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.
Why not?
> Why not?
Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.
[0] It works enough for some demo to some person
[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.
Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
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.
yes, or at least largely overlapping circles
what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for.
another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see?
I've had worse. Mostly much better, but I've had worse.
There is no communication there. No concepts for them to communicate. It is just math.
I'm not sure that models are complex enough to have a consistent internal representation of a concept the same way that organic brains can to communicate. I'm not sure of any quantitative science backing this up though. Models don't know anything across iterations yet.
Can you expand. They have both context and memory?
I'm sure there are research prototypes that work differently from this but I haven't seen any enter the mainstream yet.
Also, diffusion language models have a different evaluation order but I think they also do not really have internal thoughts or feelings because they also do not seem to have any sort of hidden state that encodes anything like that.
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 don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.
When interest rates are high, capital shifts to yield-generating, interest-bearing investments. They give higher returns with less risk.
So basically the ROI of biotech becomes less competitive compared to alternatives. You have the same number of people/firms chasing a smaller supply of investment dollars.
Suppose the ROI of biotech becomes more competitive compared to alternatives, because there's an ongoing series of technological breakthroughs.
The return on investing goes up (by assumption) and this means interest rates go up (by definition; they are the return on investing).
Is this bad for biotech? Does it shift capital out of biotech? Obviously not.
Everyone else is using it to mean "the Federal Reserve has set the interest rate high right now"
Very different situations.
High fed rates means the ‘tide’ is different. For biotech to get more interest, it has to have a higher roi than comparable other risk investments.
High ROI != high interest rates.
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.
does that get you a new fed administration that isn't idiotically anti-science?
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
russia: brain drain
usa: brain drain
I am saying this as someone who pursued Canadian citizenship by descent and moved to New Zealand in the last year, so it's definitely happening some, but my impression so far is that the total number of people who actually make the move is small. Most people who are skilled enough for an overseas employer to jump through hoops to put them on a visa have more lucrative jobs available in the US that are closer to home without all of the downsides of emigration.
I would believe that a lot of dual citizens or skilled immigrants to the US are moving home.
It isn't. At least, not in the way being portrayed. The people going back to China were already from China, and the people returning to Europe are largely from there as well.
The dirty little secret of US academic research is that it became almost entirely dependent on Chinese labor over the past 30 years, and that's reversing a little bit.
https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/Resources-American-S...
- 30-50% pay cut
- points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30
- frequent unfavorable rule changes
- fear of being trapped forever on a temporary visa and eventually sent back to the USA, poorer than their peers who stayed stateside.
- huge pay raise
- retire back home wealthier than their peers and still enjoy socialized healthcare.
But what about "free healthcare". Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
> - points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30
Many countries with socialized healthcare do this. They only want young people and don't want older people who are a risk at becoming a burden to the state before they paid a lot into the system. After a certain age or health status, many workers, even locals not just immigrants, start to become a net negative to the welfare state, consuming more resources in care than they contribute back, so you need a constant stream of young healthy workers to keep the ponzi scheme going.
US being private healthcare doesn't give a damn since your health conditions are your own problem.
>Canada's immigration system is just structurally tilted toward brain drain. It's all stick and no carrot.
And yet they have record immigration rates, mostly from india. So it seems there's plenty of desperate people on the planet that don't even need a carrot, they prefer the Canadian stick because the situation back in their home is so much worse than the canadian stick.
However, I do think that if you're relying on a stream of desperate people from all over the world to replenish your own brain drain because you manage to push away your most valuable people, then you're doing it wrong and it's not gonna be sustainable, you're just putting band aids on major structural issues to cover the rot, and eventuall y the piper will have to be paid.
I haven't lived in either country but as someone who lives in a country with socialised healthcare, it mainly benefits the older generations, as health issues begin to crop up nearer retirement.
If a Canadian spends most of their working life in the U.S. then returns to Canada to raise their kids or to retire then they're getting the best of both worlds.
Not really. The internet bubble might make you think that, but actually ordinary people aren't interested.
People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.
And the issues with healthcare in the US will not be solved by the government being the one to pay. Billing is too complex (i.e. costly), and Dr salaries are too high (compare them to other countries). Neither of those issues are solved by the government paying.
And don't forget how Americans hear stories from other countries about huge waits for care, and they want none of that.
There are zero proposals to make all Dr's employees of the government, on salary, who just take care of whoever shows up. But that might actually work to reduce costs.
Case in point: an EE I know who is finishing his master's[1] is considering interesting proposals from solid (but not top tier, think Texas not Massachusetts) universities from the US, Germany and China. While he's afraid of the culture gap with China, it's clearly the one that has the more interesting things going on technically and the one he feels more excited about
[1]Engineering by itself is a bachelor's level degree here
There are a lot of QOL advantages to living in a less violent, less polarized, less cruelty-driven society that isn't actively trying to dismantle all of its institutions and destroy itself. Especially if you're one of those people who are in the crosshairs of jack-booted thugs and their cheerleaders.
Hell, Canada extended its citizenship by descent law last December, and has been issuing citizenship certificates under it. Just this week many of the people who'd received these certificates had them revoked while there is further investigation into their documentation. Many of them are people who'd been living in Canada on temporary visas, and gave up their visa when they got proof of citizenship. Now they're in limbo with invalid passports and no legal status in the country.
Being an immigrant anywhere, and yes, that includes American "expats" in Canada or western Europe, means that you are at the whims of a capricious and chaotic immigration system that changes at the whims of a government you have no say in.
For many people, it does get better with time, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Y2wzmKHEU
The next federal election will be interesting as to the direction the Australian public wants to take the country, but it's not due until May 2028.
So either get in before then, or wait until afterwards to gauge your expectations of being welcome.
Having said that, the current Government (less conservative) won the May 2025 Federal election bigly (but maybe not quite a landslide) with 93 seats over the next most popular party at 43 seats, out of a total of 150 seats.
God I hope Pauline and one nation are just a stupid blip and that poll that put them ahead is a mirage though. She's doing the same bullshit playbook as the UK and US - 'elites' are destroying Australia by driving immigration! Meanwhile the richest woman in Australia is in the background holding the marionette's strings.
What's changed is recently she and her like-wits such as Joyce have abandoned traditional media and gone fully social media and focusing on building an ever growing echo chamber with zero internal examination or pushback on the bigotry.
With much thanks to the Vogon poet Gina Rinehart and GR's new bestie Elon.
my guess is southeast asia may overtake europe in a decade or so considering how wildly popular asian culture is with teenagers.
Where are you heading?
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.
Most Americans that live overseas tend to be expats rather than immigrants. Those two terms don't convey the same meaning.
Technically of course you are right.
Practically, they barely pay anything significant.
The lower net salary in Europe / Asia associated with rather high local tax means that most Americans citizens oversea barely own anything significant back to the state.
However it does remain an annoyance to fill the tax declaration every year: I know several American who chose to give up their citizenahip just to avoid this specific issue.
If you are normal wage slave with limited savings then yes the exclusions mostly work.
The 2026 Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) allows qualifying U.S. expats to exclude up to $132,900 of foreign-earned income from their U.S. federal income taxes. Married couples can exclude up to $265,800 if both spouses work abroad and each meets the eligibility requirements.
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.
What people often mean by a "true expat" is something completely different: someone sent abroad by their employer, usually with a generous expatriate package (home-country salary, local allowances, housing, private schooling for children, etc.)
