their own politics. What differs is how often they come up. As a foreigner you're usually spared the involvement in those discussions because people think you're not interested and don't want your outsider opinion anyway.
People also embed themselves in different communities when they move anywhere, even to a different city or state in the same country. It's a clean reset.
It doesn't always last forever. I know several people who tried to move somewhere, including internationally, when politics got heated in 2016. Most of them came back eventually with a realization that politics is everywhere, it's just a matter of how much you're embedded into the places it's discussed.
rwyinuse 7 minutes ago [-]
Politics is everywhere, but the state of US politics today is exceptionally bad by Western world standards. I hate the government in my country, but their corruption and incompetence is nothing compared to the Trump administration.
In that sense most EU countries are a positive upgrade.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
Apart from being the nexus of the current hot button issue - immigrants and housing costs.
homerowilson 1 hours ago [-]
I (American) worked in Spain (Cáceres, Extremadura) ~2015-2017 in tech. It was a wonderful experience. Extremely talented, hard-working, and friendly co-workers. Great health-care and education systems. I think since then rising housing prices partially due to migration have become an issue, but it's a really, really nice place.
pvaldes 19 minutes ago [-]
To add context Extremadura is a member of the "poor" Spain. To US people could be useful to think on a sort of New Mexico.
Pros: Great food, interesting cultural past, only one language to deal with and not complicated accents to grasp (more important that most people think), gorgeous wild areas, uncomplicated people, maybe a little on the introverted side at first, but solid gold after a while.
Cons: Risk of poverty sadly high, bigger than many US states (but with better government support and healthcare). Harsh continental climate very hot and very cold. Not for everybody (but US has plenty of places with similar or worse weather). The trains and communication roads are also under-average for the country and many people don't really speak English.
In many of the non highly touristic places you can live well if you can adapt to the cons. Housing prices are lower, life expenses cheaper and buying a house should be affordable with a decent job (Don't try this in Barcelona or Madrid). Portugal is close, and is even cheaper, to the point of some people living there and working in Spain. To support the same standard of living in Barcelona, Valencia or Madrid you need to plan in advance, to stomach the stress that unavoidably come with big cities, and earn much more.
In Spain if you can speak English well you will be seen yet as a big researcher.
bcgnbcennxfb 2 hours ago [-]
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realityfactchex 1 hours ago [-]
> She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become.
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
throw4847285 22 minutes ago [-]
There are less than zero theres there. This comment is negative there. It's not even here. It's nowhere.
tensor 54 minutes ago [-]
No. AI is not doing science. And also no, science is not being held back by "pearl clutching" and "unwillingness to let brilliant non-science geniuses in."
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
realityfactchex 17 minutes ago [-]
Points taken and appreciated. Thanks.
awesome_dude 9 minutes ago [-]
It disheartens me a great deal to see how the US (in particular, but they are not alone) has turned its back on good science, largely, but not exclusively, on the back of populist politics.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
dwa3592 54 minutes ago [-]
honestly my friend, i did not understand your comment.
realityfactchex 19 minutes ago [-]
I appreciate the feedback.
hgoel 1 hours ago [-]
Last year, the mood in my field, that has been relatively isolated from many of these impacts, was still very "these are uncomfortable times, but it's still possible to pull through".
Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more established scientists are maintaining backup options.
I too have re-evaluated my feelings and decided that while I am not yet at the point of actively looking to leave the US, besides the hassle of moving itself, I would be fine with having to do so.
Schlagbohrer 9 hours ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago [-]
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
evilos 2 hours ago [-]
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.
matwood 42 minutes ago [-]
The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.
23 minutes ago [-]
lopsotronic 1 hours ago [-]
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
datsci_est_2015 18 minutes ago [-]
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
MisterTea 1 hours ago [-]
> Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years,
Any citations on this?
datsci_est_2015 15 minutes ago [-]
It’s a pretty commonly repeated theory amongst far right / reactionary “thought leaders”. They call it the “Long March Through the Institutions”. I think the comment you were responding to was ironically referencing it.
WarmWash 2 minutes ago [-]
It's not especially a "right wing theory" anymore than climate change is a "left wing theory"
That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.
WarmWash 8 minutes ago [-]
Just like there are many reasons why the climate is getting warmer, not just humans.
See how easy hand waving is?
mullingitover 26 minutes ago [-]
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amanaplanacanal 53 minutes ago [-]
More likely that conservatives turned liberal once the right went all in on anti-intellectualism.
Of course the real question is: what does conservative even mean any more? The joining of Falwell and Reagan fucked both conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
lovich 23 minutes ago [-]
Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
Espressosaurus 3 hours ago [-]
The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.
They want the 1850s.
downrightmike 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sQL_inject 31 minutes ago [-]
"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."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
nine_k 2 hours ago [-]
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
epistasis 2 hours ago [-]
In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.
In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.
geodel 18 minutes ago [-]
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
epistasis 15 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
halostatue 4 minutes ago [-]
You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.
joe_the_user 1 hours ago [-]
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
1 hours ago [-]
bigyabai 3 hours ago [-]
Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.
Tangurena2 2 hours ago [-]
Back to the 1930s.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
odysseus 41 minutes ago [-]
Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.
amanaplanacanal 48 minutes ago [-]
Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.
stainablesteel 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
btrettel 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gs17 2 hours ago [-]
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.
stainablesteel 7 hours ago [-]
im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades
bdamm 3 hours ago [-]
Are you thinking of affirmative action?
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.
handle584 7 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway0123_5 3 hours ago [-]
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.
anigbrowl 2 hours ago [-]
Stop vagueposting and make a proper argument. This isn't X where you get paid for posting bait.
btrettel 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mikeyouse 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's just nativist nonsense from completely the uninformed.
eitally 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Schlagbohrer 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
stainablesteel 7 hours ago [-]
yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program
alchemism 7 hours ago [-]
My 1.8 GPA is literally discriminated-against, too. So unfair!
stainablesteel 4 hours ago [-]
it's more like skin color, ethnicity, and religion
whyagaindavid 3 hours ago [-]
Who is the one that discriminates? You mean the white american prof?
irishcoffee 3 hours ago [-]
My undergrad program in the late 2000s had very, very few white profs.
whyagaindavid 3 hours ago [-]
are they Americans?
chneu 7 hours ago [-]
Not really true but white Americans love to say that. Americans are the biggest bullies and and victims.
