Last year, the mood in my field, that has been relatively isolated from many of these impacts, was still very "these are uncomfortable times, but it's still possible to pull through".
Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more established scientists are maintaining backup options.
I too have re-evaluated my feelings and decided that while I am not yet at the point of actively looking to leave the US, besides the hassle of moving itself, I would be fine with having to do so.
Putting aside all the other things I could point out, my field is one where all the major players are roughly on par.
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.
My own experience during my PhD was that a few, if any, PI cared about your growth as a scientist. All they cared about was progress on their project which sometimes are the same. Most of the time they are not.
Admittedly I have had the luck of a very good PI, and then a very good lab to work at.
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.
I’m very familiar with the evangelical types who are running the federal government right now. Anything that doesn’t support the claim that the earth is only 5000 years old is considered a partisan issue to these fuckers.
While this is a good long-term heuristic, I'd describe the upper rungs of government as more cynical on matters of science and theology than a typical fundie.
The only relevant difference is that you might be able to push it back a bit on "strategic interest" types of arguments
It seems like they did all this to please Elon Musk and advantage SpaceX. The people at the top are nihilists. They don't even believe the things they say.
To be honest, research funding turned stupid before DOGE. I remember talking a guy who was struggling to write the mandatory diversity statement for a grant in quantum computing.
Whatever diversity sections were required in grant proposals are nothing compared to the situation right now.
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
Why attach this stuff to every grant? This guy was dealing was dealing cutting edge research using multi million dollar equipment. Stuff only a few people world wide know about. That’s difficult enough.
This leads to purely performative diversity statements that mean nothing in the real world.
Seriously. I hope everyone understands that this literally happened at a massive scale. So many projects were killed simply because the project name had a word on the banned words list. The idiots at doge and elsewhere have simply ctrl+f searched "woke" terms and ended projects without the faintest idea of what they were killing. All in the name of saving negative federal dollars.
Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
> What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
I was raised in a working-class family in Greece in the 1980s. We lived in what the average US person would describe as "squalor". Cockroaches crawling on our faces style.
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.
What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.
Meanwhile a substantial fraction of science research goes into improving the efficiency of farming, which pushes down food prices.
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
Yeah, that's the point I was making; not that those people shouldn't be interested in science funding, but that when you're in that position you're going to end up voting for whoever promises you lower taxes etc. (regardless of whether those promises end up being just hot air).
It's especially interesting because prior to the time of the election, the administration approved food funding to states that GOP run states rejected.
Sure, and it's a huge indictment of our K-12 educational system. Investments in science, as a whole, pay off many, many, many times in returns. Same with universities and other knowledge-building institutions. If you want to raise everyone's standard of living, the most certain way is to increase investment in those things.
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.
> A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
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.
I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.
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.
This implies that the money saved by cutting research was fungible and not part of a still increasing deficit, that the government doesn't debt spend, and that there aren't positive externalities (including jobs, education, and supporting services in addition to outcomes from the research.
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.
stupidest response. There are tons of gov waste that's 100 times more expensive, less effective without any returns. Wars are lot more expensive, net negative for common folks (positive for war machinery though..) And out of all this, you would steal money from research and put it to put food on table? :(
A person who’s been told all the people doing the science look down on them. Partially true, too, based on how I’ve heard people talk about ”dumb redneck trump voters”
That's a form of collective punishment that rewards their stigma. It would be like revoking tax breaks for farmers because you dislike rural American voters.
I’m pretty for revoking tax breaks and subsidies from farmers since they tend to always complain about welfare queens while they have their hand out.
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 spent nearly a decade disgusted with Trump but being contrarian by insisting that it was understandable why voters might support it, even if I felt they were wrong.
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.
That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.
> 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.
The better question is: Why is it that when republicans hear the word "racism" they immediately think people are talking about them? Are they afraid of what research on racism will show?
No that's a more partisan one, and is exactly the sort of thing OP was arguing against. If you want broad based support for research funding you will necessarily need support from a lot of people you personally find distasteful. You can either try to appeal to people across the spectrum and keep bipartisan support, or label half the country racist and deal with the resulting backlash.
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.
I don't understand. We shouldn't research whether institutional racism is causing problems? Because Republicans don't want it to be true? Is that the claim, or am I confused about what you are saying?
Part of the issue here is that the academy has lost the trust of Republicans. So even if there are results that institutional racism is a significant factor, if it's coming from someone who is "woke" in their views it'll just be dismissed. To them it feels like using their tax dollars to fund someone who is going to skew results so they have a club to beat them with. And a big part of the reason they've lost trust is that the academy doesn't acknowledge when it's being political (see "reality has a liberal bias" in this thread or your frame here, for that matter).
The way science is supposed to work, it doesn't matter who is doing the study. Anybody can read the resulting paper and see whether the conclusions are supported by the data. That's what science is. Saying they don't trust science is a pretty heavy indictment that they have lost their way. What are they proposing to replace science with, vibes?
I will have a stab at legitimately explaining the viewpoint you profess not to understand.
"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?".
You have misunderstood what structural racism is. It is not about the majority of people being racist. Is about the systems being constructed in ways that lead to racist outcomes. You can have a society with zero racist individuals and if they continue to enact the racist systems (perhaps created by racist folks long dead) you'll have structural racism. I don't disagree with the idea that the mis-understanding you have is widespread though, and would certainly be a cause for folks not being comfortable with the idea (as they have mis-understood it).
I compare it basketball. Due to the goal being 10ft in the air, it structurally biased against shorter people. You don’t need actually size-ist for it to exist. It’s just inherent to how the system of rules are constructed
It's so disappointing that you have made the mistake of thinking that those two possibilities listed cover the entire set of possibilities.
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.
> or label half the country racist and deal with the resulting backlash.
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.
It's not propaganda, it's all the normal people on the left in my life who have in the last 5-6 years started calling anyone to their right on social justice issues racist. You're doing a lesser form of it here with "Clearly, nakedly something that anyone with a decent moral compass..." That makes a moral issue out of something that's clearly within the realm of politics in a healthy society (where to direct tax dollars). It's perfectly reasonable to think that I'd rather have slightly higher dollars spent on Medicaid funding than do that research study. If you agree with that, then it's clearly a political question, not a moral one.
Sounds quite reasonable when you put it that way, but unfortunately the entire domain of such research has been demonized and turned into a right wing meme, essentially disqualifying any such research from being funded at all. “DEI” is a rhetorical hammer and any funding for research that involves equity is the porcelain that the hammer is smashing.
So it’s no longer about whether we allocate funding to this or that, as a political compromise, it’s about the culture war.
Of course it's propaganda--the product of moneyed interests, as he said. It's ignorant, irrational, and dishonest to deny it. (And the rest of your comment here, and comments here, are in the same basket.) The statement was "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”" and then you immediately respond with exactly that claim.
It's not those on the left who are the baddies. The statement here was about those on the right using "DEI" to institutionalize bigotry. And it was a response to blatant lies like "label half the country racist".
And masking immorality and blatant bigotry as "politics" is a common "conservative" ploy. Of course "the effects of nuclear weapons testing on the lands and livelihoods of indigenous peoples" is prima facie a moral issue--nakedly, as he said.
Elsewhere you claim that
> Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus
It seems that there's nothing you won't lie about.
But enough wallowing in the mud with ____ ... I won't respond further.
Agree that asking for grants requires compromises.
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.
Alternatively, they've already decided that everyone who works in the field is biased, or close enough, that it's better to just burn it all down.
And, yes, this overlooks the times when conservative scientists like Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus and then come up with the exact same results, but... that's not considered important when they have so many other "examples" of "liberal science".
I know that ultimately, there isn't really any space for 'conservative science' in climate. Either they do bad science, so it's not really 'science', or they do good science and come up with the same 'liberal' answers. But I don't think conservatives have figured this out yet; they're still convinced that good science will prove them right.
lol, are you implying science is dying because, you believe, less and less scientists are “conservative”. Do you have any notion of how ridiculous that sounds?
I'm not implying I'm stating that if you depending on the tax base of the entire country to pay your bills you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties.
> you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties
I'm not sure that that's possible. If someone is motivated by religion or finance to believe something that's simply not true, and your scientific evidence contradicts them, there's a fundamental misalignment. They won't support you, because the real-world evidence contradicts their beliefs, and you're bringing more real-world evidence.
On issues of climate change, evolution, age of the universe, etc., the hard science just straight up disagrees with conservatives. I don't see a way around that.
But one of the parties is explicitly anti-science. Are you seeing the problem?
The reason there’s no conservatives in science, or startlingly little conservatives in education as a whole, is because they’re incompatible ideologies. It’s like asking why there aren’t more polar bears in the rain forest.
This is a fictitious scenario invented to make the conservatives the victims… when they are the ones in power, killing the science. No amount of mental gymnastics trumps that fact
How about a reframe:
When they are the ones in power, cutting funding to organizations that support their political opponents and goals they don't support.
I'll be the first to say this is a bad thing AND that they're going about it stupidly. But I'm also saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage your stakeholders over a period of decades.
Better framing indeed, I agree. Not sure this was a predictable outcome though, the sheer stupidity of defunding existing science projects based on politics is mind boggling. How do you hedge against capricious self sabotage like this?
I’m not convinced academia purged itself, at least not in any way that they should be ashamed of. Reality has a liberal bias, and my extremely conservative uncle at one point mentioned how he didn’t want his kids to go to college, because college turns kids atheist. Actually, learning things opens your mind, and so the standard conservative positions come off looking pretty stupid after critical examination, so conservativism (i.e. dogmatism) and learning are inherently at odds. Falsifying or omitting things just to suit the feelings of conservatives is wrong, even if the alternative is to “purge them” from academia by making their stupidity unwelcome.
Do you have any idea how smug this sounds to about half the people that need to pay for the scientific funding? I'm not a Republican, but even I'm turned off by this sort of attitude.
It's easy to offend them without even trying. Every day they find something absolutely absurd to be inflamed about. We should know when it's beyond sanity to try to pander to some persons.
Wouldn't want to research anything that might make someone question their beliefs. What you are saying doesn't sound like any kind of science I'm familiar with.
The guy claims that Richard Muller disproved the mainstream consensus of climate science. I don't think his claim of not being a Republican is credible.
I stopped caring about hurting the feelings of conservatives when they started intentionally fucking over everyone just to make liberals mad. Catering to their stupidity is called appeasement, and just ask the Europeans how that works out.
When someone is skeptical and wants ask questions, it's reasonable to hear them out. When said person fails to listen or accept basic facts (that allow establishing a shared reality), we should turn the volume down on them.
If Tommy, age 7, asks if the Earth is round, teachers should explain how we know the Earth is round and give Tommy a couple of ways to check. When Tommy comes back at age 27, having done no experiments, convinced the Earth is flat, and alleging a massive global conspiracy to hide that fact for domination, we should ignore Tommy. If Tommy persists, the amount of embarrassment and shame they face should be proportional to how loud they are.
Conservatives are the ones calling for fuck the feelings, why are they themselves so emotionally weak and always making an emotional ruckus at everything.
If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.
This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.
> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is exactly the kind of expertise and competence we have in the Administration right now. It is totally believable that they would do a substring search for "black" and "trans" and defund black hole research and transistor science.
It is a little impressive how actively bad they are at this.
I haven't had that much respect for Elon since he called the cave diver a pedophile, but something I didn't realize until the 2025 administration started is how lazy everyone involved with it is. As far as I can tell, no one in that administration has, at any point in their life, ever examined any of their own opinions or actions, or looked up the "why" of any of the programs that they declared as "wasteful".
> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
I don't think requiring prospective hires to write a DEI statement is equally as political as illegally cancelling already funded and approved research into e.g. racial disparities in maternal mortality, or health equity gaps for rural Americans (yes, it's DEI even if it's for predominantly white people).
It's not just research into things like that. As I mentioned elsewhere, one of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response". Someone replied saying theirs was canceled for "mineral inclusion". There are thousands of things like this. It's not about DEI, it's about getting rid of science, because science is at odds with their view of the US.
People that view DEI like this are incredibly lost. The vast majority of cases of DEI initiatives are so tame, and nothing like they are portrayed as. "Pledge allegiance to the left" come on be real. The modern conservative movement is so unserious.
I've never once turned on Fox News, but I have been in elite academia and I'm sorry to say the person you're replying to is dead on.
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.