More broadly, though, expatriate simply means someone living outside their native country. Ex means "out of", and patria means "native country" or "homeland". It's that simple.
So the word itself isn't limited to wealthy retirees or corporate transfers. All immigrants are expatriates, although not every expatriate is necessarily an immigrant.
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.
Some of my non-Spanish European colleagues also have commented that the education system is kind of "good not great" especially compared with other Western/Central European countries. However, I understand the Spanish system to be somewhat federated; perhaps the difference between Extremadura and Andalusia would explain the difference in opinion.
So doing better than that isn't too hard.
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 automatically seen as a great researcher.
More cons: You will eventually have to shift to a very different customer service climate and hours. The development levels can vary quite a bit, especially "modern" infrastructure like internet outside of the major cities (maybe that's gotten better in the last 5 years). Bureaucracy of some institutions (government/finance) can be extremely frustrating.
Regarding bureaucracy I'm afraid that there has been no such progress. Extremely frustrating that even when I do everything right, I get told to come back another day for my trámite because they just...haven't done it! Sorry!
The question was asked if some US person might be called racist for having an opinion about gentrification that seemingly has little to do with race, and the answer is yes, yes they have been.
That said, there can be some "Oh yeah - well if you're insinuating that white people are displacing black people then YOU are the racist" which is just... not the same thing. One view of the world may incorporate a significant accommodation and acknowledgement of historical discrimination, enslavement, red-lining, you name it. The other is... technically correct I suppose, but complete horseshit on the merits until we start to see significant, systemic harm going the other direction as a result of race.
But that's just, like, my opinion man.
Cheaper than 120k?
I mean so you'll move to Spain and just be horrible ignorant of any issues facing the local population, living in a financial bubble where you've earned significantly move then the them and can ignore any political issues locally.
Sure it's "freeing" to just move and stop caring about "politics" and use money to smooth over or move again if anything slightly bothers you.
Isn't it enough to not having to look over your shoulder fearing you will be a statistic in the long list of atrocities being committed by this government? Having a good quality of life is something to be guilty about?!
I'm sorry that scientific projects are being cut but are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum regardless of how our economy and our future is going to be crippled by debt?
EVERYONE is going to be crying about their projects being cut and there's no good way to do it where everyone is going to be happy. Some people are going to lose their jobs, and that sucks but there is no other way except having the courage to cut funding. We have to cut everything and then reorganize at a lower budget number and the reallocate funds to the most important projects.
We can't keep funding everything. You may not care about our debt but I certainly do and there's more than enough of us around that care. Our descendants are going to be fucked and that's not fair. I'm sorry you're losing your job but soon over half our budget is going to be used to pay off interest on our debt. Just the interest and not the principal. This is an economic crisis.
I would go as far as to say that the only things getting reduced funding are education and science research, but that’s just a hunch.
Science funding is a minuscule part of the US budget
The GOP cut a measly $60 million per year for scientific monitoring instruments in the ocean, yet are increasing spending by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on things like military spending, White House security, and deporting good people they call “illegals”.
They haven’t cut the national debt because they cut taxes on the rich. Taxing the rich could pay for all the science and gradually pay down the debt. But it’s in the GOP interest to cut science to dumb down the population. Climate change is “fake” they say, meanwhile Fox acquired Roku (100+ million households), Paramount (MAGA) acquiring Warner Brothers, CBS, CNN, etc. Oligarchs taking over TikTok and their disinformation machine strengthens.
If you actually cared about the national debt you would back higher taxes and the democratic party given that the democrats are the only party who actually run a balanced budget at any point in the last 50 years.
But you don’t care about the national debt. You don’t care about the well being of americans. You don’t care about the cost of living, or protecting the environment for our children.
You don’t care about making the country better. All you care about is making sure that you don’t see anyone who is different. Your willful ignorance and hate disgusts me.
What was that new number they were throwing around, 1.4 Trillion dollar budget?
But sure, let's worry about cutting funding to research institutes which were sucking the US dry with their budgets in the millions.
Is the assertion there are no places for her to enjoy doing what she's great at, without leaving the country, in private industry?
Genuinely curious.
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.
Just have faith (in science, not sure about the U.S. - empires come and go)
In any case, you've inspired me to post the original reply I had composed for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48575653 (the immediate parent to your comment), below. This is what I wanted to say, before then deciding to just be grateful for the sharing of the parent's perspective:
""" I'd frame AI as a plausible hypothesis engine, not as a working scientist (yet). I think AI can do some things that look like rational analysis (far better than many/most humans much of the time, perhaps), but I reserve that (most rare and prestigious and important) activity of actual science for humans too, when it counts, for sure.
I get the main article is about the very real "chaos/threat" of no funding, not the "chaos/threat" of AI-articles/"research" nor the "chaos/threat" of "real issues in the state of Science (before funding crises)".
IMO, the state of Science (before funding crises) could be, perhaps, inextricably (though not overtly) linked to the later/current chaos/threat of markedly reduced funding. No? Maybe it's not stated anywhere, but it seems oh so likely, reading between the lines.
If funding cuts, in the medium to long term, lead to a good thing (which would be the best we can now wish for -- and, after all, everything comes and goes in and out with the pendulum of time), it will be a much needed "reset" of science onto a more honest (and net knowledge-learning productive) model.
It (Science) was, arguably, already well by the wayside. Not just sort of expensive (though not very, compared with other budget items). But more importantly: inefficient (to put it nicely). And more importantly still: often (perhaps more often than not!) plain wrong. And that means, sadly: fairly/largely ineffective (degree depending on the domain). Which is the opposite of what is wanted. If you're going to do Science, it should at least be valid, or if it's not, it should be possible for those in their own field to tell that it is not. Else, it's kind of broken.
And if it doesn't serve it's purpose, what can you do but reboot. Reset. Just like a computer.
At least Science can be rebuilt. You just start doing it again (with what you have/can). With more rigor.
Maybe this reads like more of the same. But I don't think "being well funded" correlates well with "doing good science". (Only if the science is measured by the paychecks. Which is economics, not science.) """
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of "science." Science is not experiments and papers. Science is a set of methods by which we discover truth.
I will agree: if you knew in advance which experiments to do, or which needed fewer resources, you could make science more efficient. Pharma could save a ton of money by not testing all the stupid compounds that don't work. We could abandon safety protocols and simply not make mistakes that harm people. Rocket companies could simply start by designing the working rocket on the first try instead of making all the failures first. Physicists should just model reality accurately instead of spending money building giant particle accelerators to check how reality works. These are all good ideas, and I am sure there are many more!
In the Land of Theory, there are any number of ways to make science more efficient and always right. You can guarantee yourself a Nobel prize if you can demonstrate how to run real science in the the Land of Theory.
Why dont you stay and take a teaspoon of responsibility for the country/monster you created?
He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.
Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
Yeah just milk those suckers dry. Hope dare they try to do something good and ask to get paid
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.
Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
Its weird - I'm australian. We have the same caliber of software engineers here. But there's not the same ambition amongst skilled engineers to solve problems at the world stage. And its far more difficult to convince investors to give you the capital to try.
The technology sector is propping up the US economy. The AI race is - so far - making this even more true.
See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01...
Quote: ``` Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work.
So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.
```
Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years.
Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.
This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)
How come there's still no better desktop processor than Intel/AMD on a per core basis? This is just one example. Nobody's made anything at that level still.