_DeadFred_ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
handle584 6 hours ago [-]
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.
whyagaindavid 3 hours ago [-]
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)
_DeadFred_ 5 hours ago [-]
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.
xp84 2 hours ago [-]
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.
irishcoffee 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
conception 3 hours ago [-]
What tax dollars are you referring to? America famously does not pay for people to go to higher education at any real scale.
gs17 2 hours ago [-]
They're talking about PhDs, many of which are funded by grants.
chneu 6 hours ago [-]
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.
_DeadFred_ 5 hours ago [-]
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.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
XRG 2 hours ago [-]
As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.
paytonjjones 53 minutes ago [-]
I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.
gs17 2 hours ago [-]
Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?
paytonjjones 58 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.
As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
gs17 47 minutes ago [-]
I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
paytonjjones 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work.
There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.
amanaplanacanal 36 minutes ago [-]
Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.
AnthonyMouse 51 minutes ago [-]
It's actually kind of a hard problem.
There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?
Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?
This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.
ambicapter 1 hours ago [-]
"R&D is a cost center" what an insightful take.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
What a depressing view of the world.
1 hours ago [-]
setgree 2 hours ago [-]
I work at a research lab that was previously supported by an R01 grant that did not get renewed last year. It’s been tough and the staff (including me) have been moved to part-time employment.
However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.
So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
lovich 14 minutes ago [-]
Petyr Baelish got stabbed to death while on his ladder, I don’t think that’s a good analogy
Rebuff5007 10 hours ago [-]
> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
chasing 1 hours ago [-]
It certainly is when people are typing the word "black" into the search field when deciding what programs need to be cut...
nikanj 3 hours ago [-]
And the real partisan question is ”should the US fund studying the black holes”, not the actual science question
twothreeone 2 hours ago [-]
Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
littlekey 1 hours ago [-]
>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
datsci_est_2015 8 minutes ago [-]
What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.
nikanj 17 minutes ago [-]
A person who’s been told all the people doing the science look down on them. Partially true, too, based on how I’ve heard people talk about ”dumb redneck trump voters”
wins32767 1 hours ago [-]
That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.
wins32767 45 minutes ago [-]
Like this from the article:
> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase 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,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”
If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.
My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.
throw-the-towel 23 minutes ago [-]
> If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes?
A society where funding depends on a person's political position doesn't sound free.
amanaplanacanal 29 minutes ago [-]
The better question is: Why is it that when republicans hear the word "racism" they immediately think people are talking about them? Are they afraid of what research on racism will show?
khalic 1 hours ago [-]
lol, are you implying science is dying because, you believe, less and less scientists are “conservative”. Do you have any notion of how ridiculous that sounds?
wins32767 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm not implying I'm stating that if you depending on the tax base of the entire country to pay your bills you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties.
khalic 40 minutes ago [-]
This is a fictitious scenario invented to make the conservatives the victims… when they are the ones in power, killing the science. No amount of mental gymnastics trumps that fact
wins32767 26 minutes ago [-]
How about a reframe:
When they are the ones in power, cutting funding to organizations that support their political opponents and goals they don't support.
I'll be the first to say this is a bad thing AND that they're going about it stupidly. But I'm also saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage your stakeholders over a period of decades.
LadyCailin 49 minutes ago [-]
I’m not convinced academia purged itself, at least not in any way that they should be ashamed of. Reality has a liberal bias, and my extremely conservative uncle at one point mentioned how he didn’t want his kids to go to college, because college turns kids atheist. Actually, learning things opens your mind, and so the standard conservative positions come off looking pretty stupid after critical examination, so conservativism (i.e. dogmatism) and learning are inherently at odds. Falsifying or omitting things just to suit the feelings of conservatives is wrong, even if the alternative is to “purge them” from academia by making their stupidity unwelcome.
wins32767 32 minutes ago [-]
Do you have any idea how smug this sounds to about half the people that need to pay for the scientific funding? I'm not a Republican, but even I'm turned off by this sort of attitude.
amanaplanacanal 26 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't want to research anything that might make someone question their beliefs. What you are saying doesn't sound like any kind of science I'm familiar with.
helterskelter 2 hours ago [-]
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they thought it was a DEI thing.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.
ryandrake 35 minutes ago [-]
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is exactly the kind of expertise and competence we have in the Administration right now. It is totally believable that they would do a substring search for "black" and "trans" and defund black hole research and transistor science.
tombert 15 minutes ago [-]
It is a little impressive how actively bad they are at this.
I haven't had that much respect for Elon since he called the cave diver a pedophile, but something I didn't realize until the 2025 administration started is how lazy everyone involved with it is. As far as I can tell, no one in that administration has, at any point in their life, ever examined any of their own opinions or actions, or looked up the "why" of any of the programs that they declared as "wasteful".
That or they're just idiots. Tough to say.
apical_dendrite 49 minutes ago [-]
This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.
> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
GolfPopper 1 hours ago [-]
The real "partisan" question is, "What can the GOP leadership and their owners loot without immediate negative consequences for themselves?"
okeuro49 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
enragedcacti 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think requiring prospective hires to write a DEI statement is equally as political as illegally cancelling already funded and approved research into e.g. racial disparities in maternal mortality, or health equity gaps for rural Americans (yes, it's DEI even if it's for predominantly white people).
andrewla 5 minutes ago [-]
In a sense both things are true -- the current reaction is an overcorrection in the right direction, but it is still an overcorrection.
The framing as this being "unheard of" is very disingenuous, though.
0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago [-]
It's not odd. If the institution of it is political, the removal of it is therefore also political.
It is not, however, based on who can claim to be the biggest victim. It is based on a simple statistical analysis of demographics.
noosphr 2 hours ago [-]
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.
_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
The statistical analysis is step one, but those stats are (or were?) used as proxies for quantifying a persons victimhood. I dont actually think "victim" is quite the right word here, but the OP used it and it fits well enough.
breakyerself 15 minutes ago [-]
Just having keywords associated with DEI could get a project defunded. Thee government isn't just defunding liberal projects. Look at the millions being thrown out on ocean monitoring because the Trump admin thinks global warming isnt a problem if you don't monitor it.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
oersted 10 hours ago [-]
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.
nextos 8 hours ago [-]
True, also very precarious and unstable. It is now common not to get a long-term contract until your 40s.
Given the massive pay gap with industry and scarce funding, it's natural lots of innovation has shifted to industrial labs.
oersted 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jltsiren 38 seconds ago [-]
The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not.
In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law.
European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of.
Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them.
I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire.