In a previous project I ended up talking with a scientist who couldn't shut up about how she was 1/4th Indigenous and how many grants that could open for our collaboration.
If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany. That someone was doing this in 2022 was extremely off-putting. That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
> If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany.
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.
You're right nihilism is a never a productive reaction to have, but I find it a bit tone deaf to say it now after the past 10 years of ever increasing partisan capture of science agencies.
If being apathetic to a broken system makes you Nazi, what would be a better approach to the problem outlined by the person you were responding to? How would you keep political agents out of science institutions?
Someone once talked to a scientist who wouldn't shut up about how they could use their, let's call it privilege at this point, to help them both (use it for their collaboration), and now they are happy with seeing all science burn? Because that situation was like the 1930s Germany? Yeah no. And US science isn't getting less political with Christian fundamentalists and kleptocrats dismantling as much as they can as quickly as they can, so complaining about the previous situation more than the current one might be projection.
Imagine that your people had the land you'd been living on for countless generations invaded, taken from them after a bloody campaign, where the survivors were forced into poverty in concentration camps, where they could not leave, where many women had their fallopian tubes tied without even their knowledge, where children were beaten for speaking their language, where they were intentionally and deliberately kept in structural poverty for generations, and other horrors.
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?
>Imagine that your people had the land you'd been living on for countless generations invaded, taken from them after a bloody campaign, where the survivors were forced into poverty in concentration camps, where they could not leave, where many women had their fallopian tubes tied without even their knowledge, where children were beaten for speaking their language, where they were intentionally and deliberately kept in structural poverty for generations, and other horrors.
Yes, it's terrible what the English did in Ireland.
I think you can easily turn this around: scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment, DEI statements, and other practices that half of the country despises are saying that it's better to do no science at all than to set those divisive practices aside and just do science.
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.
This group of people you're describing ("scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment") is simply not real. The idea that academics would cling to DEI statements or refuse funding is beyond laughable, and could only be dreamt up by someone who has never experienced academia.
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.
Williams College wasn't content to blindly follow a vague directive restricting their speech. They already received very few grants as the article said. You better bet most scientists at big institutions were tripping over themselves to police their own speech to ensure they aren't uttering any of the new forbidden words like "engender."
> These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.
Yes, some people have egalitarian principles. As much as you think there is a conspiracy against your group to keep you down it's just not true.
The French, who have "égalité" in their national motto, prohibit the kind of demographic tracking and reporting that US Progressives consider core to their project. Do you think the French don't care about egalitarianism? No, they just have a different concept of what that means. Just like many Americans.
Academics could broaden their horizons and consider the possibility that there are multiple perspectives on egalitarianism, and that the public that funds them is quite split on the issue. If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues. But I guess it's more fun to preach and condescend to people who disagree, and then complain when those people don't want to fund your enterprise anymore.
US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.
> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.
Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_
No I don’t support any kind of assistance for the descendants of Holocaust victims. Yes, of course the Holocaust was a vile disgrace, but it was almost a century ago. At some point you have to draw a line under it and allow the descendants — who in many cases never knew the relevant ancestors — to live their own lives.
Up until Trump2, Ivy League schools were gaming the system to limit Asian students… but how could they, the Japanese-American internment camps weren’t that long ago.
The statistical analysis is step one, but those stats are (or were?) used as proxies for quantifying a persons victimhood. I dont actually think "victim" is quite the right word here, but the OP used it and it fits well enough.
Correct. But not understanding how DEI drove a huge wedge into science (or at least its politics and institutions), and is actually a large component of the underlying rift, is just as horrifically out of touch with reality. The current crisis can be largely laid at the feet of the people who prioritized DEI over everything else, with utter contempt for opposing opinions. The current crisis is just the backlash.
Just having keywords associated with DEI could get a project defunded. Thee government isn't just defunding liberal projects. Look at the millions being thrown out on ocean monitoring because the Trump admin thinks global warming isnt a problem if you don't monitor it.
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).
Not about quotas? It's pretty well-known that the DEI committees don't review the statements blindly and somehow manage to choose people with the skin color they want.
For instance, in the past Berkeley's DEI committee let only 13.6% of the white people onto the short list for Bio professorships in one application cycle. And said that this was a "positive change". So, yes, we know about this because the people in the DEI committee wanted to brag about it.
This report is gone from the web now, but here's an archive link:
I don't think DEI was political until Trump made it a dog whistle for white nationalism? Insofar as Trump platformed white nationalists, I suppose it's political, but you are confusing the causality.
> DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
Disagree. This is just defaulting to "it makes one of the political poles angry, it must be political".
DEI isn't about achieving or gaining political power for "the left", but anti-DEI is absolutely about gaining political power for the right-wing reactionaries.
DEI didn't just come from nowhere. Data supports the idea that groups with more diversity and representation are not only more fair, but also more efficient and robust. The point of DEI was to make our systems stronger by helping everyone participate. That means addressing structural problems that discourage and even prevent many people from participating. DEI didn't just come about because they wanted to see fewer white faces and more brown faces. It's actually based on Science!
There are just too many right-wing reactionaries, and as a society we humor them too much! Everything feels threatening to right wing reactionaries. They're afraid of vaccines for fuck sake! They believe that "DEI = hating white people". Learning new things threatens the cultivated ignorance that keeps their political masters able to control them, which is ironic because the little house cats think they they are lions.
> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.
If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.
Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not.
In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law.
European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of.
Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them.
I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire.
The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.
As far as I remember, from when I was closer to academia, in NL postdocs had to be offered a permanent contract after 3 temporary contracts, with a maximum of 1 year per temporary contract, or something like that. I believe this wasn’t exclusive to postdocs and it is a general law for most professions.
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.
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
Australia has the highest number of solar panels per capita in the world.
Australia has extremely high uptake on EV's given the cheap solar.
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.
Is that better than the US response? By the time the Royal Commission started, the total amount the Catholic Church in the US had paid out was approaching a billion dollars (back when a billion dollars could buy you instagram). Dioceses have continued to pay since then and many had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US.
That seems like a more severe response than a single cardinal getting arrested.
There were consequences, but only eventually as the depravity of what was happening became ever more apparent as the list of victims willing to speak out grew.
But in all the places this was happening, it was an open secret that it was happening for years before any meaningful response occurred. The first victims to speak out were not believed and even punished for how dare they accuse the holy priests of such behavior.
Will we see a similar tipping point for climate change where people on mass begin facing the issue head on? It hasn't happened yet.
I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
You're being downvoted, probably for being abrasive, but I agree with your overall point.
When I was younger and more naive, this
> "the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient") i
is what I thought (american) politics meant. When people talked about things being political or arguments related thereto, this is what I imagined happening.
Then I grew older and saw it was mostly people whining about gays getting married or who was allowed to have an abortion or what activities minorities were allowed to participate in.
Thank you, I don't care about some meaningless points here. Its often tough to be a critically thinking person in a crowd of folks who coast life deep in comfort zone who want quick convenient 'truths' and frequent dopamine kicks and couldn't care less about some higher or deeper concepts.
Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.
Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
After Vietnam, many accessibility features for folks in wheelchairs were mandated, this also favours the bicycle.
Grades in America are excellent for cycling. If you a mere mortal, going over an Alp in Europe will take all day and leave you pretty much unable to do much the following day. Meanwhile, in the USA, you can cycle over the major mountain ranges with considerable ease, when compared to the Alps.
Grid patterns are also most welcome on a bicycle. I know suburban McMansion land doesn't have grids, and getting lost in those places is cycling hell because the houses all look the same, however, Big Auto made these absurd developments possible, along with some white flight from cities where the black man dared to move to.
As for long distance commutes, what a waste. And for what? Many service sector jobs just don't warrant people driving two hours each way just to earn a crust. It all comes at a cost to community.
Although there is cradle to grave car dependency in the USA, one true fact about American people is that they are the best when it comes to hospitality. This matters on a bicycle and, sadly, in Europe, there just isn't the same hospitality.
All considered, warts and all, America is excellent for cycling, at least in the nine Westernmost states. The roads generally come with a handy 'edge' which serves as a cycle lane and the people are fab.
Bring back the streetcar, the broadway railways and Main Street. Kick the corporations to the kerb and the job is a good one. The richest country in the world got to the moon many decades ago. The roads already exist, the space for railways exists, what doesn't exist is the mindset, which has been reduced to cradle-to-grave car dependency.
Yes, societies have made different choices over the course of 100+ years. How do you suggest a city like say, LA is fixed? What is a commuter from dayton ohio to cincinnati supposed to do?
The gp comment made it sound like something americans just choose, when the reality of the situation is it is a necessary part of life. The people participating in it didn’t make this choice. Literally everyone wants something better and no one wants to be beholden to $6 gas prices.
They do choose it though. Infra policies and budget allocations don’t just grow on trees. Every decision that got us here has been “chosen by Americans”.
LA could be fixed incrementally by improving frequency, signal priority, and dedicated lanes for buses. Then go from there, but technically there’s enough right of way to build out the rail network by sacrificing the monstrous car network.
The reality is that there will be short-term inconvenience for long-term gain, and it will only get worse the deeper we dig our heels in. And if there’s one thing that Americans hate: it’s short-term inconvenience.
Voters certainly don’t choose it. This is chosen by unelected councils appointed by representatives with motives not driven by the same motives as voters. What is to be done about that?
Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.
Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline.
If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
The anti-science right was a lot easier to ignore when they weren't actually ripping apart the US scientific apparatus, yes. How is that remotely demonstrative of a conspiracy?
> Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
Sure, but again, this misses the point. Regardless of how conservatives talk about science, if Congress keeps on broadly funding research, then scientists can fairly focus on actions over words. It's only when Congress cuts funding that we're forced to reckon with the fact that most Americans don't actually prioritize science.
So: yes, it's the funding cuts that cause the frustration and sadness. But not because this results in a personal job loss, but because this shows how our country is going downhill.
Speaking personally, two of my siblings took government buyouts, but still then moved out of the country. You can be ok with your own personal job loss (particularly when it comes with a fat check), but unhappy with the direction the country is going.
It's kinda weird that you keep making this about the impact to personal finances, rather than the impact to principles. Wouldn't you feel frustration and disappointment if your homeland was acting contrary to your principles?
A lot of the people affected are people who want to leave their homelands and be in the US instead. So they were already putting up with their homelands acting contrary to their principles.
If the bible cited even 1/1000th as many studies and experiments as the IPCC Reports, it would be a very different book.
> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.
If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:
1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it
2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.
These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!
Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.
Interestingly, the IPCC reports themselves (not the summaries for policymakers) are quite optimistic. IIRC something like, if we do nothing to abate emissions, climate damages in 2100 will cause damage equivalent to ~3% of GDP per year. (With GDP being many times higher than now per capita). Hardly a catastrophic prediction!
I know, right? They bend over backwards to not be "alarmist," even perhaps a bit more than they should. But of course this wins them zero credit from their political opponents, which is an important lesson about politics: seeking middle ground with someone bent on destroying you is a fool's errand.
On one hand we have the IPCC with concrete claims, detailed explanations, piles of survey papers expanding the details, and piles of novel and confirming work behind each survey.
On the other we have adornKey, with vague accusations and smack talk that feel like they came from a LLM, still stuck at gate #1. Sad.
> The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
> The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
Thank goodness honest citizens like "AdornKey" are around to pinpoint the precise reasons why the international community of climate scientists are crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant. I am certainly glad that "AdornKey" made this laser-focused contribution to my understanding.
While I wouldn't argue that academia is "crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant", I would absolutely argue that they are ideologically homogenous. The whole community is rife with political signaling and affinity groups.
> It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics. Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled
Wat
I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.
I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.
This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.
Not only that but with somewhat less fervor those having fairly strong faith in superstition really add up after a while too.
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.
So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis?
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits.
I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
I asked a simple question. Your conclusions just proove how religious topic it could be for some. You completely ignorong a point and talk about your dogmatic opinion. Insulting others that not even agree/disagree with your pushed opinion does not makes you right.
He’s probably a bot or paid to post misinformation to muddy the waters. The topic is highly financially charged despite overwhelming evidence on one side.
the experimental framework for finding out absorption spectra goes back like 100 years and is basically high school level science. not only that, we have quantum chemistry models that predict empirical results from atomic configurations that are 20+ years old and match that empirical data to a very high level of accurany. there is plenty of ambiguity to attack in climate modeling, but you chose the most settled and fundamental thing to poke at.