- science that simply will not get done, and may be lost to humanity altogether. There is research the US would have done this year that will not get done elsewhere this year. Once the individual researchers leave the field, there is no guarantee the research will get done this decade, or the next, or the next.
- Intel and AMD lean on technology developed in the 1950s. US science and R&D done in 2026 similarly will underwrite US industrial success in the 2050s and beyond. This is like the classical warning against eating your seed corn (instead of saving it to plant). Pressing pause will have an impact, but one would not expect it to show up in the industry league tables for some time.
Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted.
Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration.
Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production.
Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.
Who so far has been put into office twice by?
* Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".
Uhhh... Not voting at all doesn't count as "Not Trump". It counts as "I don't care," which implicitly means "whatever everyone else thinks".
This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. A majority of voters elected the clown, and the population of non-voters is complicit in that.
1. Of all ballots, only 49.7961% were for Trump. [0]
2. Of ballots where someone made a non-blank choice for President, 50.1976% were for candidates who were not-Trump.
So when I explicitly wrote about a "minority" of "voters", that really does mean an an actual mathematical minority of the people who actually voted, thankyouverymuchdamnit.
[0] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
Guess you're right, though
As the saying goes: "Don't start nothin', won't be nothin'."
That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident.
Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population.
Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.
I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
"And so the anecdote goes that Xi Jinping bragged that they were going to — China - was going to win the competition because they had 1.3 billion people to choose talent from. They had the biggest talent supply.
And the elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said, 'You're wrong. You have 1.3 billion to draw from, but the United States has 8 billion to draw from, and so they have the upper hand, and don't forget that."
Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.
The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.
[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...
Graduate research in the United States is often an exercise in exploitation of cheap labor.
China and India have a large pool of highly educated workers who can qualify for graduate research. Their visas specifically prohibit them for seeking alternative employment in the United States.
You can demand long hours and very low pay. The payoff to them is a chance at long-term employment in the US for more money than they could earn at home, and in any event increased status and employment opportunities when they return.
The payoff for native-born kids is not at all the same. Even for those who can afford graduate school, opportunity cost may be prohibitive.
The US has decided that creating new scientists out of its own citizens has no economic value.
Capitalism is duplication of effort.
I've never been particularly convinced by the crusade to eliminate alternatives to capitalism in the name of eliminating a society's wasteful behavior.
At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.
Of course we also have Ronald Reagan to thank. And that administration spawned the career of John Roberts, which we can now see as a through line to the destruction of The Court.
The entire western world had been shifting towards neoliberalism as a direct response to the eastern world shifting towards communism since WW2.
Trump also isn't the embodiment of anything other than the guy who didn't take it seriously and suddenly ended up with the job because the voters in the country decided it couldn't be any worse under him than whatever the current situation they were living with was.
Absurdist leftist fantasism or, more likely, true paranoid schizophrenia. Are you taking your meds?
If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.**
Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?
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.
Given the money available to conservatives, why haven't they been able to setup vibrant universities, films, art etc. The point here is not to blame conservatives, but push the analysis of the cause to something deeper than just saying that the opponents have all the power.
Any citations on this?
https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/
I'd be shocked to find anyone surprised by this.
This is such a wildly elitist take. There's nothing intrinsically progressive about education, and to just declare so as fact is an excellent example of the exact kind of hostility that keeps non-progressives from being at home in higher education.
> I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.
Is it really surprising that people who disagree with someone's politics would let that bleed over into their assessment of that person's professional abilities?
We literally see this everywhere! People use a person's politics to discredit other aspects of their being all the time.
Conservative professors are a rare breed in academia because non-conservatives in academia make it a very hostile workplace environment.
There is a reason why a lot of progressive ideas worldwide originated in and spread from universities, often time resulting in student revolts/rebellions. Throughout history, starting in 1202, academia was always a source for new ideas, usually non establishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Student_activism&...
My friend, I simply stated a conclusion that is very commonly accepted, including by conservatives (hints: populism, religion, gender roles). You're welcome to dispute it but instead you declare it 'hostile'. If conservatives think this is offensive then I'll add that to the list of reasons they seem to avoid scenarios where their viewpoints are challenged (because that's how academia works).
> Is it really surprising that people who disagree with someone's politics would let that bleed over into their assessment of that person's professional abilities?
It certainly can. That's a long way from a coordinated conspiracy. And there are layers of insulation like wanting talent regardless of personality and avoiding legal issues.
> Conservative professors are a rare breed in academia because non-conservatives in academia make it a very hostile workplace environment.
Like stealing their lunch or lighting them up in a reply-all or what are we talking about here? Note I'm not freaking out that you "just declared something as a fact".
People commonly accept that God exists, too, all across the political spectrum. That doesn't mean he actually does exist, though. "Commonly accepted" does not mean "is true".
> It certainly can. That's a long way from a coordinated conspiracy. And there are layers of insulation like wanting talent regardless of personality and avoiding legal issues.
No one in this thread is claiming a "coordinated conspiracy", just years and years of ever increasing political bias amongst faculty at universities in the U.S.
C'mon, implicit bias training is supposed to teach you about how the negative impacts of persistent, low-grade bias accumulate over time, right?
> Like stealing their lunch or lighting them up in a reply-all or what are we talking about here? Note I'm not freaking out that you "just declared something as a fact".
Like not inviting them to conferences, social gatherings, networking opportunities, etc.
Again, decades of small bias add up. I mean, isn't that the entire thesis of things like "systemic racism"? Why would that not also be true in other areas?
Don't get me wrong, I believe theories like systemic racism have merit and are largely true. I just acknowledge that, if it's true that being black in America is an inherent disadvantage due to years of accumulated bias, it's probably also true that being conservative in academia is also an inherent disadvantage, due to the same mechanism.
All that being said, way to double down on the elitism!
Correct. And if you asserted the existence of a god based on this common notion I wouldn't scream that it's religous hostility.
Of course, dieties are not a great example here since they're based purely on people's superstitions.
> No one in this thread is claiming a "coordinated conspiracy"
From above: "Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years"
Most political purges I'm familiar with aren't "oops, implicit bias!"
At the start of this I said: "I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors." If you agree with this could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.
> Like not inviting them to conferences, social gatherings, networking opportunities, etc.
We're talking about adults, right? In any event, it would be interesting to see some stats or hear some anecdotes on the matter.
> Again, decades of small bias add up.
Does it? Seems far more likely to settle on some sort of median. It's just that the median is considered 'leftist' because it embraces the scientific method while most conservative platforms need to deny evolution, climate change, etc.
> it's probably also true that being conservative in academia is also an inherent disadvantage, due to the same mechanism.
There are far, far more dissimilarities.
You were clearly implying that the person you were responding to was saying it was some kind of conspiracy. I'm not buying this sudden retcon.
> We're talking about adults, right? In any event, it would be interesting to see some stats or hear some anecdotes on the matter.
Thats... literally what you were replying to in the aforementioned post! Here's the link again, in case you forgot: https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/ It's literally a lack of diversity, just like there used to be an equally stark lack of diversity in tech, etc.
I'm almost positive you're just trolling at this point.
Conservatives spread propaganda about woke universities -> conservative kids are less likely to go. Do this for decades and you end up in the situation we're in.
Either that or conservatives are just stupider and less likely to be academics; which is, in my opinion, more likely than your hypothesis about grand conspiracy.