The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.
gignico 10 hours ago [-]
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.
IsTom 9 hours ago [-]
I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
yongjik 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
Theodores 18 minutes ago [-]
Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
Eddy_Viscosity2 9 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
In the US, sure.
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.
jordanb 8 hours ago [-]
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 ?
8 hours ago [-]
HWR_14 7 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
The comment I responded to seemed to imply that the US was hung between two paths and took no action.
I'm pleased to hear a response was made and hope Eddy_Viscosity2 sees your comment.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SiempreViernes 8 hours ago [-]
As a leading exporter of coal Australia isn't really a good example of a serious climate actor.
defrost 8 hours ago [-]
Australia's a good example of a country that sells out its resources for a pittance NSR in exchange.
We can talk about Indian coal companies (Thermal), global steel demand (Metallurgical), US natural gas extractors, etc.
It’s true. In the US reality itself has become controversial. Maybe the oligarchs’ lies are just as valid as objective reality? Who can say!
kakacik 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
You're being downvoted, probably for being abrasive, but I agree with your overall point.
When I was younger and more naive, this
> "the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient") i
is what I thought (american) politics meant. When people talked about things being political or arguments related thereto, this is what I imagined happening.
Then I grew older and saw it was mostly people whining about gays getting married or who was allowed to have an abortion or what activities minorities were allowed to participate in.
Very depressing, frankly.
QuantumGood 6 hours ago [-]
It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.
gignico 9 hours ago [-]
Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
foxglacier 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mothballed 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mothballed 7 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 4 hours ago [-]
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?
Windchaser 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
JuniperMesos 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of the people affected are people who want to leave their homelands and be in the US instead. So they were already putting up with their homelands acting contrary to their principles.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
What a wonderful example of why we need more scientific education in this country, not less.
garte 6 hours ago [-]
It is often hard to put an economic value on research in general. That makes the whole "labor market" highly different from the rest of the world.
ambicapter 1 hours ago [-]
GP is saying everyone should bend the knee to the power of the dollar, not that they care about a nuanced understanding of the world.
scrollop 9 hours ago [-]
And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
999900000999 8 hours ago [-]
In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada.
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
pvaldes 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throw-the-towel 21 minutes ago [-]
AFAIK the peat is already releasing gas very quickly.
adornKey 8 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Straw 3 hours ago [-]
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!
smallmancontrov 3 hours ago [-]
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.
adornKey 5 hours ago [-]
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...
smallmancontrov 4 hours ago [-]
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.
t0mpr1c3 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Ancapistani 1 hours ago [-]
While I wouldn't argue that academia is "crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant", I would absolutely argue that they are ideologically homogenous. The whole community is rife with political signaling and affinity groups.
teddyh 3 hours ago [-]
Please refrain from personal attacks.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
Does "he started it" count?
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
4 hours ago [-]
adornKey 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tovej 8 hours ago [-]
It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
t0bia_s 8 hours ago [-]
By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist?
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.
tovej 8 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
pastel8739 8 hours ago [-]
You’re clearly referring to something specific, what is it?
mothballed 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rainsford 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
>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."
Supermancho 53 minutes ago [-]
> I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists
You can restate the ideology over and over. It doesn't change reality. There are many parties involved. I have agency as well. It's all very pedestrian to be reductive, but it's not compelling.
mothballed 49 minutes ago [-]
>You can state the ideology over and over.
This is rich considering it's the first time I stated it in this particular sub thread as the person I responded to was both too chickenshit to quote what I said or respond directly where I said it because it would betray that their portrayal was bad faith and full of shit.
The "reality" check, in fact, is coming for the scientists who are still suspending belief that they too were not better than the plebs who could be shit-canned in a millisecond by the whims of the "parties" involved (but muh reductive portroyal! Also science is in chaos!) and have to go on a "pedestrian" and "reductive" mission to use their "agency" to find a new "party."
Time to face the music, "scientists."
Supermancho 47 minutes ago [-]
More noise. Lovely. Do you think how often you say something has any bearing on a base assumption from which all your conclusions are drawn, is not an ideology? Oh boy.
mothballed 44 minutes ago [-]
Of course not, go "make noise" about science being in "chaos", say it a lot. The "scientists" seem to have no problem saying the shock of their plight over and over with the hope it will change the "base assumptions" of the "ideologies" influencing their employment. But as you say, it doesn't change reality.
amanaplanacanal 17 minutes ago [-]
If it changes the minds of the voters, then different people will be in charge of the funding. Is that not how it works?
mothballed 15 minutes ago [-]
This is saying that "saying something over and over" will change reality. This was ridiculed by the person I was responding to so I decided to play along with it, but I'm open to that being true if we're revising that outlook.
adornKey 6 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 6 hours ago [-]
> most likely people haven't bothered to check
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.
adornKey 5 hours ago [-]
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?
smallmancontrov 4 hours ago [-]
scholar.google.com is right there. Put in the work or talk to the hand.
quietsegfault 3 hours ago [-]
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.
adornKey 7 hours ago [-]
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.
convolvatron 17 minutes ago [-]
the experimental framework for finding out absorption spectra goes back like 100 years and is basically high school level science. not only that, we have quantum chemistry models that predict empirical results from atomic configurations that are 20+ years old and match that empirical data to a very high level of accurany. there is plenty of ambiguity to attack in climate modeling, but you chose the most settled and fundamental thing to poke at.
lakhim 7 hours ago [-]
make the argument explicitly. Here, I'll do it for you: doubling co2 levels should only lead to a 1c increase in temperature (~3w/m2 extra forcing).
That ignores all the other things that happen besides co2 forcing alone.
adornKey 4 hours ago [-]
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?
smallmancontrov 2 hours ago [-]
You have no numbers at all, and your complaint is that lakhim's aren't exact?
phs318u 8 hours ago [-]
> nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.
I’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.
lakhim 7 hours ago [-]
dude make an argument or dont, this kind of half assed "I know something but the man won't let me talk about it" is annoying and useless.
N_Lens 6 hours ago [-]
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.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
What a pointless comment.
"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.
If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.
anigbrowl 2 hours ago [-]
Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
xp84 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow."
It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.
Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.
I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.
All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
bcrosby95 1 hours ago [-]
> if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
Effectively no one is arguing for this. You're ranting about a ghost.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
> I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
You did it, you torched the strawman.
esarbe 2 hours ago [-]
That's a straw man argument.
Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Besides that; all the nice and shiny things you mention - the busses and trains and the cement - can be produced and operated at fraction of their current CO2 cost. Wind mills and PV panels offset their CO2 cost by magnitudes if they are replacing fossil fuel industries.
There's a middle ground between "lets burn it all to the ground" and "let's go back to the savanna".
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
esarbe 39 minutes ago [-]
There have been many systemic changes since we started to understand the physical mechanism behind climate change and the dire consequences of unmitigated climate change.
Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.
We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.
> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.
esarbe 2 hours ago [-]
That's a ludicrous proposal.
A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'.
This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
remixff2400 2 hours ago [-]
This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
Sure we can all do our part as best possible, but this requires systemic change.
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
10 hours ago [-]
dmd 8 hours ago [-]
One of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response".
Whoops, keyword match.
beej71 5 hours ago [-]
We had one that mentioned "mineral inclusion".
KolibriFly 8 hours ago [-]
And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway
9 hours ago [-]
timr 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jfengel 9 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 9 hours ago [-]
> You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
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.
nixon_why69 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
nixon_why69 8 hours ago [-]
Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well? Do you think we have it all figured out? Is Economics solved as well?
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well?
I didn't malign all social sciences.
> Do you think we have it all figured out?
No.
nixon_why69 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
But I appreciate the subtle insinuation!
nixon_why69 7 hours ago [-]
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".
timr 7 hours ago [-]
Literally the thing I quoted in the top comment on the thread. Go read that comment.
nixon_why69 7 hours ago [-]
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".
SanjayMehta 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
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.
archagon 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mold_aid 8 hours ago [-]
Perhaps better than "if I don't like it, it deserves to have its funding cut"
mech998877 8 hours ago [-]
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.
t0mpr1c3 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
Well put. It's easy to attack people attempting to work on hard problems for not achieving perfect results. Which they don't. Because IT'S HARD.
Weirdly, these critics never have useful suggestions to improve anything, it's all just personal attacks at one remove.
I mean, frankly, we wouldn't need a lot of these studies if people in power were slightly more willing to just believe (usually minority) people who talk about the problems they have.
Black soldiers were denied home loans after ww2; white soldiers were not; many white families therefor benefitted from owning a home (appreciation of value and safety/stability) in ways that black families did not.
Do we need a study on that? I mean, it doesn't hurt anything, but we could also just read some reports and talk to some people and then realize "hey this is messed up"
fireflash38 9 hours ago [-]
> 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?
timr 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, we should fund grants to make sure that the heliocentric model is still wrong.
qsera 8 hours ago [-]
I just want to say that what you say makes a lot of sense to me and I am happy people like you are pushing against the narrative.
TomasBM 6 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mDyJzDPmBdG 8 hours ago [-]
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.
djeastm 8 hours ago [-]
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?
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jfengel 9 hours ago [-]
I believe it's a fairly common attitude. Thus far it doesn't seem to be down voted.
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?
timr 8 hours ago [-]
You didn’t write a coherent objection, you just said I didn’t understand what I was talking about.
nilirl 8 hours ago [-]
From your original post,
> 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.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nilirl 8 hours ago [-]
> thanks to years and years of advanced training
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.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nilirl 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
timr 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nilirl 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tovej 8 hours ago [-]
You're not being very rational. Please be civil and respond to the points, rather than give a "no you".
raincole 2 hours ago [-]
As I expected, the comment I wanted to 'pre vouch' is dead and flagged now.
> 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.
rjsw 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thinkthatover 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
iwontberude 8 hours ago [-]
Medium effort flame bait
ModernMech 9 hours ago [-]
So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
timr 9 hours ago [-]
> 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!
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
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?"
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> (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?"
No. Next question.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
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?
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
estearum 7 hours ago [-]
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?
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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!
estearum 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ModernMech 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ModernMech 39 minutes ago [-]
> I am against bad research.
Most people are against bad research, but not everyone agrees with you on what bad means. Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine. So where does that leave us on the question of who gets research funding? Or did you have a different definition of "bad" in mind that doesn't consult your biases?
> One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions
Who decides what's a relevent question? The president? Political parties? B/Trillionaires? Big Tech / Oil / Pharma ? You?
> Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
Sorry I ignored it, but you only included it as a footnote to your reply, so I wasn't sure you were actually serious. You gave two ideas really: fund stuff at random and fund continuations at random but holding a minimum objective bar. I'll take them in turn:
> just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
This is more or less how the system operates now. You get a PhD, you go to a good institution, get some results, publish some papers, submit a proposal, and then it's a dice roll from there whether it gets funded or not. You said you had a career in research so you know this. How do you do "basic review for research viability" to your liking that's different from what's done now? Because now it's done by experts in their respective fields. You seem to think that means "bias is built into the system", yes? How do you evaluate basic research viability without consulting people specifically for their biases?
But funding continuations at random means that good research and bad research, whatever that means, would have a random chance of just not continuing. How does a country build long time-horizon research programs if they can just be defunded at the roll of the dice despite good results? How does that improve the system if good research can just randomly die and bad research can continue randomly as a matter of policy?
> just fund stuff at random.
Doesn't prevent bad research from being funded, as you admit. So to me, since both of your ideas aren't really designed to eliminate bad research but work to eliminates biases, it seems like you're less concerned with not funding bad research, and more concerned with how biased you perceive the funding process to be.
> you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science?
That's my whole point, you can't. The system we've built is a compromise because so many people have an opinion on what should / should not be funded. You and I are biased and will never agree, so we leave it up to experts who are biased and will also never agree, but at least they know what they're talking about. So at the end of the day some things we both don't like get funded from a very small pot. Maybe a dice roll improves the whole process, but given the system has been wildly successful in producing technological breakthroughs despite inefficiencies and biases and disagreements, you probably should o
carlosjobim 8 hours ago [-]
From anywhere except from the tax payer. Lord knows there are academic institutions sitting on a lot of cash.
ModernMech 8 hours ago [-]
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...
carlosjobim 8 hours ago [-]
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"?
dluan 9 hours ago [-]
What the fuck
timr 9 hours ago [-]
Intelligent response.
Avicebron 9 hours ago [-]
It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
timr 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Avicebron 9 hours ago [-]
My bad, on mobile, I think your stance deserves a more thoughtful critique.
Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dluan 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dluan 6 hours ago [-]
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.
timr 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
5 hours ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
roysting 7 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 2 hours ago [-]
When ever asks about or attempts to defend fascism/strongman style systems with some kind of excuse that they "get things done", THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
MemoryHoleHQ 10 hours ago [-]
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).
qnpnpmqppnp 9 hours ago [-]
Quoting the article:
> 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.