One example is that whenever patents expire on some refrigerants or related process somehow magically at that same exact moment Dupont or other chemical IP behemoth magically find a new one safe for the ozone, the science magically all aligns at that moment, and congress/EPA finds the time to change the law before one iota of generic industry can squeeze out.
I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.
The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
>The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.
>Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.
This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.
> defending politicians as customers of scientists
I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.
> ... demanding politically convenient science.
and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.
> ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.
There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.
> What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts
The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."
> I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists
You can restate the ideology over and over. It doesn't change reality. There are many parties involved. I have agency as well. It's all very pedestrian to be reductive, but it's not compelling.
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."
More noise. Lovely. Do you think how often you say something has any bearing on a base assumption from which all your conclusions are drawn, is not an ideology? Oh boy.
Of course not, go "make noise" about science being in "chaos", say it a lot. The "scientists" seem to have no problem saying the shock of their plight over and over with the hope it will change the "base assumptions" of the "ideologies" influencing their employment. But as you say, it doesn't change reality.
This is saying that "saying something over and over" will change reality. This was ridiculed by the person I was responding to so I decided to play along with it, but I'm open to that being true if we're revising that outlook.
Ozone is an interesting topic. CFCs seem to be very potent climate gases. But I haven't checked any calculations about them, yet. I'd love to see a good analysis of the absorption-spectrum. Adding something new to the atmosphere has a lot of warming potential - but the question always is how fast it reaches a level of saturation. For ozone and CFCs years of media coverage haven't brought any insight. Having 3 different updated versions of Dupont-products in the atmosphere could be good or bad - most likely people haven't bothered to check, yet... But they're all full of furious knowledge. People "know" that banning CFCs "cured" the ozone hole - but they don't ask why it shrunk too early, and why the situation hasn't changed at all for decades now...
I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.
Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.
Your original claim was that people haven’t bothered to check. When someone pointed out there are tens of thousands of papers on the subject, you changed the question to find papers that answer my specific question.
Those are not the same claim. You went from arguing that the research doesn’t exist to arguing that you haven’t personally seen research that satisfies you.
> It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.
Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.
> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.
Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.
But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!
Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.
The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
"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.
Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
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.
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".
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
There have been many systemic changes since we started to understand the physical mechanism behind climate change and the dire consequences of unmitigated climate change.
Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.
We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.
> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.
> 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.
So you're saying that no Western leftists espouse degrowth policies that, if carried out, would lower their living standards while enjoying the luxuries our nonzero-carbon world provide them?
This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary
Some individual projects are not worth the money on their own, but maintaining the ability of as many researchers as possible to continue to be at the top of their game, having ever-improving research chops in general is worth more than money can buy.
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.
Such is life in fascism. This is why we used to try to avoid fascism. It sucks.
Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.
When ever asks about or attempts to defend fascism/strongman style systems with some kind of excuse that they "get things done", THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....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.
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.
You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
> To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
I mean, yes, there's some shoddy ideology-as-science at various universities but those people all still have jobs. That's not what got cut by DOGE, apparently.
> Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.
From TFA (more like 10th graf after a lot on the NASA project):
> research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,”
That sounds like science to me, they're trying to quantify health outcomes relative to community environment. Later research can use the figures, just like with your black hole observations.
One could say that maybe they should measure low-income communities in general with race as a dimension, but that doesn't make the whole thing "bad science".
Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process. Thanks for reminding me that you quoted that, I'm just not understanding the objection from then until now.
Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".
>Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process.
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.
I don't follow. Are there not sciences that primarily study a type of human relationship? Economics, for instance, which covers our financial relationships with each other.
Having mingled and worked at length with PhD-level folks in both STEM and the social sciences, rest assured: social scientists are some of the smartest researchers out there, almost to a frightening degree. So your dismissal is genuinely chuckle-inducing to me.
The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
This is a narrative that doesn't match the reality.
Reported failures to replicate are pretty similar in other fields, including in biomedicine. The replication crisis was just first highlighted in social psychology; lots of other fields just don't report these failures to replicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis). It's a bit like shooting the messenger.
It's funny reading through the comments in this thread because there are people claiming that sociology both (1) is so obvious that the effects replicate at such rates that the research is useless because everything is known a priori and (2) that nothing replicates at all.
Also, criticizing fields like social psychology and sociology for focusing on social phenomena seems a bit strange because that's what the fields are about. It's like criticizing biology for having too much of a bias toward living things.
> The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences
This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.
> > And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
> The 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.
Well put. It's easy to attack people attempting to work on hard problems for not achieving perfect results. Which they don't. Because IT'S HARD.
Weirdly, these critics never have useful suggestions to improve anything, it's all just personal attacks at one remove.
I mean, frankly, we wouldn't need a lot of these studies if people in power were slightly more willing to just believe (usually minority) people who talk about the problems they have.
Black soldiers were denied home loans after ww2; white soldiers were not; many white families therefor benefitted from owning a home (appreciation of value and safety/stability) in ways that black families did not.
Do we need a study on that? I mean, it doesn't hurt anything, but we could also just read some reports and talk to some people and then realize "hey this is messed up"
Do you have a specific example of a wasteful STEM research project that was cut?
My (perhaps wrong) impression was that wastefulness was given as the reason for making the cuts, but that the cuts were done broadly and indiscriminately [1].
In other words, the actions don't match the stated goal of reducing wastefulness. They seem more like a punishment for the members of all scientific institutions, and deterrence for curiosity-driven research.
[1] For example, the cuts to the STEM grants & projects didn't seem attached to any evidence of said projects' wastefulness.
> work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing
Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth.
Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outcomes? Perhaps confounding factors?
Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done? Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
> Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done?
Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.
> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.
> I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
The keywords search cuts were not exactly skillfully enacted.
> Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
Well, assuming that this is not an apocryphal story, and that there's no other relevant missing details (e.g. "research into silly topic X also used the word engendered"), etc., then that's dumb. I'm not going to argue about hearsay.
I will say this: before you believe such claims, you should verify them. They're often misremembered or completely made up. In particular, I'm not sure how anyone would know what keyword search was used to target their grant for review.
Like that program to study the mating patterns of sterile flies in Panama, right? They cut that because it was a $300k waste of money. Do you know what happened after they cut it? The US got a $300m infestation of those flies.
How does it feel to spread miss-information on internet? The Panama barrier was broken by screwworms 2 years before the cuts. It was dumb decision but didn't directly cause current infestation.
A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data.
Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.
Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.
I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.
Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.
> Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research.
I mean...not to be too flippant, but they don't. They're busy with hard problems to actually get people out of poverty, and don't have to worry about pesky partisan politics getting in the way. Plus, like, Mao is not that far in the rear-view mirror, y'know? It would be at least a little bit ironic to spend a lot of time researching that question.
Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation.
(Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)
Thank you for providing your perspective. I really hope HN has a 'pre-vouch' button as I know your comment will be flagged in no time, even though it's quite articulated.
> while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel
There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
> randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold
You ignore the political and economic system within which the scientific system sits.
> if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor
Again, your normative standard for what is legitimate.
> simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas.
They're trendy for a reason. Science is, at it's core, questioning things because someone cares about it.
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research.
Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all.
This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can also tell "good research" thanks to years and years of advanced training, which I have used here to tell you that most of this stuff you like is bad.
> Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
If you can't do the experiment, you don't deserve scientific funding. Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority. Unfortunately, advanced training is not unique to you, and so, you don't get a singular say on what's good or bad.
> so let's not have any standards at all.
Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
> Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
And there's your actual point. You hate that science is so affected by the politics of those who control the funding.
But that's always been the case. Wars have done more for physics than curiosity.
> That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority.
How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you...
Anyway, I'm just telling you that I actually do have enough experience to know the difference between a good question and a bad one, and I'm applying that experience here.
> Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
No, your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times. Here, I'll quote you:
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
Reducing uncertainty is great. I'm all for it. Sometimes it's even worth paying for. Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
> How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you
A problem of authorization can be solved with delegated authority. I'm saying your use of it is as evidence for your reasoning is weak. Those are two different problems.
> your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times.
Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all." You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
> You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
You're placing words in my mouth. I didn't say I like the research, I'm saying I don't like your grounds for dismissing it. I don't dismiss your expertise but I reject it as sufficient evidence for your argument.
> Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
If you cannot see the hubris here, if you cannot see how unscientific it is to conclude (reductively) the results of an experiment before the experiment, then we are at an end. Let's move on.
> Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all."
No, I concluded that from a process of deduction, but fair enough. You're arguing that nobody can be qualified to critique the thing you support.
> You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
It's just another way to try to arrive at the same place through the back door: my standard is wrong, because it's "normative" (or "political", or whatever other word you use in the next post), but your standard is (again, for some reason) not those things.
You don't like what I'm saying, so you reject my ability to say it. And when I catch you in this fallacy, you'll slip back to arguing that all research might be relevant to someone somewhere, and who are we to judge anyway, man, and blah blah blah. You're obviously just being big-brained and magnanimous.
Well, your deduction was unsound. And continues to be unsound. You can critique anything as long as you know you can be wrong too.
> Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
You're hand-waving. Your stance is political but not irrelevant. Your stance is philosophical (resting on chosen assumptions) and not empirically irrefutable.
Not acknowledging that is why you fail to convince.
You've made this argument about you and your ability to "catch" people. You have no argument that stands on its own construction.
Having read through this whole discussion, and as an outsider: they're approaching this from a much stronger and consistent position than you. This is most obvious given how far you've moved the goalposts along the way.
Maybe they've been more consistent but the strength of their position is not measured by my inconsistency.
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 we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
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.
> 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.
I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? Listen to the folks who have the expertise? Like sure, don't believe that they have the expertise or whatever, but ask for proof of the expertise, don't just handwave it away because you don't agree with the expert. Nothing that they've said has appeared to be inconsistent with their claim of expertise, however.
So... maybe trust the person with the experience? Or, if you have a contrasting experience, present that instead. But this is not what you're doing.
> What is their actual point? That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
My read is something like this: Their point is that the scientific method (aka "science") is fundamentally about rigor. If some science doesn't have rigor, it's fair to question its quality, because without rigor, you can't trust any of the results. There's too much possibility for error. The social sciences are notorious for lacking rigor. It's part of the reason there's a repeatability crisis in the field.
> 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'.
That's really not what they're saying at all. You keep trying to spin it that way, but I haven't seen that indication of that particular intent.
> 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."
No! They're not saying "these questions don't matter", they're saying "the people doing the science to 'answer these questions' are doing it badly, because they know what good science looks like, and that ain't it."
> isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? Listen to the folks who have the expertise?
No. We look at the best model that explains and predicts the most observations.
> Nothing that they've said has appeared to be inconsistent with their claim of expertise, however.
What expertise have they shown? How did you determine they're an expert? This is what they said in their original post: "if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor"
That has no expertise required. That's a political stance of what "actual, legitimate science" is.
> If some science doesn't have rigor, it's fair to question its quality
Yes, and I'm saying rigor should be pragmatically determined by operating conditions. All fields cannot instantly achieve the same level of rigor; instrumentation and methodologies need to develop over time. It's fine to say there's a problem with repeatability, it's not fine to say the researchers are illegitimate. Mine is a political stance as well.
> You keep trying to spin it that way, but I haven't seen that indication of that particular intent.
Our interpretation is at odds. You have not argued against it either. What makes their stance apolitical?
> the people doing the science to 'answer these questions' are doing it badly
And I'm saying that's in the nature of tough problems. Do you want to study tribal behavior? Culture? How nation states interact? How slavery has ripple effects across centuries? Tough shit, experimentation is hard. That doesn't make it bad science. That framing is thoughtless.
Beyond doing the best research you can do, given the conditions, there is no apolitical norm for what makes a researcher legitimate or illegitimate.
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.
So you elect leaders to make those "political" decisions. I don't see the problem here. I think no politician or leader would say that they are "obviously" right, but they don't have to be. That is what a leader is supposed to do. If they only did the absolute "right" think, they will do nothing.
And about the "good/bad cutting", I think it only mean in relative terms, because funds are not infinite...
> So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
I understand you personally are of the opinion that it's bad research, but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
> but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
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.
> Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine.
"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"?
Just because the medical system hasn't adapted to the (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research doesn't mean it's not valuable or should be stopped. The takeaway from SDOH is that social determinants are by far more powerful forces on people's health than actual medicine.