Let me give you a hint: the concept of DEI statement to apply for a position exists
See how easy hand waving is?
What you show is that there are not many conservatives in academia. The reason for that is manifold. It could be that they are forced out. It could be that their views are changed with higher learning and turn progressive. It could be that conservatives self-select to not go into academia.
Pointing that out is not hand-waving.
And now you have another situation where "there could be many causes for the change X".
And you think that because Climate Change followed that pattern above, X must necessarily have only one real cause, and that cause is your preferred pet theory.
Does not sound like a convincing argument.
It's been in a constant burbling flux that has many factors, fires, volcanoes, etc all contribute to the steady level of churn.
The substantial change away from baseline is well recorded, tied back to sources by isotopes, and has a single cause - carbon dioxide by products from the combustion and release of previously sequestered carbon sources.
There's no doubt about that - there are multiple atmospheric libraries of gases from various parts of the world to back that up.
The data source sets for atmospheric makeup and ocean thermoclines are deeply tied into Cold War nuclear test monitoring and watching enemies, not some hippy dippy eco friendly new age hand wavyness.
Fun fact, what you're arguing is actually one of the reasons Charlie was murdered.
He notoriously said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. He specifically referred to Title VII which states even a neutral policy can be racism if it produces disparate impact[1] in practice. That is, if a neutral policy results in fewer black people being hired, that's evidence of racism. Charlie disagreed with that.
It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.
The paradox of tolerance is real. And more practically, it's impossible to guarantee representation of all viewpoints because there are an infinite number of them.
Is it?
Care you define who makes up the "white race"? Or any other overly-broad category that typically gets bandied about as "race"?
From my perspective, as someone who is flexibly categorized as "white" or "latino", depending on whatever is most convenient for the categorizer, "race" is a remarkable fluid label. Most people can't even agree on what "race" folks of mixed ethnic heritage actually are.
Race is a social construct. There's nothing intrinsic or immutable about any social construct.
Yes, some people are mixed ethnicity or "white passing". Yes societal views changes ("Italian used to not be considered white"). At the end of the day, most people fall into one of the categories and don't get to change that.
But since you're insisting that this be spelled out: The categories are quite arbitrary, can vary, and can change. Yes, race is a social construct.
The point is the physical attributes that often define the categories cannot be significantly changed. One can't particularly make their own skin lighter, regardless of people with marginal skin tones being able to change other aspects about themselves to pass for a lighter category, or regardless of being able to go to a different community where one might be in the lighter category by default.
Compare with say how easy it is for someone with different political views to just hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about DEI, just as one had to hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers were waxing poetic about the virtues of mega golf or owning a boat, just as one might have to hold their tongue these days when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about the virtues of fascism.
(also can we stop using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym? Applying that label to the Republican party after ~2020 is absurd)
Obviously.
> Compare with say how easy it is for someone with different political views to just hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about DEI, just as one had to hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers were waxing poetic about the virtues of mega golf or owning a boat, just as one might have to hold their tongue these days when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about the virtues of fascism.
That seems very un-Australian; I'm unfamiliar with the concept of letting rank stupidity ride w/out having a poke at it, and a lot of people have boats, big, small, whatever.
I'm quite fond of shed built ground effect boat/planes FWiW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
> can we stop using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym? Applying that label to the Republican party after ~2020 is absurd
TBH I'm not sure I have ever done that; "Conservative" varies by country, as does "Liberal".
That's a cool boat/plane! I'm certainly not picking on people who are interested enough to build their own, or even just buy into doing something they themselves really enjoy. Rather I was referring to the previous managerial fashions in the US, before the DEI fashion took over.
The point about "conservative" wasn't directed at you, but all of the parent comments who did use it that way
Modern Australia is seeing new waves of various behaviours, like all cultures these things ebb and flow - at our last elections the poor (particular) Christian conservative liberals that tried to ride the US wave of being mean to trans people and blaming big problems on a tiny tiny minority got hammered electorally for what was seen as un-Australian behaviour (giving everyone a fair go, regardless).
This time around the xenophobes are back stronger than ever riding a wave of flag draping nationalism not so subtlely hiding a grab bag of white supremacism and general X-phobia; we have
No, I don't, and smugly insinuating I have some ulterior motive or whatever is, frankly, offensive.
I asked you a question because I didn't know what you meant, because you made a statement that was wildly ambiguous even with well-defined context.
> most people fall into one of the categories
One of... Which categories, exactly? This is why I'm asking. You keep making statements as if they're somehow inherently obvious, but... I can think of many different competing definitions of "race", so I'm trying to figure out which one you're using, or if you're even using one at all.
Not to those familiar with the history of the US Census racial classifications, given the number of times the categories shifted and changed it seems more than a little opinionated.
Ethnicity is mostly stable for most individuals, sure, but it too is hardly immutable - people do and have changed their countries, social cultures, and daily language usage- even to the point of struggling to think and talk in their primary birth languages.
> care to comment on the actual point of the parent comment thread?
Ahh, that "Charlie" (Kirk) had opinions, that US science is in chaos, that US use of the phrase "leftists" is always grating, that a two party Hotelling's law cluster feck inevitably resulting from US style elections is inadequate to politically represent a large population?
There's a lot going on here; one thing at a time is that race being an "an intrinsic immutable attribute" is all manner of horseshit.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a German student activist's definitionally anodyne proposal to engage with society and barely referenced in the decades since has probably been coopted more than a little to concoct a new boogeyman for the right wing.
Anyway, what you presented is not a “gotcha”, despite the fact that I’ve heard it a million times when engaging with right wing “intellectuals”. It’s still a conspiracy theory.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...
- nothing happens by accident
- nothing is as it seems
- everything is connected
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.
I'm not even critiquing any particular cultural stance. But I think it's possible and important to critique anti-intellectualism and specially denialisms specially in things that are actually important and threatening to society -- simply because of greed, most of the time. Let's not fool ourselves, climate change denialism isn't like a random cultural thing they chose to deny, it's specifically because of connections to coal, oil and gas industries.
If things are bad, you should want to know what will be the consequences and what can be done to mitigate things. In fact, I think denial tends to create some reactionary behavior from the left as well, sometimes leading to overblown claims around climate change. All of this leads to increasing polarization.
Slowing down cultural change is perfectly fine (as long as it's respectful of well established things like human rights), cosplaying a farmer is fine, whatever. Or being an actual farmer, or living outside of a big city, etc.. What's not fine is actively denying important scientific facts, being hypocritical (and, largely, stupid) in their positions: for example, farming tends to use very high tech equipment and methods, seeds, and so on; I'm sure most farmers enjoy most technological development, treatment against cancers, all sorts of diseases; computers, the internet, etc.. You can't at the same time want progress in cancer treatment and other conditions and want to cut funding to health sciences. And so on. I am willing to even entertain say technological regression. I don't love every technological change we've been through. But at least be consistent, you can't advocate to stop wearing clothes and want to live in the arctic.
Also, culture should be, carefully yes, questioned. It's not because it's cultural that it should stay frozen forever. People who want their culture completely frozen forever are dangerous to human progress and flourishing (I imagine most people wouldn't find ancient practices of human sacrifice, or say medieval torture practices nice and acceptable today). Being careful and well-reasoned is a completely different thing, and something conservatism could stand for instead.
They literally look down on the idea of updating your previous beliefs.