MemoryHoleHQ 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
frickinLasers 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to bother to write an essay like the other person.
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.
MemoryHoleHQ 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brorfred 9 hours ago [-]
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.
SiempreViernes 8 hours ago [-]
Bless you for trying, but that's clearly just a troll you are responding to.
tinyplanets 2 hours ago [-]
Don't feed the trolls... MemoryHoleHQ is not arguing in good faith.
mold_aid 6 hours ago [-]
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).
MemoryHoleHQ 5 hours ago [-]
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?
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but, like, what's the worst that could actually happen by eliminating crop diversity?
Potato monocultures fed literal millions for a good while, Shirley it can't hurt to see grain cropping go that way.
sorry_outta_gas 47 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
MemoryHoleHQ 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SiempreViernes 8 hours ago [-]
> 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).
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
Mate, if you had to make a new account just to try posting this nonsense, it might be time for some self-reflection.
ModernMech 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
MemoryHoleHQ 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jyounker 1 hours ago [-]
> 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
You should really shouldn't subtly misrepresent the argument. The article states that blind auditions made orchestras much more diverse in some categories, but did not make much of an impact in others.
As far as I can tell nobody except Anthony Tommasini is calling for blind auditions to go away. His position position is just weird and using it
to represent the opinions of most of the left is more than a bit disingenuous.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
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?
MemoryHoleHQ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
So when are you going to talk about the scientific grants?
jyounker 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
changoplatanero 10 hours ago [-]
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.
analog31 8 hours ago [-]
What's a better way, that's not the Chinese way?
What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
nine_k 1 hours ago [-]
What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
breakyerself 9 minutes ago [-]
Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future.
What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.
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
dbvn 1 hours ago [-]
There's an emergency!!! To find out what it is, pay me!!!
stanford_labrat 2 hours ago [-]
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.
calvinmorrison 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
you can do this, you just need to find a chump who is willing to spend the money.
andbberger 10 minutes ago [-]
this exists and the chump is howard hughes
nickpeterson 9 hours ago [-]
You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.
9 hours ago [-]
Balgair 7 hours ago [-]
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
randusername 2 hours ago [-]
I think all the following can be true simultaneously:
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
throwawaypath 25 minutes ago [-]
Fascist are defunding critical studies that would rocket the US ahead in science. Studies such as:
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!
Havoc 10 hours ago [-]
Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals
simonh 10 hours ago [-]
They're not own goals, they're achieving what they set out to do.
__patchbit__ 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
K0nserv 9 hours ago [-]
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.
neogodless 8 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
testhest 8 hours ago [-]
Nearly 40 trillion rollers in debt.
ck2 3 hours ago [-]
and it's 100% Russell Vought
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
It's 100% christian evangelicals (bible fundamentalists) that inserted themselves into the republican party after the counter-culture movement of the 60s. They hate freedom and liberty, full stop.
towledev 40 minutes ago [-]
At Heritage, in the break room over the microwave, there's a sign: "science delende est."
tinyplanets 2 hours ago [-]
Vought has openly declared himself as a Christian Nationalist. Christian Nationalism as a whole is dead set against scientific research.
Invictus0 12 minutes ago [-]
> Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects.
Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle
fabian2k 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bsenftner 9 hours ago [-]
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.
alberto467 10 hours ago [-]
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.
orwin 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
fabian2k 9 hours ago [-]
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.
thrance 9 hours ago [-]
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...
After the election my very first thought was that this is the start of the Chinese century, since America has voted to step down.
Seems to be playing out.
Schlagbohrer 9 hours ago [-]
No other country punches itself in the face as hard or as often as the usa does.
brookst 8 hours ago [-]
And if you tell us to stop, we’ll punch ourselves in the face even harder just to prove you can’t tell us what to do.
Integrape 5 hours ago [-]
Never underestimate the power of American spite.
7 hours ago [-]
svachalek 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kingnothing 7 hours ago [-]
What are the foolish maneuvers that China is making?
dirck-norman 3 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 2 hours ago [-]
Refusing to bail out real estate speculators was bold and painful, but I'm not sure it was wrong.
dirck-norman 1 hours ago [-]
Not at all what’s happening. China’s government privatized real estate and was the engine of the bubble by disallowing localities from taxing and only allowing revenues via land sales. See above how central planning in the CCP has forced massive debt upon localities.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
smallmancontrov 31 minutes ago [-]
The citizens with real estate were the speculators. They gambled on being able to squeeze even more out of the next guy and they lost. In the US, we would just have taxed the kids (again) to bail out the homeowners (again). I have a hard time calling that more responsible.
handle584 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Hikikomori 7 hours ago [-]
At this point they can use the Gaben strategy and easily win.
MarkusQ 29 minutes ago [-]
That would require making babies and not making mistakes. Humans are generally/historically better at the former, but these days both seem to be a challenge.
noosphr 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ikari_pl 3 hours ago [-]
Not to the extent I'd like — it stopped working on Huawei too.
collinmcnulty 10 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately there is another possibility: a return to great power competition.
marcyb5st 9 hours ago [-]
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).
> 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.
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.
bxk76 8 hours ago [-]
Well China cant seem to make a single friend beyond North Korea and Russia. Everyone is a bit wary of them.
I mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
God, this is depressing.
I think it's difficult, if you're a millenial/zoomer/whatever we're calling these things, to understand just how much of the world genuinely liked and respected and wanted america involved in their local affairs.
America obviously wasn't perfect and many, many more people than trump were involved with squandering all of this goodwill, but we still had some left over before he showed up.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
The US can just hyperinflate to pay its debts.
marcyb5st 5 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lII1lIlI11ll 4 hours ago [-]
> And kill the savings of what remains of the middle class.
I would assume majority of US middle class' savings are in the real estate or securities. Why would hyperinflation kill these?
rimliu 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe AI is not a good example. It is extremely efficient as money burning machine, but for everything else...
brnt 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
mech998877 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mrguyorama 2 hours ago [-]
All that GDP growth in the US is advertising. Google isn't some sort of innovator. They sell advertisements.
What practical machinery and infrastructure has the US innovated in that time frame?
marcyb5st 5 hours ago [-]
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, ... .
bsenftner 9 hours ago [-]
Nah, that fantasy is over, with the new Era of Moron Power. The future of humanity of absolutely Asian. Western culture is Rome on Fire.
api 9 hours ago [-]
The irony is that the people who screamed the most that Rome was on fire aggressively pushed for what you brilliantly call Moron Power.