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
> (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research
I'm telling you, these same "astounding" findings were around 20 years ago. I learned about them when I was an undergraduate. They haven't changed.
Things can be astounding and still be old news. Quantum mechanics were astounding in 1930. Doesn't mean we should firehose money into standard model research. The world moves on.
> You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research, and so I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?
> I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research,
Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".
Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.
> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".
Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.
Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.
These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.
You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?
> Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.
This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.
OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.
> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
That result is hilarious, I really love it. If I have to guess perception of rural means they adopt what they think of as rural food and lifestyle which leads to worse health, can't say without reading the paper of course, but still its hilarious.
>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.
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?
It wasn’t a “theory” (at least no more than any other scientific fact), and telling me that someone found a relationship between two things doesn’t tell me that someone proved the relationship was causal.
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.
> It’s a perfect example of research that does nothing except making people feel virtuous for doing the research.
You could say the same for basically any of the fundamental sciences since none of them translate to any appreciable short-term economic value. What is the point of continuing research in physics or mathematics? Math theorems don't convert immediately to industrial output. Why invest even one dollar into astrophysics instead of having people stargaze on their own dime? Should the US outsource basic research to other countries?
Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste". The vast majority of questions there's nothing interesting or useful to discover. The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category (except you, obviously, you do know this, but just don't want to share the secret sauce)
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.
> Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste”
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.
I already described very precisely what this particular researcher's work (if true to description) would be valuable for. Quantifying the harm of things we know is bad is very important for pursuing lawsuits and writing laws. Would you like to comment directly on that claim?
And yes I agree broadly there is a lot of waste (and foreseeable/detectable waste) that falls into this category, but it seems like you're either suggesting that you know the specific targeted programs fall into this category or you're comfortable assuming that all the programs of this shape fall into this category.
> This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao. There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
> I don't know [how to mitigate health disparities]! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
Huh? I didn't claim to have all the answers lol, you did.
> Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao.
OK, cool. Let's not do more of that, then. I just said that I could see the difference between the questions, and that they're not likely to get funding elsewhere, not that we should absolutely fund more black hole space telescopes.
> There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
No. Not in the same class as "are poor people sicker than rich people", or "does gravity cause things to fall down". Next question.
FYI we've discovered precisely 0 (zero) things in cosmology or physics more broadly, or even material science, in the last 100 years that aren't derivable from relativity lol.
Does your tirade copy/paste to that entire field too?
Why not, I pay taxes too and I want researchers to study things you don't like. I don't want to fund the military, should they get their funding from Lockheed? Lord knows they have enough...
Exactly: You and every other tax payer is entitled to have an opinion on how the money is spent, so why your original comment about "topics you don't personally like"?
America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
> America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research
This sounds very bad! But since I'm not arguing in favor of technical decline and irreparable harm, it doesn't mean that my argument is wrong.
> let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose,
I'm confused: is science funding a welfare state for people who want to be scientists, or is it a meritocracy by which we fund the development of science?
> and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut,
Well...yes.
> when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Erm, so what? I can't have an opinion on bad science?
You're not making the decision either, but apparently you're allowed to have one.
The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.
If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
> The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Well golly. Mind numbing!
> Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
What "false beliefs" are those?
> The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from.
You literally just bragged that you were a member of countless NBER meta-science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors.
Tell me more about how the "universal lesson" is that you don't pick and choose. We do it all the time.
You just don't like my opinion, but you can't argue on the merits, so you resort to this stuff.
> You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from.
Great. I'm not doing that.
This isn't hard: there's such a thing as derivative, bad science that is unlikely to lead to novel results. It's fair to critique research on those grounds. "Social determinants of health" is a perfect example of this kind of science. I don't even disagree with the conclusions. I just think the science is terrible and shouldn't be funded. It's not just this area: observational nutrition research is generally abysmal science, and shouldn't be funded, yet is common. There's a replication crisis across the sciences, with certain fields being overrepresented.
This is not an imaginary problem.
Arguing that we don't filter science for quality, is of course, dumb and wrong. We do it all the time. It's just that some fashionable fields are able to bypass this test, because some folks substitute politics and indignance for logic.
> You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
You know, for a person who wants desperately to appeal to scientific authority, you resort to personal insults a lot. You'd think, if you were truly on the winning intellectual side of this, you could deal with the actual argument.
> It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
Note: There is always some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled literally all through the entire course of scientific history.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
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.
Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?
Inclusion Plan
Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies.
The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators
It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders.
Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
> Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
Since this can only mean the DOGE witch hunt we all clearly remember, I think Elon Musk was paying for it? But now it's just taxpayer money (if there is anything left after "contributing" to all of Trumps many funds).
> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
You know you can't just put one topic into the grievance bucket (science funding), shake it around, then pull out a different topic (orchestral hiring practices) and expect to have a conversation, right?
> Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate
> this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to
> blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse"
> instead of more
You should really shouldn't subtly misrepresent the argument. The article states that blind auditions made orchestras much more diverse in some categories, but did not make much of an impact in others.
As far as I can tell nobody except Anthony Tommasini is calling for blind auditions to go away. His position position is just weird and using it
to represent the opinions of most of the left is more than a bit disingenuous.
There is a far deeper problem, a systemic and foundational one; and unfortunately the whole system and all its components are all so vetted to the current rotten and distorted system that no amount of good intentions or personal dedication or will can overcome it. Unfortunately for us all we are at the precipice of a chasm and the forces of nature are upon us.
I work at a research lab that was previously supported by an R01 grant that did not get renewed last year. It’s been tough and the staff (including me) have been moved to part-time employment.
However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.
So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
Yep, Sansa climbed the ladder better than he did. As she says to him at the end, "Thank you for all your many lessons, Lord Baelish. I will never forget them."
My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.
I'm surviving on consulting income for a wide variety of clients right now in this space, and let me tell you it's brutal and extremely difficult to get entry to this space for people that don't have a wide network and lots of industry experience. Academic experience typically doesn't count.
In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
There is some history to why it is as grim as it is right now (sunny skies will return, don't worry!). A lot of funding was around ~2019 from the VC people, and biomed PIs were getting their startups funded and hiring from the recent PhD cohorts. The horrible environment in STEM academic hiring needs no introduction, so the talent pool was rich. Early stage drug development and biotech is horrendously risky, so most don't make it past ~5-7 years. Now there are lots of people looking for a job, and the only surviving companies are the extremely hiring averse ones.
Weird egos. I moved from academia to industry and constantly got told "In industry we just care that 'it works'". I thought that was a weird premise, given... you know... who doesn't? But the more time I spent in industry the more time I found that they in fact do not care if it actually works. What seems to matter more is the politics and about "working"[0] the right way using the right new buzzword[1]
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.
> 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.
It has always seemed clear to me that the world requires two types of people.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
>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.
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
>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.
That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
>Academia creates the foundation industry sits on.
Depends on the industry. All the researchers I know in academia are just wasting government grant money not delivering anything useful. Their words, not mine.
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
I really don't get why it's so commonly stated. It's so obviously dumb once you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's like people arguing that improving the track or improving the shoes doesn't win races because at the end of the day it's the runner that crosses the finish line. Sure, but to discredit everything but the runner is so myopic. Let them run barefoot and run on glass shards, then watch them lose
> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.
That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.
I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.
To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic
Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former.
I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize.
- person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y
Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.
If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.
That may depend on the field. My experience (in bioinformatics method development) is that people in the industry can't afford to work on state-of-the-art problems. But once a problem has become established and it's important enough to be worth their time, they will eventually come up with a better solution due to their superior resources.
Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.
Sure, but it would seem the solution would be to hire the recently minted PhDs and teach them through more senior staff how to operate in the real world, just like in literally any other profession.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
I don't know if it's so much that talented people are being locked out, as much as it is that communities everywhere, not just industry, are requiring a level of people skills that academic people lack but nonetheless thrive without.
Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done.
okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something.
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?
Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect
I would say you communicate to the model and you interpret the model's outputs. I would not say the model communicates back though.
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.
Most models do not have any persistent state or output that is separate from their input. They consume a stream of tokens and then output a probability distribution. The probability distribution will always be the exact same for that particular stream of tokens. There is no internal state, thoughts, mood etc., only prediction based on the input. "Memory" is usually just something injected into context by the harness and updated by usually a tool call from the model.
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.
Academic's, FTR, have to have a huge amount of people skills. Their job isn't just to discover, it's to share.
You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.
Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work
> The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard
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 low, capital is willing to go to riskier enterprises like biotech in order to get a larger return compared to the alternatives.
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.
High interest rate environment usually means the government specifically is paying a better rate on its debt. Then other interest rates are downstream from that. Government interest rates aren't connected to returns on investment (or only very indirectly).
Tech investments don't come with interest payments usually, so if interest rates go up it pulls money into government and corporate bonds which are much lower risk. Why take a gamble on new tech that might lose you everything to get 10% ROI, if you can get 6% "risk free" in bonds?
We are not convinced that we will be happy in the industry and part of it is the visa issues. She currently has a valid visa until 2029 but she just doesn't want it anymore.
how exactly did you jump to the conclusion that American ?citizen? taxpayes are propping these two people up financially? They are presumably both paying income tax in the United States as well, probably a lot of it based on his wife's profession.
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.
You are a fool if you think these companies are hiring enough to meet the labor needs. So many Phds I know are looking for work and yes they’ve applied to probably 500 jobs mostly in industry.
A lot of people in academia are mission driven - they don't care about the money, they care about the application of their work to benefit humanity and don't want to exist as a cog in a private corporation's profits. I think this mentality of "scientists just want to get paid a lot of money" is contributing to the anti-science views that are so pervasive in America these days. Some people are motivated by more than just profit.
When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. -Confucius
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
- 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.
Canadian citizen moves to us on equivalent CUSMA visa:
- huge pay raise
- retire back home wealthier than their peers and still enjoy socialized healthcare.
Canada's immigration system is just structurally tilted toward brain drain. It's all stick and no carrot.
I don't know what a CUSMA visa is - I thought CUSMA was a trade deal?, but it seems very convenient to compare the standard Express Entry points-based immigration track versus (nothing) on the US side. Convenient is an euphemism, reality basically the opposite of what you're saying:
Moving to Canada:
- Rational points-based immigration system with transparent rules which you can actually look up and prepare for, start your life as a Permanent Resident with all but voting rights compared with a citizen, become a citizen in a few years.
Moving to US:
- Wait years for an H1B with a yearly lottery with 15% chance
- Wait another 10 years for a Green Card, equivalent to a PR card
- Wait another ? years for full citizenship
>US citizen moves to Canada on a CUSMA visa:
- 30-50% pay cut
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.
>Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
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.
> But what about "free healthcare". Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
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.
>People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.
Clearly, all those people who lost everything or even became homeless from some health issue despite paying insurance all their lives must be fictional
How many people per capita become homeless from healthcare in US vs how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?
Quite a lot for the first case apparently (see 1).
The U.S. had roughly 770,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2024. Even if one-third of cases involved medical debt as a contributing factor, that gives 200 homeless people per 100,000 residents with healthcare costs contributing to their fate.
And obviously way more affected if we expand from complete homelessness to a housing downgrade (e.g. from a nice home to renting some appartment or going to a trailer or some motel) to cover medical costs that would have been trivial elsewhere, and even more so for those.
As for "how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?", we know in Canada e.g.: 15,474 deaths while waiting ≈ 38 deaths per 100,000 people per year. And that's dying while waiting, not dying because of the wait. A lot of them are heavily impacted/elderly etc and would have died anyway with or without procedure (and the wait time of some of those could be comparable to a typical US wait time, or be totally independent from the healthcare system, and based on e.g. donor list priority, etc.).
To contrast, this report (2) estimates around 200,000 deaths/year ≈ 59 deaths per 100,000 Americans from lack of access / insurance/access-related mortality.
In recent years about 40% of uninsured adults reported delaying, skipping, or not obtaining needed care or medication because of cost. Even among insured adults, about 8% reported doing so. Gallup found 38% of Americans said they or a family member postponed medical treatment because of cost in 2022, the highest level in its long-running survey.
Keep in mind that about 8.2% of the US population that's uninsured (compared to ~ 0 in Canada). And that's not counting the US under-insured, claim denials, and costs that exceed deductibles and annual limits that all heavily burden even the insured in the US. In fact most US citizens with medical debt ARE insured.