Person 2: [gives examples]
Person 1: oh ho! But those people are not in academia any more! They're not "practicing scientists"!
Person 2: ...
There's a kind of Schneierism thing that happens in these threads; like: I could ask, ok, name a scientist practicing in this field. They exist, but they don't have names your 3rd grade science teacher knows.
OK, I'm really sorry, but "just for adopting" is doing some heavy lifting here.
Watson's other greatest hits: worries about Big Black Dicks; melanin injections as boner pill; what I call "The Cunning Chinaman"; and a whole bucket of others.
Taken in sum: it turns out you can be asked to leave a private club if you are being an asshole.
To clear the air, as a card carrying liberal (even a !gasp! Socialist) I don't necessarily reject empirical racial differences based on genetics. Maybe even for "intelligence", for whatever good that does ya, since "intelligence" lacks anything like a quantitative definition.
But I also think that - if they're even present, which is by no means certain - these are not significant differences. Structuring your entire society around quantitative racial differences, from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, is not enough juice for the squeeze.
But, well, the juice isn't the point, is it?
It's the squeezing - the ability to brutalize your citizenry, to purge Unmanly Virtues like "empathy" or "introspection", to be always prepared for violence - the squeezing, being able to squeeze, is what is important. And the fastest way to do that is convince a bunch of people that other people aren't people. Europe tried that, a few years ago. You might remember that it did not go well. A lesson America never really got. Maybe someday we'll need to learn the same damn thing the same way, except instead of B-17s and Red Army Sex Crime we get to enjoy thermonuclear weapons. Come back Ivan. All is forgiven.
(1) He wasn't a practicing scientist.
(2) He wasn't fired for making scientific claims, but rather for saying things like "I'm pessimistic about Africa".
(3) He didn't do any research in behavioral genetics, psychometrics, or molecular genetics; his authority in the discussion was "famous science guy".
(4) He lost an honorary and, later, an emeritus position, in which his role was not "scientist" but rather "spokesperson for a scientific organization". I wouldn't want him for a spokesperson either, any more than I'd want Ibram X. Kendi or, maybe closer to the mark, Elijah Mohammed as my spokesperson.
James Watson was closer to Donald Sterling than to Galileo.
Bluntly, racists have decided IQ measurements mean they're not racist instead of wondering whether IQ, as a measurement, is itself racist.
Secondly there's no strong argument that links larger population groups genetic makeup to intelligence - that's what Watson claimed and what's so infuriating; it's plain racism. There's an inherited component in intelligence - that much is right. But population groups have enough diversity that this does not have a statistically relevant impact on these groups as a whole.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/james-watson-s...
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.
US may have evolved differently, Asian scientists may have come, US progress may have started a few decades late, US may not have been super power but normal power (not such a bad thing) and so on.
> The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
I never get this point how come these extremely smart scientist feel okay to come to US as long funding is there meanwhile US can continue thousand other extremely bad things all over the world.
These scientists seems like FAANG employees who don't look at what their employers are up to as long paychecks are huge. However once leaving or fired from job they become moral philosophers of our times.
And somehow they still managed to be very rich!
The only way in which we're "getting back to the 50s" is that it's now ok again to be openly racist and blatantly suppress the voting rights of black Americans.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now.
The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.
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.
It was so wound down that 6 years after Obama left office, whites were 0.54x under-represented in the Ivy League, despite having SAT scores close to the groups that were ~5x over-represented: https://archive.org/details/ivy_league/
An expected outcome of still having explicit affirmative action hiring/admission criteria in 2025: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-disc...
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.
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.
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.
Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place
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.
Also, any country should be focused on research irrespective of AI, I do not see how AI is “coming” or how it’s related to this thread.
Also, this isn't about making yet another DB SaaS, it's research. AI can only help make it possible to do more than what a lone person could do before.
The problems are not the kind where AI can threaten jobs, and even for junior positions, it's well understood that sometimes things need to be done less efficiently, to allow new people to learn. It's kind of the point of a PhD.
Some of my coworkers have shared some of those horror stories from previous positions, PIs insisting on primary authorship, making students do work for projects without getting any credit etc.
However, despite those abuses, I think the ultimate purpose of the PhD remains the same. Though perhaps it is easy for me to say because I didn't experience the abuses myself.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
The only relevant difference is that you might be able to push it back a bit on "strategic interest" types of arguments
The scientists need to market their research to exploit the biases of the administration. Sad that it's come to this.
If your guy couldn’t say stuff like we will do outreach to local CCs, will design summer research programs, etc, then they’re just not a very good grant writer
Creationists.
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
My parents made only a few luxury expenses: encyclopedias for us children, and especially books about space and the cosmos. So please speak for yourself when talking about the interests of struggling people.
I just watched a video about how inept politicians caused a food crisis in Sri Lanka because they thought they knew better than scientists, chemists, and farmers: https://youtu.be/1S2wwbX_p_E
But alas, after many years of convincing people that going to college makes you dumber, enough people have started believing it that they willing vote against their own self-interest.
Most of humanity shared this existence, and yet the language, institutions, ontologies, etc around existence come from those people who did not have the food and housing security of most Americans.
The counterexamples are numerous, but just start at the arts and you'll quickly see there is not a correlation between material comfort and basic curiosity.
Indeed, not only did research programs get cut, but so did USDA funding which both balanced farming and put food on table. And this was a year after the previous administration reduced the deficit, sent food funding to states, of which ~13 rejected the funding.
Food funding, which, has been studied to increase economic output beyond it's costs, similar to research funding.
Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.
And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.
A person who is certain they already know the answer.
> 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.
However, this administration has made clear that there are no compromises to be had for projects that seek forbidden knowledge. Climate, for example, is not a subject that is permitted at all. It's not about how one asks, it's that we do not want to know the output of the research.
As someone who hates the current administration and thinks it's doing untold harm to our future, I'm disappointed by how many people in the sciences chose option two.
Is "institutional racism" when institutions do treat individuals differently on the basis of race, or when they make sure not to?
I'm used to seeing that term in context of advocating for explicit double standards.
"Institutional" or "structural" racism doesn't just mean racism by one or two people in power. It's the idea that the majority of society demonstrates some kind of racial bias, by whatever means.
Society is made up of people.
One of two things must, logically, be true:
1. A SUBSTANTIAL portion of the people who make up society exhibit some kind of racist behavior, or
2. Structural racism is not a widespread issue
Which one of these two propositions must one believe is likely if one is researching the impact of structural racism? Keep in mind people do not generally don't go looking for things they do not believe exist.
In other words, people don't like other people believing they-en-masse discriminate (even IF they do), so taking actions that only make sense if you think that poorly of the everyman offends them. It's not about what someone wants to be true, it's that investigating implies a level of distrust in society some members of that society find uncivil.
To use a blunt analogy, "why not let me check your underwear to make sure you haven't soiled it? Do you just not want it to be true?".
The Parable of the Polygons is a cute case study that shows that it is possible, in a mathematical sense, to prefer diversity and yet end up segregated: https://ncase.me/polygons/
The whole point of studying institutional and structural racism is that no one needs to be racist per se to have racially discriminatory outcomes. Perhaps a good analogy is the higher mortality rates among left-handed people. We no longer persecute them and drive them out of society or beat them for their sin, and yet, they die earlier due to structural factors.