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
franktankbank 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but Rome certainly didn't have airplanes.
Oh hey, a good faith argument. I thought about going and googling for more studies supporting my position, but I'm not sure if that actually has much of a point?
Maybe I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.
Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.
Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.
Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?
saintvlad 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wredcoll 53 minutes ago [-]
> "real" diversity of thought isn't allowed under globohomo. The goal, of course, is handouts for race communists and to further solidify communist control of political
What the fuck?
phtrivier 3 hours ago [-]
Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start 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
molybd3num 1 hours ago [-]
don't call me shirley
N_Lens 6 hours ago [-]
No wonder Trump is referred to as “nation builder” in China since he’s building them up by tearing down America.
plutomeetsyou 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Herring 8 hours ago [-]
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.
...which is why there are no emerging far-right-populist political movements in welfare-heavy societies like the UK, France, and Germany, right?
roysting 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Windchaser 5 hours ago [-]
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.
These problems are not new.
saintvlad 1 hours ago [-]
> Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 6, 1916,[10] to a Jewish father
> [...]
> Influenced by his wife, Hofstadter was a member of the Young Communist League in college, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party USA; he quit in 1939.
> 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.
More efficient than any foreign actor
athrowaway3z 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tokai 10 hours ago [-]
But that man is a foreign actor.
vrganj 10 hours ago [-]
Whatever happened to stripping criminal immigrants of their US citizenship and putting them in a torture cell in El Salvador?
Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
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.
croes 8 hours ago [-]
Musk can afford the Trump Gold Card
Nesco 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
Science has always been in Chaos. I know of zero laboratories doing “science” that isn’t biased or otherwise tainted with politics or money
The US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from there
You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing
newsclues 9 hours ago [-]
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.
svachalek 8 hours ago [-]
It's not an opportunity to improve until the source of chaos is removed. You don't rebuild from a hurricane while the winds are still 150 mph.
dmpk2k 8 hours ago [-]
You're right, and yet it's also true that existing institutions have ossified. There is immense inertia.
Covzire 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Yeah, if only they had tried to appease the fascists harder and earlier. Thanks Nigel.
kittikitti 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mbmbn 8 hours ago [-]
People are going nuts. How is this comment even remotely acceptable?
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.
mothballed 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jdw64 10 hours ago [-]
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.
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
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.
The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
jdw64 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
It's genuinely amazing(ly depressing) how quickly and effectively "certain groups" can create enemies and whip up public sentiment to attack them and gain power because of it.
alberto467 10 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
But not as smart as bernie madoff, who had much better results, right?
10 hours ago [-]
NoImmatureAdHom 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).
Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!
JuniperMesos 1 hours ago [-]
Is China actually particularly interested in allowing non-Chinese foreigners to immigrate there ostensibly to do science but really so they can permanently settle in China and have children who are considered fully Chinese under law?
qsera 1 hours ago [-]
> It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from,
No, that is just your opinion.
jimbob45 59 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it’s impossible to have this conversation until the left admits it poisoned the well with trans “science” and DEI funding and grants.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
> Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
Tummler68 1 hours ago [-]
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iluvcommunism 2 hours ago [-]
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crises-luff-6b 9 hours ago [-]
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priyankarr 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jimt1234 1 hours ago [-]
The Dow is at 50,000! Why can't we all just be happy about that?! /s
Weallneedclima 8 hours ago [-]
I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year:
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
hammock 2 hours ago [-]
> I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Realest comment in this entire post
spwa4 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cyanydeez 10 hours ago [-]
you might be an american, and know this, but when you say "complaining" it's a negative tone.
If you support US Science, you need to say "more rightly pointing out that..."
emsign 10 hours ago [-]
Good. Very good.
TavsiE9s 10 hours ago [-]
Could you please explain? I fail to understand your comment.
jr_isidore 9 hours ago [-]
He means GGP saved GP the chore of reading by pegging the article as a typical Elon hit piece. You know how HN articles can be so longwinded.
It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.
dang 20 minutes ago [-]
Ok, but that doesn't make the GP a good Hacker News comment. It simply repeats a cliché, and a good HN comment should be more substantive than that.
johnp314 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Rebuff5007 8 hours ago [-]
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."
_DeadFred_ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE.
The science is doing research and writing reports about what they've found. Which is getting defunded and denied and destroyed.
Is it now partisan to say "I'm in favor of doing research into how earth's climate is changing and what if anything is causing it"??
Rebuff5007 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Draiken 7 hours ago [-]
Definitely. We should ignore it and it'll go away by not going into these damn climate conferences. There are so many of them!
giladvdn 9 hours ago [-]
Exactly. One side prefers being miserly on science while spending lavishly on needless wars.
rzwitserloot 9 hours ago [-]
In normal times, what you say is obviously true.
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.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
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?
throwaway173738 7 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
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"
fn-mote 8 hours ago [-]
> Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. […]
Try harder to engage in dialog. Basic economic theory contradicts your claim. You need a much stronger logical argument to have any credibility.
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
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
mothballed 7 hours ago [-]
the US can trivially and renewably acquire infinite money (in USD). It is an infinite resource.
Wealth on the other hand....
hackyhacky 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
9 hours ago [-]
ModernMech 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kombookcha 8 hours ago [-]
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irchans 9 hours ago [-]
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."
svachalek 8 hours ago [-]
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.
_DeadFred_ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
godsinhisheaven 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Draiken 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
American politics are so absurd.
godsinhisheaven 7 hours ago [-]
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?
alchemism 7 hours ago [-]
I’m sure the same justification was trotted out in Hungary when they purged the intellectuals there, too.
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
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.
kashunstva 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
saintvlad 42 minutes ago [-]
> 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
Yeah the reason for this is that conservatives have been unjustly excluded from academia for almost a century.
6 hours ago [-]
acdha 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Helloworldboy 9 hours ago [-]
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cubefox 9 hours ago [-]
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IsTom 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think I've ever met a leftist denying evolution.
ffsm8 9 hours ago [-]
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
brookst 8 hours ago [-]
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.
samlinnfer 8 hours ago [-]
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.
IsTom 9 hours ago [-]
> any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot
I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
9 hours ago [-]
foxglacier 8 hours ago [-]
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.
j_w 8 hours ago [-]
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.
carlosjobim 7 hours ago [-]
And that's the most anti-scientific attitude a person can possibly have, what you just said.