>you asked it as if implying it's an argument against "socialized insurance" as opposed to a mere question
And how did you come up with that conclusion? Are you reading minds? No, I genuinely asked to know, since many factors are important, there's no winner out of the gate.
But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be. Good day.
I didn't, the parent commenter did. I simply answered your question on why HE did it, and even said it your question was put "as if" it implied it, not that it necessarily implied it.
Of course one could also come with that conclusion from reading your lengthy comment at the start of the thread pissing on socialized healthcare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581228 and trivially putting two and two together too.
>But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be.
Of course you will. Conveniently frees you from having to take into account my sibling comment with numbers and references :)
Yes, Canada gets many immigrants from the most populous country in the world (1M Indians in 2024) - should that be surprising?
It also gets immigrants from the China (772k), UK (427k), Germany, France (100k each). Saying its all stick and all those people are desperate is an insane take.
Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
>Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
No, but if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US. Similar with EU. Ambitious people don't like being lowballed.
Those figures I cited were a snapshot from 2024 (https://ourworldindata.org/migration) Data is cumulative of course. I couldn't find a yearly breakdown on statcan. Doesn't change my argument though.
>if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US.
Immigrating to the US, not emigrating. People emigrate from a place and immigrate to another.
And the thing about hypotheticals is you can't prove them. That's just your opinion.
>And the thing about hypotheticals is you can't prove them.
You can prove it by how many canadians move to work in the US versus how many Americans move to work in Canada. This discrepancy will scale if immigration barriers to the two countries would be the same, but since they're not we have to extrapolate based on other data.
The free healthcare only matters if you get permanent residency.. Otherwise, it's just like the world's most expensive insurance plan thanks to the pay cut.
In terms of people in the tech industry I know of who moved to Canada from countries where they get a legitimate pay boost there.. Yes, it makes sense for them. If they never attain permanent residency, at least they made more money than they would have back home for a few years.
However, I've rarely seen one of them turn down a chance to get an additional huge pay boost by moving to the United States afterwards. In fact, it's common for top tier companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
I don't think Canada can compete on pay, but there are certainly people who could get that top pay but would trade it for a chance to live permanently in Canada. I'm guessing those are the sorts of people who have already taken pay cuts to work in highly specialized or speculative areas of science and technology. These are great people to have because they are low risk and high reward in terms of impact on the economy.
Sadly, if you look at any forum for Canadian immigrants you'll find a huge amount of depressing stories about never attaining permanent residency or of grinding for years to game the point system in a way that is soul crushing. It is a broken system on both sides. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does. If you make above a certain salary, you can get a blue card. You can accumulate time on the blue card in any country in the EU (except for Ireland, which has their own similar system if I recall). After 5 years you can typically apply for permanent residency, in Germany just 2 years so long as you attain B1 German (very practical for usage in daily life and doable in the timeframe without cramming or cutting corners).
The implicit reasoning seems to be that if you can stay out of trouble and earn a good living for 5 years. You're probably worth keeping around. I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Check out all of the people cramming French to try to increase their odds in the Canadian lottery for example. Canada probably doesn't get the sorts of genuine francophones they seem to be looking for--cramming for an exam with a verbal component is not the same as fluency--and the people entering the country are doing so by playing arbitrary games instead of living a real life.
And of course the French is just one example, there are also all of the useless courses and degree programs. The points-based lottery encourages and rewards the accumulation of arbitrary points, or in other words, a sort of dissimulation.
I suppose you could argue that Canada is selecting for people who are willing to diligently jump through hoops. If so, that does nothing to address brain drain.
> companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
Nobody would mind the lower Canadian salaries if they also came with a matched lower CoL, but that's not what's happening IRL. Similar issues across the EU where some very expensive to live areas don't pay proportionally high so the issue isn't necessarily pay but CoL. However as a worker your only option is demanding more money from your employer as you can't lower the CoL of the area. So there we are.
>The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does.
That's not a pro for the EU citizens as they get lower quality immigrants than Canada or anglophone countries with a stricter points system.
>I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Blue card system is also heavily gamed thanks to unscrupulous EU employers wanting to wage dump the local workforce, and much more easily because there's no multiple points criteria.
How much is this actually happening? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but the net migration flows haven't changed much. British Columbia did a big push to bring in American medical staff, and have only had a couple hundred move so far. Compare that to the number of Canadians moving south on TN visas, and I'm not sure it's significant.
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.
Exactly. The US is a leader in technology pretty much exclusively because of immigration. As that reverses, we can expect the US to fall behind, and fall further behind, over time.
60% of all CS researchers in America are not American. 55% of all engineering researchers.
When everyone goes home America loses the majority of it's research output, plus the extra Americans who choose to join them. I suspect a great many Americans will choose to join them, for personal or professional reasons. Why try to get a grant in the US, where the rules change whenever Trump sneezes, vs a stable, consistent system in the rest of the OECD?
For a country that has been a "brain magnet" for a good century, a "brain drain" might just be "talented people from wherever choosing to go somewhere else".
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
HK will give you right of abode which is almost as good as citizenship so long as you stay in HK. I suppose you could still be deported for high crimes or some such but that almost seems like the best case scenario if that happens.
Personally, I would go to Toronto. Decades ago I used to work for a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto and had development offices in the states. There was a project I needed to do with a distinguished engineer that required me to move to Toronto for a few months. I really liked it. TBH, there are very few cities in the US that I would say are on par with Toronto, and none are better. Now the Winters are brutal, but they're brutal where I'm from so that's not a dealbreaker for me.
Higher intangible quality of life, lower spending power.
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.
There are a lot of QOL disadvantages to being an immigrant on a visa anywhere. I moved to NZ for the next couple of years recently, and my QOL has dropped in many ways from the move. My much lower income buys a lot less housing here, so I went from a 2 bed apartment to myself to a moldy studio. I'm extremely far from family and friends, and there are weird cultural gaps with most everyone around me because we grew up on different media, sports, and education systems. I'm constantly having to figure out how things are done here, from taxes to bank accounts to renting, and I know I have different worker protections, but I don't really know what exactly they are. My status in the country ends after my visa is up in 2 years, and I don't know if I will even be able to extend it with a sponsor because there are health requirements that I may or may not meet for the visa I would need.
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.
He said Canada man. If you had other reasonable options when leaving you wouldn't pick it so lets not pretend anyone moving there from the USA didn't fail already.
For anyone thinking of migrating to Australia, please add to your considerations the increasing groundswell of conservatism and support for anti-immigration and the very recent proclamations of anti-multiculturalism of the newly popular One Nation party:
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.
And yet despite their majority, Labor still seem reticent to make big changes of the sort people are asking for, and backpedal on their initiatives and promises all over the place.
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.
She's been doing that for decades with no traction.
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.
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.
a person who temporarily or permanently lives and works in a country other than their native country.
I mean, some Mexicans and other latin americans go to the US to make money and buy a home back in their countries. And still by they're not called expats?
I guess I think of "expat" as a possibly-temporary state where full assimilation is not the goal. American expats also pay American taxes unless they give up US citizenship.
> American expats also pay American taxes unless they give up US citizenship.
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.
I'm not sure I follow. I am a US citizen and have never lived abroad, but my understanding is that US Citizens living abroad must still pay the US a full federal income tax. It's graduated/progressive, of course, so the actual percentage may vary, but it should probably be between 15% and 40% of income. Not what I would call small. I don't think they can deduct local taxes, can they?
Many countries have tax treaties with the US, and there’s also the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE), which excludes up to 132.9k of foreign income; so many US citizens abroad will indeed pay no US income taxes.
That is mostly only true if you have no significant investments. If you have investments, the tax situation is not good as an American even under tax treaties.
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.
Most American ex-pats don't really understand that the thing that makes ex-pat life so attractive is that, for most of people's lives, being American in a foreign country has traditionally conferred a wide range of benefits (this is most clearly exemplified by the way Americans living in a foreign country refer to themselves as "ex-pats" not "immigrants"). The ex-pat solution assumes American exceptionalism as its foundation.
Historically Americans have benefited from income asymmetry and a fairly wide-spread desire by foreign nations not to cause too much legal trouble for US nationals abroad.
I have quite a few friends that do live, quite happily, abroad. But the common pattern for them is a.) fluency in the native language b.) historical association with the country c.) fairly large cash reserves so they can ignore any economic problems these countries are facing.
That sounds more like FIRE / geographic arbitrage than expat in the traditional sense.
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.
Most places have their own politics. What differs is how often they come up. As a foreigner you're usually spared the involvement in those discussions because people think you're not interested and don't want your outsider opinion anyway.
People also embed themselves in different communities when they move anywhere, even to a different city or state in the same country. It's a clean reset.
It doesn't always last forever. I know several people who tried to move somewhere, including internationally, when politics got heated in 2016. Most of them came back eventually with a realization that politics is everywhere, it's just a matter of how much you're embedded into the places it's discussed.
Politics is everywhere, but the state of US politics today is exceptionally bad by Western world standards. I hate the government in my country, but their corruption and incompetence is nothing compared to the Trump administration.
In that sense most EU countries are a positive upgrade.
I (American) worked in Spain (Cáceres, Extremadura) ~2015-2017 in tech. It was a wonderful experience. Extremely talented, hard-working, and friendly co-workers. Great health-care and education systems. I think since then rising housing prices partially due to migration have become an issue, but it's a really, really nice place.
To add context Extremadura is a member of the "poor" Spain. To US people could be useful to think on a sort of New Mexico.
Pros: Great food, interesting cultural past, only one language to deal with and not complicated accents to grasp (more important that most people think), gorgeous wild areas, uncomplicated people, maybe a little on the introverted side at first, but solid gold after a while.
Cons: Risk of poverty sadly high, bigger than many US states (but with better government support and healthcare). Harsh continental climate very hot and very cold. Not for everybody (but US has plenty of places with similar or worse weather). The trains and communication roads are also under-average for the country and many people don't really speak English.
In many of the non highly touristic places you can live well if you can adapt to the cons. Housing prices are lower, life expenses cheaper and buying a house should be affordable with a decent job (Don't try this in Barcelona or Madrid). Portugal is close, and is even cheaper, to the point of some people living there and working in Spain. To support the same standard of living in Barcelona, Valencia or Madrid you need to plan in advance, to stomach the stress that unavoidably come with big cities, and earn much more.
In Spain if you can speak English well you will be automatically seen as a great researcher.
More pro: Spain may be one of the best places in Europe to raise kids (culturally, especially), though a good chunk of the country has emptied out of its young people - so it can vary by region. It's a shame that their birth rate has gotten so low. Crime overall is very low, especially if you're not tied directly to it.
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 internet infrastructure, the fiber optic network seems to be quite robust these days. There are still places where it isn't available, but compared to e.g. the US it's another world entirely. Even small cities typically offer 1 or sometimes 10 Gbps hookups in many areas.
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!
Also American, and I'm interested why you praise the education system. I have a child who will be entering the Andalusian system at some point and although it seems better than my Oklahoman system, that is, uh...damning with faint praise.
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.
gotta be ready for the crazy heat in the summers, they don't call it extremadura for nothing. unironically best lodging is rooms that were dungeons in the castle.
Man Spain is mentioned as a top destination with expat influencers, youtubers and now even on hn. I get the feeling that something is going to crack at some point. You must be pricing out locals and they can't be happy about that.
Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.
The point is that people in the US absolutely do get called racist all the time for all manner of things.
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.
Spain has its own load of problems, like any other place. Big cities have lowered their quality of life a lot since the 2008 crisis.
Science is massively underfunded respect to what US was enjoying. Expect cuts in your salary. Physicians earn much, much, less, but students can follow public university studies without being put a crushing debt load around their necks.
Science is also being invaded lately with political and bureaucratic BS. Universities have less resources and are always scammed in the ranks that benefit Asian and US universities.
We expect one month of Holidays each year, by law, or to be compensated for it if we agree to spend this time working. Most researchers volunteer to work extra hours or weekends if needed to finish the experiments.
About cultural differences. There are not "white" people and "hispanic" people in Spain. Is either the same thing, or it does not really matter.
"Negro" means "black", and is just a color. Some people are racist, specially out of the big cities, and even more are classist, but if you are black and people describe you as a man negro or a woman negra they don't mean to insult you, they are just describing you. There is not such ridiculous term as an "Afro-spanish", if you have born in Spain or earned the nationality, you are as much 100% Spanish, as any other.