I agree with you that "people don't like other people believing they-en-masse discriminate." And that's why science in the US is f*(&ed, because somehow everyone takes intellectual inquiry as some sort of personal affront or verdict on individual virtue, and that's the one thing the American cannot abide, the thought that someone else is judging them and finding them wanting.
This is an unfair characterization, and frankly, is baseless political rhetoric. Incredible propaganda job moneyed interests have performed in order to convince the right wing that any research that asks probing questions about equity automatically implies anyone white and conservative is “racist”.
My favorite research that falls into this category concerns the effects of nuclear weapons testing on the lands and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. Clearly, nakedly something that anyone with a decent moral compass would give a shit about, but pulled under the umbrella of DEI because empathy is dead.
= Social Determinants of Health
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.
At this point, there’s no defending it. Anyone who supports this incarnation of the Republican Party is as stupid and backwards as they’ve been castigated.
They can individually have them back if they can publicly state they are receiving support from the state. Don’t even need to say if it’s good or bad, just acknowledge the reality.
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...
Let's not pretend politics wasn't meddling with science before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049
Correction: One of the points claims researchers were prosecuted in Sweden. This is my mistake - they were merely investigated. The rest I believe is accurate - those downvoting feel free to correct any inaccuracies you find!
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.
That's...exactly the point of DEI statements! They are used to filter for "cultural fit", i.e. determine if you fit the political mold or at the very least capable of pretending you are with the most recent shibboleths.
I've literally seen faculty searches cancelled because there were too many white male applicants.
This is utter fantasy.
You are making a completely separate argument.
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 you knew more about it than some memes about racism, you'd know that the nihilism, this thin-skinned "at least we'll take them with us" sentiment you just expressed, was at the heart of it. But they had a lost war and the 1920s to be bitter about, the treaty of Versailles, not someone who "couldn't shut up" about something. The mind boggles.
If you can't understand why you're being a nazi when you're being a nazi, you're a nazi.
What kinds of damages would you think your descendants should be owed? If you heard that the restitution given was for those who managed to climb into the ivory tower of academia are now first in line for research grants... Sure, that's a trade.
There are many scholarships, grants, services, and opportunities for descendants of Holocaust victims who had their property and lives taken from them. Do you support that? What's the difference?
> 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.
I just want you to sit with that sentence for a minute. You'd rather have no publicly funded science, you'd rather have the entire enterprise collapse, just because of some people are getting research funding because they are descendants of genocide victims? Seriously?
Proponents of these policies want to have it both ways; they're at one moment just this small thing that nobody should be bothered by, but in the next moment a nonnegotiable bedrock principle that they are unwilling to stop doing, even under threat of losing funding.
It happens indirectly all the time. As of 2025, despite all the funding cuts, the AAAS is still publishing its yearly DEI report, now rebranded as an "Inclusivity for Excellence Report", but containing all of the same stuff: an effort to collect and publish as much demographic data as possible, and a stated goal of getting all the numbers to go in the "right" direction. These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.
Yes, it's terrible what the English did in Ireland.
DEI statements are not about quotas. Anyone who was using them as quotas was acting illegally. But so far there has been no attempts at showing that that was the case anywhere (only people spouting off, like Charlie Kirks's statement about a theoretical black pilot).
The framing as this being "unheard of" is very disingenuous, though.
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.
Russel Vought thinks the President has the power to not spend funds allocated by Congress. They literally are acting as if the presidents budget request for NASA was approved, when Congress actually allocated NASA at the same level as prior years.
Science is particularly vulnerable. They can just not award the grants they’re supposed to.
Powers granted exclusively to Congress have been usurped by the Executive, with no pushback from Congress.
The courts have done better. But they can only do so much at the unrelenting stream of violations coming from this administration.
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.
In recent years in Spain they aggressively decreased that threshold to the point where most employees need to have permanent contracts. Interestingly it has led to significant growth because, among others factors, it has increased consumer confidence, and it has been a much smaller burden on companies than expected.
Perhaps the term “permanent” contract is confusing to some. It’s not in the sense of a functionary or tenure, where you virtually have a job for life unless there are extreme circumstances. A permanent contract is an indefinite contract, one without a specific end, where firing you needs to be properly justified, but you can be fired, certainly.
Whoops, keyword match.
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...
Australia is about as serious as you get in terms of climate action without being unreasonable. We need power, you can't switch off coal overnight. We also need the country to remain afloat, we cannot turn off all natural resource exports either.
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
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.
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.
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'.
There exist societies that have made different choices.
The car dependency isn't an act of God.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
You did it, you torched the strawman.
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).
There's a reason it's called a "problem." Doing the thing on your own is not a solution to it.
Required reading: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
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.
Are you saying that some of the commonly-accepted science is significantly incorrect? If so, which parts?
Combine both and it can be the most bizarre trend in non-cognizance that many have ever seen.
Very often displayed by those who wouldn't recognize the difference between a CO2 spectrum and the brain scan of an accurately diagnosed mentally deficient patient.
Some conditions you just can't fix.
Regardless it makes you wonder what kind of medication some people are on, and if they took too much even if it was to no avail.
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.
Your arrogance to opposite opinion does not bring anything new to dialogue.
I’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.
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.
It's still an extremely short-sighted and imbecillic action not to be increasing research opportunities at least as fast as other places like China in particular.
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.
As someone who spent far too much of my life pursuing that goal, I have an unpopular opinion: US science needs some cuts.
The first project (the space telescope) makes me sad, simply because it's pure science that probably wouldn't get done any other way. And it probably costs nothing, in the grand scheme of things. See also: climate data gathering, oceanology, etc. I don't support cutting things based on politics in any direction.
But as you go down the article, you quickly run into projects that are, frankly, a gigantic waste of money -- like "determinants of health inequality" work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing:
> Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD)...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.”
It's laughably absurd to claim that "we can start asking these questions", because I'm here to tell you that ineffectual 'scientists' were doing the same research when I was a graduate student, which wasn't yesterday. This kind of stuff has always had ample funding, while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel. It sucked. It's not "censorship" to eliminate it, and the bureaucratic imperative -- along with being accused of "racism" if you cut it, as in this article -- essentially guarantees that it lumbers on for decades.
Even in "harder" sciences, it's really a case-by-case basis. You see so much questionable science getting huge funding, simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas. Frankly, there were many days where I felt/feel that the US scientific funding process should just randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold. It would be a much-needed revolution for younger scientists, though of course, it would also lead to endless squealing from beneficiaries of the current system. One of the side-effects of cutting any budgets related to science is that it leads to articles exactly like this one, quoting the people who lost funding.
So while I'm saddened that a lot good projects are having a hard time, if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor -- even if "Scientific American" doesn't approve.
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".
Is this really poorly understood? I think that's (partially) their point. I think we all pretty well understand that income correlates with health and that poorer people will tend to live in less healthy environments.
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.
> The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.
And the thing that makes it had to do well is that it's easy to know ahead of time what experimental result will best favor your existing beliefs.
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"
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.
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?
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.
Look at how much "trust me, I've got training, I know what's good, I know what's already right" is in their argument.
What is their actual point? That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
Good research is field dependent; some fields are younger than others, some fields have an easier time controlling experiments than others.
I'm saying what matters is what people care about. My point about stances being political is because what gets funded is what people care about, not what can guarantee the highest confidence using research design.
My point is that their stance is political too, because it says 'I don't care about this like how they care about this, so I think it should get cut'.