Windchaser 7 hours ago [-]
> 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
joenot443 9 hours ago [-]
Totally, but there’s a lot more to science than just evolution.
IsTom 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that's one of examples OP gave and it doesn't match my experience. Doesn't leave a great impression of the rest of the argument.
cubefox 7 hours ago [-]
For the record, I provided a counterargument and it got flagged and downvoted.
Helloworldboy 9 hours ago [-]
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cubefox 9 hours ago [-]
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snaking0776 8 hours ago [-]
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.
archimedes237 8 hours ago [-]
It's closer to 70,000 years. If not, then explain the Australian Aborigines.
cubefox 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
MSFT_Edging 8 hours ago [-]
Because if you give an inch to that line of thinking, it leads to broader dehumanization and mass tragedy.
cubefox 8 hours ago [-]
What is true is already so.
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)
foxglacier 8 hours ago [-]
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.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
This is a good point.
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
saintvlad 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
panny 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Windchaser 3 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, what's more important to you, discovering truths via scientific research and reports, or conforming to your political ideology? (or getting revenge for perceived attacks, I guess)
smarf 1 hours ago [-]
'just let the bully beat on you, otherwise they will be justified in escalating'
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
andrewla 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
newaccount670 1 hours ago [-]
US Science needed this. Racism, sexism, plagiarism, and fraud were rampant in the academic community. It's going to take a long time to fully fix the problem, but we are on the right path currently.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
No it did not, and even if there was a correction needed, this most certainly is not that correction.
EcommerceFlow 34 minutes ago [-]
Private enterprise is vastly more competitive than public institutions in every single facet of society. Defund all public science funding so we can have another 50 SpaceXs.
Blackstrat 1 hours ago [-]
The government can't fund everything. Too much of the budget is tied up in transfer and interest payments squeezing out other more viable research. The federal government doesn't have unlimited funds. Something has to give.
Avshalom 1 hours ago [-]
The president said we dropped 250 million dollars worth of bombs in a single night last week.
mrexroad 1 hours ago [-]
> Something has to give.
Just so I’m not misunderstanding, you felt that science funding should be the first thing to give? And that other recent controversial expenditures should take priority?
throwaway-11-1 1 hours ago [-]
What’s the military budget again? How much did the war we lost in Iran cost?
Blackstrat 1 hours ago [-]
Down voted, imagine that. Predictable as sunrise. So what should be cut?
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
Trump's ballroom.
Trump's "irs lawsuit settlement fund"
The salaries of all the lawyers being paid to justify illegal and discriminatory executive orders.
ICE's budget.
TSA's budget.
"Border Wall" construction costs.
Should I go on?
stackskipton 20 minutes ago [-]
I agree with all of that but you don't put a dent in spending outside of tackling ICE budget. TSA is more neutral since a lot of funding from that comes from airline ticket fees.
There is only 5 items that matter:
Interest on Debt.
Social Security
Medicare.
Medicaid.
Defense.
Blackstrat 39 minutes ago [-]
These counter arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't sound like left wing talking points. No one on this thread nor in the media knows the reality of what happened in Iraq. That most here dislike Trump, I get it. But, to pretend that this administration is somehow behaving differently than others in the past is ahistorical and disingenuous at best.
chasing 53 minutes ago [-]
Trump's tax cut on the wealthiest 1%? $1,000,000,000,000 over ten years.
Daily cost of the Iran debacle: $2,000,000,000.
We sure as shit have money to fund research.
We prefer to fund second yachts, third vacation homes, and bombs.
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
i like academics, don't misunderstand me.
You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.
Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.
Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.
Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.
Historically Americans have benefited from income asymmetry and a fairly wide-spread desire by foreign nations not to cause too much legal trouble for US nationals abroad.
I have quite a few friends that do live, quite happily, abroad. But the common pattern for them is a.) fluency in the native language b.) historical association with the country c.) fairly large cash reserves so they can ignore any economic problems these countries are facing.
People also embed themselves in different communities when they move anywhere, even to a different city or state in the same country. It's a clean reset.
It doesn't always last forever. I know several people who tried to move somewhere, including internationally, when politics got heated in 2016. Most of them came back eventually with a realization that politics is everywhere, it's just a matter of how much you're embedded into the places it's discussed.
In that sense most EU countries are a positive upgrade.
Pros: Great food, interesting cultural past, only one language to deal with and not complicated accents to grasp (more important that most people think), gorgeous wild areas, uncomplicated people, maybe a little on the introverted side at first, but solid gold after a while.
Cons: Risk of poverty sadly high, bigger than many US states (but with better government support and healthcare). Harsh continental climate very hot and very cold. Not for everybody (but US has plenty of places with similar or worse weather). The trains and communication roads are also under-average for the country and many people don't really speak English.
In many of the non highly touristic places you can live well if you can adapt to the cons. Housing prices are lower, life expenses cheaper and buying a house should be affordable with a decent job (Don't try this in Barcelona or Madrid). Portugal is close, and is even cheaper, to the point of some people living there and working in Spain. To support the same standard of living in Barcelona, Valencia or Madrid you need to plan in advance, to stomach the stress that unavoidably come with big cities, and earn much more.
In Spain if you can speak English well you will be seen yet as a big researcher.
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more established scientists are maintaining backup options.
I too have re-evaluated my feelings and decided that while I am not yet at the point of actively looking to leave the US, besides the hassle of moving itself, I would be fine with having to do so.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
Any citations on this?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...
https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/
I'd be shocked to find anyone surprised by this.
See how easy hand waving is?
Of course the real question is: what does conservative even mean any more? The joining of Falwell and Reagan fucked both conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
They want the 1850s.
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.
There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?
Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?
This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.
However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.
So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase 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,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”
If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.
My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.
A society where funding depends on a person's political position doesn't sound free.
I'll be the first to say this is a bad thing AND that they're going about it stupidly. But I'm also saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage your stakeholders over a period of decades.
I haven't had that much respect for Elon since he called the cave diver a pedophile, but something I didn't realize until the 2025 administration started is how lazy everyone involved with it is. As far as I can tell, no one in that administration has, at any point in their life, ever examined any of their own opinions or actions, or looked up the "why" of any of the programs that they declared as "wasteful".
That or they're just idiots. Tough to say.
> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
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.
The framing as this being "unheard of" is very disingenuous, though.
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.
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.
In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law.
European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of.
Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them.
I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire.
The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
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.