In fact, you are either Spanish, or foreign. If you learn the language well you "are honorary Spanish". If not, you will be always be the "Moroccan" or the "Gringo", but not the "black" or the "white". Europeans had mixed their bloods for ages and people here consider themselves as much "white" than you (if not more) and will find the distinction offensive by unnecessary.
As long as you act as a reasonably civilized person, only the extreme right idiots will care about your tan. Avoid this European MAGA like the dangerous plague that they are.
In restaurants, you need to call the waiter and say what you want. If you want the bill, you need to ask politely for the bill. Don't wait to be noticed or you will wait forever. You will not be chased off the table normally, that would be rude.
You will receive the amount of food expected traditionally in the area (not the humongous portions normal in US unless you visit the North).
Tips are fully voluntary. Unless you go to a very exclusive place you should tip between 0 and 2 dollars and don't need to argue why. (Forget about that X% of the service. We hate going out and being forced to do math).
People will benefit also of the environmental regulation. I assume that a big chunk of the morbid obesity epidemics in US came from unregulated contamination.
To end, a couple warnings, specific from the country:
In small populations near mountains and forests, wildfire crime is a recurrent problem. If there are cows or sheep roaming wild in the area, expect wildfire mafias. Assure to remove any flammable materials near your house and to have an escape route plan.
Dry riverbeds are dangerous. Engrave this in your brain. Locals use this places as parkings, but will run to remove the cars if there is rain expected. You shouldn't park in this areas, never, ever, try to cross a current of water or rescue your parked car if there is water, and should avoid buying any property in this areas. The place is called Rioseco for a motive. Each year a few expatriates die in the Mediterranean caught by flash floods.
Sure, you can find something with various budgets. As other said, that house is far away from the city centre (the reddit OP says so in the thread). You'll also probably need to spend a lot on upkeep and retrofits with buildings this old.
Just browse idealista in the city you want and you'll see its not such a bargain as people might think. Mid-sized cities I've checked (Vigo, Valencia, Granada) all have similar prices, around 400k for a 2-3 bed older apartment, or twice as much for a newer one.
Who cares if it is outside the city center? Looks like it is plenty urban. Even better, more real businesses priced towards locals paying 120k for an entire building, and no seasonal tourist businesses taking up space in the market priced for whoever can afford a four figure vacation to Valencia. Besides, OP said it was 20 mins by car to the city center. That seems perfectly reasonable in the american frame of reference towards distances to points of interest. The place looks turnkey too. Unfinished attic is pretty typical even in the US.
If it looks like a good deal to you, by all means, hasta luego. I was just saying that specific Reddit post is not really a good average case for housing. Check idealista and see the average homes there first.
> 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.
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.
What are you talking about? They will move to Spain and be financially well off means they will be ignorant of local issues and live in a bubble? How did you make that stretch? Sure they may not be very political but that doesn't equate to living in a bubble. People choose to engage with politics at varying degrees, as is their right.
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?!
We didn't. We can't vote. If anything, last three years I worked in fraud detection in healthcare - my work is currently being used by the medicare audit team. So respectfully, we only wanted good for this country.
Ok, so you think your responsibility ends with voting? You build and fund a giant death machine and "welp my vote for death machine leader doesn't count so nothing else can be done"?.
No idea what the most heavily armed civilian population on the planet could possibly do about its tyrannical government?
We are approaching a situation where everyone else on the planet is going to have to do it for you. It would be much cleaner for everyone involved if you dealt with this before it got that far.
Fair question - our concerns are multidimensional. Funding cut + Visa uncertainty + ICE arresting us and putting us in detention + us visiting another country but not being allowed to enter back are a few of them.
The US is still dominant for research spending and high impact scientific publications and medicine. I too would be interested in where they think it would be better. Israel and South Korea are the only two that might provide more opportunities depending on the area of interest.
> She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become.
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
No. AI is not doing science. And also no, science is not being held back by "pearl clutching" and "unwillingness to let brilliant non-science geniuses in."
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
It disheartens me a great deal to see how the US (in particular, but they are not alone) has turned its back on good science, largely, but not exclusively, on the back of populist politics.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
I think we agree. I certainly agree with what you've written. You may not agree with my opinions, and that's fine.
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.)
"""
> 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)
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.
This is what happens when we are $40 Trillion in debt.
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.
Funny, because while science and research funding is being cut…the debt is still rising faster than ever, because I still see taxpayer money flying towards useless things more than ever.
Defense (DoD) budget is $900 billion now. When you also account for veterans' health, expenditures on nukes (goes to the DoEnergy), military stuff in space (goes to NASA), border protection, etc., the total national security spending tops $1.5 trillion. That's not counting the interest on past wars.
Medicare + SS is about $2.6 trillion. With Medicaid, it's up to $3.3 trillion, but this still gets you nowhere close to "all military is 1/6 of ss and medicare".
Even if we are more conservative about how we count "all military" - for instance, include veteran's health and nukes, but not CBP - it still doesn't get us close to the 1/6 number.
Would you explain your reasoning and numbers a bit more?
medicare, medicaid, ss is > 4 billion and dod is 1 billion, so its more like ~< 1/4. sorry i forgot to mention medicaid, also my bad. i was eyeballing a pie chart.
Yeah, but I do think you need to count nukes, veteran's health, space launches for the Air Force, etc, also under "military spending". Better not to ignore them just because they're not properly under DoD.
tbf, it's unclear to me at this point how much of that is going to represent $$ out of the American pocket. A lot of it is "guarantees of financing and investment" by other gulf states. Probably we're subsidizing Iran re-investment, and the costs of that are intentionally ambiguous.
If its USD dollars that are going to be spent, its not different than Fed literally printing money out of thin air and sending to Iran. The mere consumption of these dollars will have some effect on global inflation and will strenghten Iran long term
Being friends with Israel and giving them billions of dollars annually was a dumb idea. There would’ve been no war between USA and Iran if there wasn’t such a close friendship with ridiculously acting Israel.
> are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum
It depends. Do you want to be rich?
People don't "fund" science, they "invest" in science.
There is a big difference. Often, each dollar invested will return multiplied by five, ten or more.
But you can also spent 14 millions painting a pool in a different shade of blue or much more building the Barbie's disco dance house and will end with... the same pool, or a disco dance house that you will never be allowed to use. Is your money after all.
The losers whining loudest about the debt just started and lost a war with Iran and now they’re sending Iran $300 billion.
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.
No, cutting R&D is the same as eating our seed corn. These programs pay off a lot in the long run, because they're a core and unavoidable part of technological progress.
They also tend to pay off big in societal progress. As an example, researching teaching and learning better results in better education, which results in better-trained kids and a more productive society. Research into clinical psychology leads to better therapy and emotionally healthier and well-adjusted people. Etc.
Science funding is one of the best investments we can make into the long-term success of the country, and it's a gross mistake to cut it. Literally one of the biggest mistakes we can commit. Science is a big part of what keeps us moving forward, and it is outlandishly cheap compared to the benefits.
Cutting public services and lowering taxes is what we've been doing since Reagan, and look where it lead us. And you still want more of that!?
To fix society, you need to bring money down the ladder, from the ones whose wallets got indecently fat in the past few decades. Public spending (outside of police and military) and higher taxes for the rich are the only way to go, lest you want society to get completely consumed by the neoliberalist death cult.
Some of the science spending was to help us prevent catastrophe and save our descendants.
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.
How much money has Trump just quite literally blown up in an idiotic, pointless war that has served no purpose other than granting Iran Billions in reparations?
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.
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
More decentralized decision-making (in the hands of universities and institutes), requirements for permanent positions as a requirement for funding, more funding of individuals and programs rather than projects, more randomized funding (lotteries etc), requirements for trainee positions to be tied to projected permanent positions, more early career development and retraining funding, etc etc etc.
The traditional model was actually pretty solid: a decentralized system focused on universities and institutes with lots of independent funding of individuals, with protection of those individuals. The shift toward funding of universities by a centralized institution (the US federal government) based on temporary projects with no protection of the individuals behind the projects, led to the pyramid schemes and vulnerable attention-seeking that you see now.
Academics in the US has been a tinder box for years. This past year or so has been like setting fire to the tinder box rather than cleaning up the fire hazard.
This is obviously an overly simple narrative, but one real factor: the Bell Labs model was built around giving brilliant people a lab and a bunch of funding, and leaving them on their own to explore for a while. Lots of blue sky goofy research, a lot of which ended up being useful. That has its own problems, including “which few brilliant minds get this opportunity?” and “how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”
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.
“how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”
do we even need this? i think accepting that some will produce nothing useful is just cost of doing business. certainly better than imposing bureaucracy in name of accountability
Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future.
What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.
I’ve seen it claimed that higher taxes on corporate profits incentivized that lab model. Better to invest in risky research than have that money taxed away. When the regulatory environment changed, shareholders insisted they should get that money through dividends and stock buybacks, and goodbye Bell Labs. I don’t know how accurate that argument is, but it certainly sounds plausible.
My father worked at Bell Labs. He said the rules of the monopoly signed with the US govt drove innovation. AT&T, which operated Bell Labs, could charge cost plus a fixed percentage, but it was based on costs from N years earlier. I believe N=3. Anyway, if AT&T improved costs, it became more profitable.
The profits of the company depended on innovation. The employees knew that. And it innovated.
Sounds like this is what's still done in last decade Amazon who didn't report profit for so long. Though it's also stopped by another regulatory change that no longer regards S&W dev as R&D for tax purposes, but I don't remember the name.
Each of those companies had a profitable near monopoly, and were heavily vertically integrated.
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.
Bell Labs, which blew the rest away, was entirely government-subsidized in the form of the AT&T monopoly on telephone service. I'm not sure if AT&T was required to run Bell Labs or if it was just an enlightened policy that they were able to implement because of their unique circumstances, though.
That's a good question, and I'd also add the Manhattan Project, the NIH, the NSF, NOAA, Fermilab, NIST, NCAR, and academic research including the state "land grant" universities. Every complex system has failure modes, but there must be success stories to learn from in all of those programs.
Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.
That meant the optimum for corporations was to invest the money in R&D. The cost of paying dividends was too large, so the advantage gained from developing competitive products was actually worth it.
As a bonus, high capital gains taxes also fill the state's coffers, which can also be used to fund research.
But as the western world has cut taxes down down down, the behaviour of big companies shifted to short term gains: dividends and stock buybacks.
Private equity is also to blame, because they set short term performance targets that remove the incentive for long term planning. The MBAs that have been installed as executives that follow PEs favorite playbook are another issue.
Those places grew out of an approach that had its origins in WW2. It was pretty obvious to the powers that be the USA won because science and engineering produced more and better weapons, transport and logistics than the enemy could. They eventually squashed both Germany and Japan with sheer industrial might.
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.
- 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.
A research system can adapt to lower funding if the rules are stable. What it can't adapt to is grants being frozen, staff disappearing mid-project, forbidden vocabulary changing
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.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.
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.
Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.
What a weird argument, sorry. You're positing that those working in science aren't doing it for your decided "correct" reasons. Does this go for other industries as well? We should fire all bus drivers that aren't in it for the love of the game? Can't one still provide value?
I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.
The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.
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.
Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density.
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.
> The technology sector is propping up the US economy
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.
"But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since."
Quote:
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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.
Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.
My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing.
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.)
@josephg
Being from the EU myself, I'm surprised in the same way you are. There is certainly something good going on there as well, at least when looking at certain technologies in isolation, where the US leads.
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.
These are companies built in the heyday of American hegemony. The concern is not around dominance of existing science. Rather, the issues are:
- 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.
> 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.
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.
It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now.
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.
Enough to condemn the US forever in the eyes of the world. It’s no longer seen as a reliable ally or a desirable destination by the majority around the world.
Strictly speaking, that Presidential race was not enough, since Trump alone would have been far-more survivable. A mere repeat of 2016-2020 would have been shameful and humiliating, but not the same kind of diplomatic self-implosion.
What is enough involves the outcomes of other elections/candidates, where almost all the Republican party decided that this time around they were going to go into full-steam ahead with Trump's whims and crimes.
He has, as predicted, destroyed the very idea of America, and all those who voted for him and are collaborating with him deserve the consequences, particularly his followers who he reliably uses then betrays. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t vote for him though, the slide into fascism is beginning and many don’t recognise it yet.
> 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.
Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts.
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.
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
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.
A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview:
"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."