Their position is not some innocent defense of empiricism, it's a political stance that says "these questions don't matter, I already know how the world works."
That is not my point, but it is a true statement, yes [1]. Science without controls is not science. Science without novelty is called an undergraduate lab exercise.
> Good research is field dependent
Controls and novelty and rigor are not field-dependent. If you want that, go do English Literature or Philosophy or something. They love to entertain unresolvable debates about post-modernism.
[1] Modulo the "easy" part. I feel like you put this in as some kind of emergency exit slide from the debate, so I'll just say up front that good science doesn't have to have "easy" controls. It must have controls.
There is no bad cutting or good cutting, there's only politics. Meaning, an argument for what make some problems more important or worthwhile is not an apolitical argument, it's an argument of how other people should live.
As in, you don't get to conclude that you're obviously right and they're obviously wrong.
And about the "good/bad cutting", I think it only mean in relative terms, because funds are not infinite...
> 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.)
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.
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.
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!
It's one thing to theorize a causal relationship, but informed policy-making needs actual data that can only be obtained by legwork. What aspects of the social/cultural environment are we talking about? What genes are being expressed differently? What are their estimated health or economic impacts?
But sure, let’s say I accept your (implicit) assertion that this genetic relationship is solid, causal and clear. How does it help solve the problem? It’s a perfect example of research that does nothing except making people feel virtuous for doing the research. Academia is loaded with this stuff, and if you point out that it’s a waste of time and money, you get indignation and faux outrage for having the temerity to “question discovery”.
Y’all keep coming back with “there are always things we don’t know!” as if this is somehow an argument for funding literally any question (and any bad methodology) that someone labels as “science”. It isn’t.
And no I think people are coming back with "there are things we don't know that seem highly relevant to understanding and improving our population's wellbeing." The two ingredients to fixing a problem are knowledge and action and it's not scientists' jobs to be doing the action part, and while one could argue we have all the knowledge we need, a reasonable counterargument is that the only way we know we have the knowledge we need is when action is taken (and successful). And we're obviously not there yet.
Yes!
> The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category
No! You’re acting like we have no idea what might happen if we make another observational study of some minor variant of the same question we’ve been asking for 20+ years.
This is not some magical ability that I have. It’s just the willingness to say that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and not waffle on obviously derivative work, simply because that work tickles my political fancies.
> and it's not scientists' jobs to be doing the action part,
Cop out. Nobody is asking scientists to solve the problem. The request is merely to stop wasting time and money doing work that cannot possibly discover anything new, even if done exceptionally well. The Nth marginal observational study into structural determinants of disease X in location Y adds nothing to our knowledge, has no ability to add anything, and probably isn’t even done well in the first place. Yet there are hundreds of these things published every year.
The truth is that this kind of derivative research gets done not because of demand or pure intellectual interest, but because that's what the funding agencies are willing to fund. We should stop that.
> while one could argue we have all the knowledge we need,
No! There’s tons of things we don’t know. The people wasting their time on this work should be forced to investigate those questions, instead of re-treading the same tired topics.
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.
Does your tirade copy/paste to that entire field too?
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 to determine that viability?
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 do work to eliminate 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, we shouldn't just go throwing wrenches in it just because it's biased.
"Just as much weight" in what context? Who is evaluating these weights? For what purpose?
The person you're arguing with appears to be claiming to be a domain expert. Are you also claiming to be a domain expert, or is this a case of "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"?
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.
What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
These are both reasonable questions about equitability and accountability. Unfortunately the solution we chose is a proliferation of bureaucracies that micromanage funding allocation and use. Some widely acknowledged consequences are 1) researchers spend more and more time writing grants and reports, and less and less doing research, and 2) the funding agencies (public and private, but especially public) are conservative and overwhelmingly fund work that they know will succeed. In practice that encourages monothink and endless incremental improvements on things that we already know how to do, and disincentives dissent, creativity, and real blue sky novel ideas.
Everyone loves to say they support creative ground breaking ideas, but that requires letting smart people sit around and think for a long time. And however smart they are, results are not guaranteed. The bureaucratic process is always going to prefer short term thinking with clear “deliverables”, even when it’s detrimental to progress.
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.
Xerox PARC is a bit of an outlier, they didn't commercialize much of the things we remember them for. But Bell labs and IBM Research fed Bell and IBM lots of commercially viable stuff.
The reformed ATT is dominant in its industry, but one of several, and its industry is no longer all forms of real time communication. And afaik, they don't make any equipment anymore, etc.
There are not so many vertically integrated companies anymore. The market values the parts moee than the whole, so spinning out manufacturing or logistics or etc is a popular thing.
They were all playing around in a new field that had just opened up.
Research effectiveness is downstream of what's available to be found in the idea mines.
Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.
Post WW2, the USA continued the same approach by adopting the Vannevar Bush model, which boiled down to the USA pouring money into basic research, which is never profitable. That fed the companies like the ones you list, who were willing to make bets on medium-term things that might return a profit in a decade or so. If the USA's dominance of world science and engineering in the later 20th century is any indication, it worked a treat.
The Vannevar Bush model started to be wound back in the Reagan years, and Trump seems bent on excising it entirely. Other countries noticed its success. Most OECD countries put a few percent of public money into basic research now. The country that seems to have really taken the lesson to heart is China. They've gone way beyond what the Vannevar Bush model did even in its heyday. The end result is they dominate some areas of science and engineering and consequently manufacturing now (who here remembers Huawei was the brains behind 5G), and now the USA has thrown in the towel that dominance will grow to cover most areas in time. The gap between the West and China on AI and semiconductors is at most a few years.
The USA is crying China is cheating with subsidies and yes that's true - for example it seems the AI models are mostly developed using public money, whereas the USA is relying on VC funding to do the same. The USA's funding of AI development will very likely slow down after the IPOs happen and the companies must become profitable. China's funding of AI won't slow down.
This is the result of a policy choice China made long ago in the Deng Xiaoping era, back in the 1980s. It's taken 40 years to bear fruit, but my it is fruiting vigorously now. The USA position is also a consequence of policy choices it's been making over the last 40 or so years, starting in the Reagan era.
If you want to see how far this has gone, look up: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-... It makes for sobering reading. Some key metrics they measured:
- Research Leadership: China leads the world in high-impact research in 69 out of 74 critical technologies.
- Recent Overtakings: China recently overtook the US in foundational AI and biotech fields, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and genetic engineering.
- Monopoly Risk: ASPI tracks 41 technologies where China's research concentration is so high it poses a severe future monopoly risk, largely driven by massive hubs like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
There is now little doubt how this will pan out over the next few decades. The USA and the rest of the West end up buying products made in China, using Chinese technology, and protected by a Chinese patent wall. They will wonder what happened. They will try and recover by going to Chinese universities, and adopting parts of Chinese culture. It won't be a big change for most of the West - the name on the label just changed from the USA to China. It will come as a hell of a shock to most of the USA.
The ironic thing will be - the change has very little to do with the things people will focus on, like who manufactures what, or patent walls, or political systems, or excellence in universities. China pulled that off by adopting some key USA policies, while the USA abandoned those same policies.
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.
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.
The PRESIDENT of stanford was fired over forged research. I have personally worked very closely with 2 incredibly credentialed researcher leaders who were very very smart fudge their work.
The incentive structure for researchers is completely warped. The honest ones are there but from my experience this is all because the options a fresh PHD faces are.