When I was younger and more naive, this > "the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient") i
is what I thought (american) politics meant. When people talked about things being political or arguments related thereto, this is what I imagined happening.
Then I grew older and saw it was mostly people whining about gays getting married or who was allowed to have an abortion or what activities minorities were allowed to participate in.
Very depressing, frankly.
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 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.
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."
You can restate the ideology over and over. It doesn't change reality. There are many parties involved. I have agency as well. It's all very pedestrian to be reductive, but it's not compelling.
This is rich considering it's the first time I stated it in this particular sub thread as the person I responded to was both too chickenshit to quote what I said or respond directly where I said it because it would betray that their portrayal was bad faith and full of shit.
The "reality" check, in fact, is coming for the scientists who are still suspending belief that they too were not better than the plebs who could be shit-canned in a millisecond by the whims of the "parties" involved (but muh reductive portroyal! Also science is in chaos!) and have to go on a "pedestrian" and "reductive" mission to use their "agency" to find a new "party."
Time to face the music, "scientists."
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.
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’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.
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.
"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.
If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.
It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.
Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.
I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.
All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
Effectively no one is arguing for this. You're ranting about a ghost.
You did it, you torched the strawman.
Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Besides that; all the nice and shiny things you mention - the busses and trains and the cement - can be produced and operated at fraction of their current CO2 cost. Wind mills and PV panels offset their CO2 cost by magnitudes if they are replacing fossil fuel industries.
There's a middle ground between "lets burn it all to the ground" and "let's go back to the savanna".
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.
We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.
> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.
A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'.
This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
Required reading: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
Whoops, keyword match.
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.
Weirdly, these critics never have useful suggestions to improve anything, it's all just personal attacks at one remove.
I mean, frankly, we wouldn't need a lot of these studies if people in power were slightly more willing to just believe (usually minority) people who talk about the problems they have.
Black soldiers were denied home loans after ww2; white soldiers were not; many white families therefor benefitted from owning a home (appreciation of value and safety/stability) in ways that black families did not.
Do we need a study on that? I mean, it doesn't hurt anything, but we could also just read some reports and talk to some people and then realize "hey this is messed up"
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.
Most people are against bad research, but not everyone agrees with you on what bad means. Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine. So where does that leave us on the question of who gets research funding? Or did you have a different definition of "bad" in mind that doesn't consult your biases?
> One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions
Who decides what's a relevent question? The president? Political parties? B/Trillionaires? Big Tech / Oil / Pharma ? You?
> Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
Sorry I ignored it, but you only included it as a footnote to your reply, so I wasn't sure you were actually serious. You gave two ideas really: fund stuff at random and fund continuations at random but holding a minimum objective bar. I'll take them in turn:
> just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
This is more or less how the system operates now. You get a PhD, you go to a good institution, get some results, publish some papers, submit a proposal, and then it's a dice roll from there whether it gets funded or not. You said you had a career in research so you know this. How do you do "basic review for research viability" to your liking that's different from what's done now? Because now it's done by experts in their respective fields. You seem to think that means "bias is built into the system", yes? How do you evaluate basic research viability without consulting people specifically for their biases?
But funding continuations at random means that good research and bad research, whatever that means, would have a random chance of just not continuing. How does a country build long time-horizon research programs if they can just be defunded at the roll of the dice despite good results? How does that improve the system if good research can just randomly die and bad research can continue randomly as a matter of policy?
> just fund stuff at random.
Doesn't prevent bad research from being funded, as you admit. So to me, since both of your ideas aren't really designed to eliminate bad research but work to eliminates biases, it seems like you're less concerned with not funding bad research, and more concerned with how biased you perceive the funding process to be.
> you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science?
That's my whole point, you can't. The system we've built is a compromise because so many people have an opinion on what should / should not be funded. You and I are biased and will never agree, so we leave it up to experts who are biased and will also never agree, but at least they know what they're talking about. So at the end of the day some things we both don't like get funded from a very small pot. Maybe a dice roll improves the whole process, but given the system has been wildly successful in producing technological breakthroughs despite inefficiencies and biases and disagreements, you probably should o
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.
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.
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.
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?
You should really shouldn't subtly misrepresent the argument. The article states that blind auditions made orchestras much more diverse in some categories, but did not make much of an impact in others.
As far as I can tell nobody except Anthony Tommasini is calling for blind auditions to go away. His position position is just weird and using it to represent the opinions of most of the left is more than a bit disingenuous.
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?
What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.
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.
you can do this, you just need to find a chump who is willing to spend the money.
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
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!
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.
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...
Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle
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...
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.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
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 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 mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
I think it's difficult, if you're a millenial/zoomer/whatever we're calling these things, to understand just how much of the world genuinely liked and respected and wanted america involved in their local affairs.
America obviously wasn't perfect and many, many more people than trump were involved with squandering all of this goodwill, but we still had some left over before he showed up.
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?
What practical machinery and infrastructure has the US innovated in that time frame?
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 I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.
Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.
Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.
Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?
What the fuck?
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start 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
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.
> [...]
> Influenced by his wife, Hofstadter was a member of the Young Communist League in college, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party USA; he quit in 1939.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter#Political_v...
McCarthy was right all along.
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.
The US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from there
You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing
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.
Yeah, if only they had tried to appease the fascists harder and earlier. Thanks Nigel.
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.
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.
It's genuinely amazing(ly depressing) how quickly and effectively "certain groups" can create enemies and whip up public sentiment to attack them and gain power because of it.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
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 )
You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).
Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!
No, that is just your opinion.
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
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.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.
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.
THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE.
The science is doing research and writing reports about what they've found. Which is getting defunded and denied and destroyed.
Is it now partisan to say "I'm in favor of doing research into how earth's climate is changing and what if anything is causing it"??
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.
Yeah the reason for this is that conservatives have been unjustly excluded from academia for almost a century.
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.
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
>“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.
"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
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.
Just so I’m not misunderstanding, you felt that science funding should be the first thing to give? And that other recent controversial expenditures should take priority?
Trump's "irs lawsuit settlement fund"
The salaries of all the lawyers being paid to justify illegal and discriminatory executive orders.
ICE's budget.
TSA's budget.
"Border Wall" construction costs.
Should I go on?
There is only 5 items that matter:
Interest on Debt.
Social Security
Medicare.
Medicaid.
Defense.
Daily cost of the Iran debacle: $2,000,000,000.
We sure as shit have money to fund research.
We prefer to fund second yachts, third vacation homes, and bombs.