And if you are any kind of strategic thinker when faced with that problem, you will do two things
1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.
2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.
China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.
Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.
R&D is hit or miss. And a lot will miss. It's really no different from the VC model where 90% of their startups will fail but the 10% that succeed will make up for the rest.
Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.
I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.
The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?
They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
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.
> Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
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.
Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.
The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.
Even with perfect information regarding R&D outcomes, capitalism is competitive.
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.
Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.
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.
"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.
If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
Bingo. Michael Wolff illustrates nicely how Trump is the literal embodiment of the "greed is good" 80's culture.
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.
It's a bit reductive to pin this on Ronald Reagan.
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.
Or you could go all the way back to Reconstruction. The same way that an embittered Germany led to WWII, we are living with an embittered, mutant form of Confederate culture taking its revenge on the Union that put it down 160 years ago. The current culture war intermingles Southern Christian Conservative and Neoliberal interests. They're angry that the world has rapidly grown more progressive, as much as they're angry they lost their war. It might only take 5-10 years and eventually swing back, but it could also get worse, if their leaders become more extreme (strongman leaders often do get worse, as do religious extremists).
That's exactly how Professor Sean Wilentz put it on one of his podcast episodes. He referred to it as "the politics of the aggrieved" I believe, while tracing the literary and legal influences from then until now.
Trump is the embodiment of a culture that was willing to make that vote. Of the populace that was tricked by The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal. Of the media more concerned with engagement than information. He spent his lifetime curating the image that made him uniquely positioned for his role, even if he didn't expect to get it.
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
That human industrial activities are the primary direct causation of the currently observed climate change is a scientific fact, proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
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.
If scientific investigation shows that there are many causes that have a relevant impact on "A", then saying that "A has multiple relevant and possible causes" is not hand-waving. It's stating the fact.
Hand-waving is to pearl clutchlingly throw out vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements" without properly stating what the mechanism is supposed to be and without providing any evidence that it is relevant in the last.
You know, polemic tribal whistle-blowing like you are doing. That's hand-waving.
>vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements"
And this is circling the wagons. Sorry but I can't believe someone who is intellectually honest is capable of writing such thing. You are either blatantly ignorant on this matter (and shouldn't be talking about it at all) or taking me for a ride.
It's preposterous that I have to explain how requiring a document in which you state allegiance to leftist ideals has an impact on the political makeup of admissions. I don't have enough frontal lobe damage to take you seriously.
Ok, so we establish that "Climate change could seem to have many causes, but educated people know that human activity is the proven cause of the majority of the change."
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.
Let's just talk about the recent (past 500 years) change in the insulation properties of the planet's atmosphere.
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.
What in my comment makes you think I'm disputing anthropogenic climate change? It's about the pattern of logic you are applying.
You seem to think that because Climate change is a messy topic with one real explanation, every other messy topic must also have a single true explanation. No, it doesn't work that way
Except we weren't talking about climate change. We were talking about you lying. You said one thing, and the link you provided did not support your claim.
If you make a claim, and the thing you say supports it does not support it, kinda sounds like lying. You trying to make this about climate change just proves even further that you know you are a liar.
> That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.
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.
Well, a key difference is that race is an intrinsic immutable attribute, and political views aren't.
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.
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.
I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.
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.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
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)
> The categories are quite arbitrary, can vary, and can change. Yes, race is a social construct.
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.
Well I'm glad that you've apparently got a lower density of rank stupidity in Australia such that you've never been in situations where you've just had to let it wash over you while avoiding provoking it! In the US we've got an epidemic of it, quite obviously.
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
Australia was once awash with "real British" people who constantly attempted to lord it over all - it really doesn't pay to let self denoted elites get away with that shit.
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
> I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.
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.
What's horseshit is derailing a discussion about political bias in academia by quibbling over use of the word "race" when it wasn't even essential to the point.
People can't change between white and black skin. "Racism" exists in the US. Your gaslighting is embarrassing.
u/xdennis You think it's a fun fact that Charlie Kirk died? Crazy.
> It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.
I didn't argue anything.
I made a point to say that the link did NOT show a purge happened. It's funny because you are supporting my comment by literally providing another link as if to admit that the original one didn't support the claim.
But hey, pretend I said stuff. You're the one who thinks CK's death was fun.
I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism. I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.
> I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism.
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&...
> 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.
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".
> My friend, I simply stated a conclusion that is very commonly accepted, including by conservatives (hints: populism, religion, gender roles).
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.
> 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.
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.
I mean it's right there in black and white. Yes, we've gone on a few tangents since then.
> literally what you were replying to in the aforementioned post!
No it's the AEI complaining that there aren't enough conservatives in higher education. There aren't any stats on summer barbecues MAGA adjunct professors weren't invited to. There aren't any anecdotes about an infowarrior instructor missing out on networking events. Just look at the quoted words above my request to see what they are in reference to.
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.
And it's more than the self selection force of conseratives being too frightened that college will change their worldview. Take a liberal and a conservative with equivalent postgraduate degrees. Now offer them their choice of a faculty position or a C-suite career track. Based on the values that define their respective ideologies, is it a coin toss for which path either chooses?
Or even that the categories are shifting. People who hold perfectly reasonable classical Conservative viewpoints are now excluded from the Republican party. An institution failing to shift more right doesn't make it biased.
> The lack of diversity among professors is problematic for both education and research, ostensibly the overriding purposes of universities.
I basically did a spit-take here. Lack of diversity is suddenly--and only--a problem when it doesn't include conservatives.
The funny thing is that racial and cultural diversity is higher amongst faculty than the general population. For decades America has attracted the brightest and highest-achieving college students and researchers from around the world, and those people eventually get faculty positions and advance their careers. It has gotten to the point that we hear people (usually conservatives) complain that some fields are dominated by non-white people.
And shock, as it turns out, American conservative viewpoints are actually a minority in the world. If higher education were actually representative of world population, 1/5 would be Chinese, 1/5 would be Indian, 1/5 European, and only 1/20 would even be American. If we were generous and say that half of America is conservative (it's not), then only 1/40 would be an American conservative. Most people in the world are not American conservatives. This is just a fact. They say that reality has a liberal bias. For the record, I don't believe it has a liberal bias, because American liberalism is just a weird grab bag of outposts on the cultural war front, but reality absolutely does not support a rightwing view.
We hear conservatives whine and moan about diversity exactly when it suits them, and we've all seen just exactly how they feel about diversity.
It’s a pretty commonly repeated theory amongst far right / reactionary “thought leaders”. They call it the “Long March Through the Institutions”. I think the comment you were responding to was ironically referencing it.
> To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.
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.
Yes, often one wing of political thought leaders will adopt terms and ideas from the other wing to serve as a foundation for their theories. I never suggested that the term itself was invented by someone on the right, merely that it’s a term widely used to describe the very specific idea of a calculated political effort to expel conservatives from academia. Ironically, Rudi’s ambitions were much more grand than simply transforming academia, he wanted to transform society.
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.
You misunderstand, the idea of the “Long March Through the Institutions” is that innocent conservative intellectuals are the victims of a central, coordinated campaign for them to be expelled from academia in order to transform academia into an institution that serves leftwing agendas. It’s an explicit rejection that such a transformation could occur naturally, and can fairly be considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream specifically because it meets Barkun’s criteria for conspiracy theories:
- nothing happens by accident
- nothing is as it seems
- everything is connected
I don't really buy that idea, but like the one black guy at the Country Line Dance, you get the strong vibe you are not in the right place, and kind of just want to leave, regardless of how people are upfront treating you.
The people you’re talking to don’t understand why you would ever want to have the Wrong Kind of Person around an institution as sacred as the university
More likely that conservatives turned liberal once the right went all in on anti-intellectualism.
Of course the real question is: what does conservative even mean any more? The joining of Falwell and Reagan fucked both conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
Yep, it's at least partly this. I watched a lot of "moderate" academics become "liberal" after Trump's first election.
If you're a scientist by principles and a moderate by political views, and the right-wing party comes out in opposition to science, well, it's fair that you might then join the "pro-science party". Being pro-science becomes a liberal position.
So it's not that conservatives were "purged" from the ranks of academia.
Sure, but isn't the response worse than the problem? When intellectual standards are abandoned (as opposed to correcting a specific bias), discourse degrades into mindless anger, conspiracies and leaders who defraud their own supporters.
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.
Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
I think conservatives don't really know what they are, and that's a big problem. I think Sagan discussed this. Like science is a pretty well established "institution" dating back centuries. Intellectualism dates back kind of as far back as humanity, almost every large civilization I can think (that left records) of had strong intellectual presence (including Greeks, Romans, etc.).
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.
Conservatives views are not anti-science, so much as they are a demand that science only be allowed to answer certain questions, and only answer those questions in specific ways.
That is anti science. It’s just faith based dogmatism. You also see it with conservatives calling belief in the scientific process being able to produce knowledge being called scientism like it’s just faith based.
They literally look down on the idea of updating your previous beliefs.
Liberal views are very anti-science on race. Some famous professors even lost their positions just for adopting the statistically correct position that the majority of the difference in outcomes between races is accounted for by IQ, which is mostly immutable after childhood, not some societal conspiracy against certain races.
James Watson the guy who discovered DNA was stripped of honorary titles based on comments related to race and IQ. there was a lot of discussion about that recently when he died.
Maybe you could start with an actual practicing scientist. One problem you're going to run into here is that, as I said, this is an active area of study. If these papers are firing offenses, someone ought to be telling HR.
Yes, me and my Calvinball rule of "actual scientist prevented from publishing on this subject".
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.
...I don't think Watson was kicked out for "uncomfortable truths", but because his conclusions kept overstepping the evidence he presented, and in particularly sexist or racist ways.
Again, to be explicit: he did not establish that his claims were true.
That is why it's quite worthwhile to ask if Watson is the best example available. The guy was pretty openly and casually sexist, and his racism wasn't much better.
Even stipulating the imprecise language here, he couldn't "establish that his claims were true", because he did not work in these fields. This is a pop science argument where any "scientist" can just "do science" to answer deep or controversial questions, but obviously that't not how science actually works. His racist comments pertained to several highly specialized fields of study, none of which he worked in. You might as well have asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
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.
I mean I like to hold my cards closer to my vest than this, but if we're just going right at it:
(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.
Not a Nobel prize winner (his advisor was though), but Stephen Hsu was a fairly high profile case. I remember watching a 2008 Google lecture of his on YouTube in 2019 and wondering- wow, the kind of research people could present a decade ago. Lo and behold...
(1) Lost an administrative position, retained his tenured academic position.
(2) Did not practice in the space. As I understand it, he got jumped for appearing on Stefan Molyneaux's show (Molyneaux is a proud, open white nationalist, though that was not as obvious at the time) and saying he was agnostic about group differences.
The key thing here is, again: Hsu doesn't publish in this field. He himself loudly pointed this out! He's a physicist, not a geneticist or a psychometrician/quant psych.
From what I can tell, the mob attack on Hsu was not well founded. It's not my claim that there haven't been brigaded attacks on academics; there obviously have been. Rather: it's that the scientists who actually practice in this field and actually publish results continue to do so, largely without drama. "Group differences" in "intelligence" (or proxies like EA) are not verboten in academia.
There's an example of a scientist who published on group differences and lost his job, but that example won't do the work this thread hopes it'll do; he was fired for good reason.
"Liberal views" are not anti-science on race. "Liberal views" tend to reject the reductionism and selectivity of "race science" that points to arbitrarily defined measurements like IQ as being the sole explanation for things we can easily prove have multiple better, non-arbitrary explanations.
Bluntly, racists have decided IQ measurements mean they're not racist instead of wondering whether IQ, as a measurement, is itself racist.
Race science is just about the apex of pseudoscience. Academics haven't rejected it because it doesn't mesh with their liberal politics, they've rejected it because it's junk.
Watson's comments are not based in scientific fact. First of - there is no such thing as a "race". Putting people in classes based on the colour of their skin is ludicrously simplistic, ignoring the incredible genetic diversity in the human genome. There's simply no viable scientific concept that is able to capture the features that "race" is supposed to capture.
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.
Yeah, I recall that average Irish citizens and Irish immigrants were measured to have pretty bad IQs around a century ago. This changed with improvements to nutrition, health, less alcoholism, and education.
So the research shows that IQ is not purely innate. And this is, at this point, rather old research.
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
My point is simple. Real world is highly complex and dynamic system. It is not a linear relationship e.g European scientists never came --> US remained backward.