1. Be a rockstar and make a breakthrough -> sucess 2. Be an honest nobody and don't get funding 3. Fudge your work -> become stanford president and make millions
Those who get caught get a slap on the wrist for reasons I hypothesize are because so many around them are the same.
The mechanism is not unique any SWE will personally know how easy it is to lie about their progress or work. Top researchers have the same effect but it's easily 10x easier for them. Which is also why I admire the good ones even more.
Some thoughts: 1. US Spending on R&D has gone up from $50B -> $1T annually, and from $3B -> $115B on purchasing power terms 2. The labs rely on government grants, which are hard to get and typically awarded 'equally' or 'by gatekeepers' 3. There is and have been massive scandals that question academic integrity - reproducibility, fake data. The scientific community has done almost nothing to change its mechanisms. 4. It's not clear to me what we've 'got' societally from these studies as a whole 5. The administrative burden to even do science has gotten too far out of hand 6. You can't 'fire' researchers
Research and science is a fundamentally 'good' thing; we should encourage it.
We may need to shake up the way that it's done. Yes science + R&D is long term focused, but it doesn't mean it can't be reformed.
That the article centers on hand-wringing over 'my government grant is gone!' instead of 'you're cutting this critical research that will save lives' without any discussion of 'science' needing to reform unfortunately highlights the core of the problem.
Is it actually separate from the AI related mania?
I feel like even the COVID related R&D surge couldn’t have been anywhere close.
(Perhaps technically unfair, but I don’t view AI related stuff as traditional R&D given the irrational forces driving it. Seems closer to the Dutch Tulip Mania episode).
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
Edit: Interesting how controversial my take seems to be. I’ve seen votes on this post go up and down multiple times. Why only vote? Reply!
If a CEO commits a crime does that mean the entire industry must ne shut down?
What sort of reasoning is this?
If the leader of one of the countries most famous research groups commited research fraud with a slap on the wrist it's not hard to realize how broken it is.
I have personally worked with famous researchers and seen a few fudge their work.
Acting ignorant of the major flaws implies you haven't been involved, or inside a bubble of research nirvana.
And yes it should and does. If an industry does not provide value it naturally fails because it doesn't make money. Academia has no profit by design and now gets to face its own form of regulation for disfunction.
There is no way to even attempt to fix our science base without first cutting much of it. How are we supposed to fix a system while not applying consequences to it? Every US institution is rotting from inside out demanding more money while providing less. The most effective way to begin the process for any of these is to cut money and sort out real value.
This is like US public transport argument. Should we just forever fund disfunctional systems because we are scared of trying to fix them? Our public transport is beyond disfunctional compared to basically any other country on earth.
Since the market cannot correct these systems as what makes industry so effective then you must artificially apply equivalent market forces.
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.
Adolf Hitler hated universities and their professors. So he took them over and appointed his supporters as the professors. Irony, he grew to hate those he put in place as the professors.
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...
While the also-quoted Gonsalves was a lackey for the zoonotic side of the covid origins debate, he's allowed his opinion as an otherwise non-protagonist in the single most consequential event in history to put the scientific enterprise as it had been practiced to date on trial.
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...
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.
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...
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 never seen that metric used anywhere else aside China
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?
California has added roughly 17GW of grid-scale batteries in the last five years. Modern GPU (NVIDIA). Modern electric car (Tesla). Reusable Rockets (SpaceX).
I agree that the US has an "Only Elon-led companies can get things done outside of computers" problem.
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?
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-ele...
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?
Science will become purely for recreational purposes, maybe funded by millionaires, billionaires or even trillionaires looking for a specific set of outcomes.
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
These problems are not new.
the vc & tech bros while rich, felt envious of the power & respect the academics had. they backed the anti-science candidate, then got involved in useless schemes such as 'government efficiency' which didn't result in any efficiency.
so blaming this on the current admin, isn't enough. some of the people to blame live in SF
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
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.
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.
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.
You out yourself pretty badly in implying that individuals can be ignored in gender and race in the name of aggregate statistics.
There is similarity, there is not sameness, and like I said… the people who are fascinated with proving statistical differences in gender and race usually have ulterior motives. Just like climate deniers.
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
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.
It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump administration. Denying the painfully obvious impact of our contemporary science policy is like fiddling while Rome is burning.
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
>“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.
Yeah, if only they had tried to appease the fascists harder and earlier. Thanks Nigel.
Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle
"To be sure" and "supposed to be" are doing some heavy lifting here. I am not so sure about that so I suppose that for many "scientists" the end product is not science at all. I'm not impugning the whole field as there are many good and honest scientists but the SYSTEM is corrupt. I think a significant portion are gaming the system for status or money or sinecures. P-hacking, fake data scandals, the replication crisis and various fake articles getting published in top journals are omens that something isn't quite right in the science world.
My own view is that it is all due to govt funding of science and especially the NSF which should be closed ASAP. Ayn Rand discusses the problem in her article "The Establishing of an Establishment" in her anthology "Philosophy:Who Needs It". Handing out govt grant money invariably locks in the status quo, i.e. an establishment. She also points out that under such terms it is impossible even for an honest man to make good choices which is why such rackets attract scammers and con artists, even fully credentialed PhD's.
Here is an excerpt from her article; https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_sch...
Or buy and read the whole article and the anthology.
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
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.
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.
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
"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
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!
Because certain people don't like one or both of these two things:
1) Having to pay tax
2) Having to be accountable to someone, whether they be a government or anyone else
With this in mind, they illegally gutted a bunch of jobs.
They do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because he can and no one will stop him.
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.
If $50 billion are spent on research, maybe $1 billion of the spending is actually worthwhile (totally made that number up), and that is better than $0 spent on research from a certain point of view. Wouldn't be my point of view though if I had to pay for it.
Just a simple example: when you play with firm biological facts, you might just open it all up to being bent. But then, wasn’t that maybe the goal all along?
These stats have been reported by various legitimate media sources--and you can verify these for yourself on the web:
- Outright fraud: about 2% of scientists admit fabrication or falsification, while about 14% report knowledge of similar misconduct by colleagues.
- Image manipulation: roughly 4% of biomedical papers contain problematic image duplications, with some cases suggestive of deliberate manipulation.
- Questionable research practices: up to 33.7% of researchers admit at least one such practice, while up to 72% report seeing them among colleagues.
- Replication failure is serious: results can't be duplicated in more than 50% of major psychology and biomedical research projects.
- p-hacking: researchers can unintentionally or deliberately search across data until a result becomes statistically significant, increasing false-positive risk without necessarily committing outright fraud.
- Biomedical research waste: one landmark estimate argues that up to 85% of biomedical research investment may be avoidably wasted through poor design, non-publication, and incomplete reporting.
- Unpublished research: science is science, but many null or disappointing studies remain unpublished, distorting the visible literature and causing other labs to repeat failed work.
- ...And finally: a minority of funded research (much less than 50%) is reliable, novel, usable, and clearly reported scientific journals.
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?
Like, sure, 600million for a ballroom is small compared to the annual interest payments but it could fund, dunno, at least a dozen scientists. Maybe even 2 dozen! Add in the 1.6 billion dollars trumo was trying to embezzle from the irs and we could get a couple dozen more studies going.
If that number is too small and trifling for you, how about the $80+ billion dollar budget for ice? Think we could afford a few studies with that?
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.