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.
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.
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.
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions.
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.
As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school.
I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.
On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.
Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, but national labs do hire foreigners/non-citizens, albeit possibly not from all countries with eligibility for all roles.
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.
> affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President.
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/
I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China.
The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
Well why Americans are not willing to take those PhD offers that pay barely above poverty line for 5 years or so? The answer is obvious, they would rather take a job in industry that pays miles better.
There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
I get all that. I grew up in Santa Cruz and wish I could go home but can't because of the cost. I can't imagine having to leave my entire country. I'm not trying to put down immigrants in those positions. I am inspired by immigrants. I am inspired by foreigners who come here.
But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'.
I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive.
H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it).
OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
A good and balanced take, this. Too bad we don't even allow those on the political stage anymore :(
All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
I think it is misunderstanding to think that Phd Salaries will increase to high level if immigrants left. Will NIH or NSF dump 3 x more money? If that is the case are civil servants in USA getting super great salary (a friend works for DMV in NJ and she says pay is awful)
> There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with.
> Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Long flights and leaving friends/family behind? You mean like... most undergrad students in the US? Sitting on a plane is the argument?
By which it is implied such trips are obviously non-starters for foreign students. This is the most evident during Thanksgiving and Christmas when most undergrad students in the US reunion with their family and friends.
Post docs and PhD’s working in labs get Grants sure. grad students however which is what we’re talking about here, do not. Or at least not government ones.
I'm a white American and I've heard a handful of my fellow white Americans say this, but they can't actually show me real world examples or show me how it actually affected them.
It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!"
When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens.
Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
None of this addresses that it's basic human nature. Nor provides any way to improve anything.
"I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?"
Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything.
"Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude."
Pick one of the above. You can't pick both.
"It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this."
It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.
I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.
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.
Just do as DOGE/Musk: ctrl+f for "diversity" and deny all grants. Even if it had nothing to do with "woke", for instance diversity in bacteria cultures or whatever...
I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.
As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work.
There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.
Ah yes, nothing incentivises focus on "real work" like having to check that your abstract doesn't contain any words that trigger the administrations' censors after some ignorant edgelord's algorithm defunded your study of transgenic mice or black holes.
Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place
and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.
Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.
It's 100% christian evangelicals (bible fundamentalists) that inserted themselves into the republican party after the counter-culture movement of the 60s. They hate freedom and liberty, full stop.
the recent drama about science funding to me highlights one of the main problems with our grant-based distribution system: which is that it is unsurprisingly very frail to fast-moving changes in government and society at large.
science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.
these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
> a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
you can do this, you just need to find a chump who is willing to spend the money.
You either get a slow moving multi party democracy or you get winner-takes-all presidential mechanics that can reshape the country every four years. You can't have both.
First of all, multi-party democracy needn’t be slow. Parliamentary systems in multi-party countries often react faster than the US. This is due in part to legislation being systematically easier to pass.
Second of all, winner-take-all presidential mechanics don’t imply a four-year cycle of funding instability for research. That only happens if the president has sufficient control of funding. Which, through the administrative state (which is supposed to basically be a delegate of congressional authority), really is supposed to be insulated in large part from presidential, partisan politics. With increased centralization of power in the president (which, imo, is largely just an ~evolutionary response to Congress’ sclerosis), this insulation is lost, exposing research more to the four-year cycle of heavily partisan presidential politics.
Unironically parroting uniparty lines is moronic. Sure there are problems with the Democrats, but both-sideism is at this point being wilfully blind.
As an external observer to US politics it would be great for the country to move past the two-party system, but to say they are the same is ridiculous.
You have to remember that many of us are worried about the effects on everyone but the people pulling the levers are only worried about effects on themselves, and (at least in the short term) they are absolutely benefiting (e.g. enriching) themselves, regardless of how much damage it does to everyone else.
> The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
Policy doesn't matter any more. Every case is judged as an individual case. Elon hasn't had his citizenship stripped because he's powerful and the president likes him, that's it.
There used to be a time when you came across accounts from 100 years ago - and you'd just be flabbergasted by the whimsical stupidity when laid out so plainly.
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
My wife has a Masters in Biotech and has presented in national conferences. Anyone has a good lead on where the next science hub would be? She is amazing at what she does, but the current status has her studying SWE so she can land a job, and that really kills me on the inside.
Honestly its been a long time coming. Acting as if academia and ivy leauge level research isn't incredibly sick is dishonest.
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.
the admin cuts funding by 40% ~ cutting something by 40% is bad for it ~ burning something down is an euphemism for acting on something in a way that's bad for it. what are you not following?
There was a lot of talk last year about Europe creating funds to attract US researchers burned by these cuts - I haven't heard much about that recently, but if it worked it could potentially have created/started a reverse brain-drain.
The US situation is mitigated by both Russia and China deciding to make massive, foolish maneuvers at the same time as ours. However neither can match how stupendously we are lighting our future on fire in every possible dimension.
China is undergoing a 2008 style financial crisis due to real estate speculation and deflation due to very weak domestic spending.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
Not at all what’s happening. China’s government privatized real estate and was the engine of the bubble by disallowing localities from taxing and only allowing revenues via land sales. See above how central planning in the CCP has forced massive debt upon localities.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
The citizens with real estate were the speculators. They gambled on being able to squeeze even more out of the next guy and they lost. In the US, we would just have taxed the kids (again) to bail out the homeowners (again). I have a hard time calling that more responsible.
Not is but the obvious one was COVID policy during 2020-2022. It triggered the closest thing to a domestic unrest you can get in China after 1989, a large exodus of middle class, and an almost 50% crash in their real estate market. The last one is very deadly and still ongoing because that is how China financed its growth for decades.
That would require making babies and not making mistakes. Humans are generally/historically better at the former, but these days both seem to be a challenge.
I don't see that happening. The US debt will hinder any big expense that could keep it in any game long term.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
> Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
It is absolutely a Chinese century. Even the comment above isn’t wrong per se - great power competition is normal during the interregnum, ie as Arrighi described it - one hegemon is rising while another is declining. But eventually one of them does rise and the world conforms to that - ie America in post WW2.
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.
Its not a static system. Things will swing back and forth like a pendulum. And through those oscillation we move forward. Diff today is everyone is getting their heads filled 24x7 with a whole lot of info their grandparents never had to digest about how the system moves.
The US has DOUBLE its current power production in proposed expansions, mostly solar and batteries. In 2004 it had like 20%. The US grid is set to grow.
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
Look at GDP growth in the US vs EU over the last 10 years or so if you want to talk about innovation. Europe has been stagnating economically and real productivity growth is critical to a modern economy. The large hadron collider does some impressive research, but it doesn't move the sort of innovation in practical machinery and infrastructure that powers a modern economy.
Google's research team invented the Transformer Architecture at the center of LLM "AI". A huge invention.
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.
Comparative GDP based on more current methods (well, decades too at this point) rather than the graphs you are probably seeing show a stable co-trend over the past quarter century.
As an European, yeah, we probably are doing really good with basic science, but what about innovation when it comes to productivity? Why there is no AI lab (apart from Mistral) in EU? Why there is no European model (and hasn't been probably ever) in the pareto fronteer? Or any other really innovative company in the last while (I believe Spotify was the last European unicorn that transformed the landscape in the market they operate into).
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
Fragmentation isn't really there in science and development, fragmented financing (basically the main point I'll cede) is being worked on, and markets will always have to deal with European diversity; we're not all going to speak English tomorrow and eat the same, dress the same, etc.
And kill the savings of what remains of the middle class. Probably they will do it though, as it is a slow thing and is not felt by the average Joe like a tax hike or loss of benefits. So the policians won't trigger an outrage by doing so.
hyperinflation is very fast, but I think they'll do it, by accident because they don't know how anything works, but I think it's impossible to accurately predict when.
Oh hey, a good faith argument. I thought about going and googling for more studies supporting my position, but I'm not sure if that actually has much of a point?
Maybe I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.
Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.
Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.
Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?
> "real" diversity of thought isn't allowed under globohomo. The goal, of course, is handouts for race communists and to further solidify communist control of political
For a Chinese century you'd need there to be anyone in China in a century. With the one child policy they have run out of young women and are running out of middle aged men. The Chinese, and Asian, population pyramids make Europe look young and vibrant.
(Biased) opinion is completely ignoring the crux of the issue! Cuts stemmed from the reproduction crisis, which is decades in the making. Politicians steering the field is a direct symptom from massive moral failures within. The bad apples have finally spoiled the entire harvest. Add-in the current administration's stupidity, with it's joy of heavy cuts everywhere, and the field becomes indefensible in the overall federal scope.
Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that.
But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.
From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.
[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
It is far worse than "this administration", the population in general are vastly undereducated, to the degree they do not even realize how serious this is.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
_Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater [0] talks about this too.
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.
Science, or more specific to what we're talking about, public research which happens mostly in universities, has turned political long before this administration.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
> realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
What happens right now is vastly different than before. Of course there are different priorities in funding for each administration, but those are usually more gradual shifts and especially don't cancel running grants arbitrarily.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
Just lies upon lies. Always the same weak rhetoric of "it's both sides!". The truth is that science didn't get more political, the right is just going in a direction orthogonal to material reality.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
A sociologist or historian who's funding has been cut all the same reads these comments, takes a drag of his cigarette and thinks to himself this all could have been avoided if they'd have paid attention to his field over the decades but deep down he knows that it was impossible all along.
The fact that people think the current state of chaos is a consequence of recent developments clearly tells us more about why it is in chaos than those types of people have the capacity to hear or understand.
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
Yeah, while it's particularly bad lately, I'm remembering Richard Hofstadter's book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", which one the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for tracing the religious, cultural, and economic roots of american anti-intellectualism.
Chaos is putting it mildly. It's on the verge of non-existence. Can't have infrastructure nor propensities for investigating truths when the administration's most vital interest is the ability to tell lies about anything and everything.
Complicated question... Do you have marketable skills that could land you a job in demand with a visa? Or sufficient savings to "buy" residency somewhere?
Scientific American is not the organization to be providing commentary on this as it is in the center of the maelstrom and often cited as an example of the cultural shift that preceded the backlash.
tbf I don't think Chinese citizens are faring any better than the West reporting on the ground, it's also possible there are numerous problems coalescing at the same time for humanity on a global scale.
Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
This will get downvoted to oblivion, but it's not obvious to me this shakeup is a bad thing.
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.
I think the core of the problem is a profound disrespect for the rule of law and competent leadership in this administration. This is an administration that does not believe in competence because it has never experienced it. It doesn't believe in laws because it thinks everyone is as corrupt and wicked as they are themselves. It doesn't believe in science because science doesn't produce evidence for the facts they've chosen to believe in.
That total R&D spending number is heavily private sector, and is often not what a normal person would consider research, as there is a tax incentive to identify activities as R&D.
That is certainly a massive increase in spending... Seems a bit hard to believe.
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).
I think there will come a day, shortly after the arrival of “AGI”, that people will declare all the useful science humanity could possibly do has already been done, and there is no need for scientific research anymore. We solved everything that could be solved.
Science will become purely for recreational purposes, maybe funded by millionaires, billionaires or even trillionaires looking for a specific set of outcomes.
>Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure.
"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.
Commenters are taking seriously an article that quotes the guy who was literally the lead author of Proximal Origins about the state of science. No matter what good points the article brings up elsewhere, this one act alone places its entirety in the trash for me.
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.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
This will not be a popular comment, and I love science and scientists. I have spent my career working with scientists and investing in science. But the research community as a whole has a credibility problem. Does this problem merit financial cutbacks? I can't say, but it sure makes the rhetoric and justifications easier for those doing the cutting.
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.
If there is a better way to hand the future to China on a platter, I honestly haven't seen it yet.
All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress.
But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.
I agree. Unfortunately there’s a well-established pattern of the new administration not rolling back most of the nonsense put in place by the previous administration. For example once you get addicted to the tariff revenues there’s not much will to roll them back.
The article buried the lede. DEI was the bridge too far that lit a massive tinderbox among the electorate who wanted the vast majority of what happened with DOGE, to happen. DEI was the appetizer, and once the teeth starting biting it found a lot more than anticipated (USAID). The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
> The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
Yeah, if only they had tried to appease the fascists harder and earlier. Thanks Nigel.
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
Am scientist.
We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
> This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).
Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!
Is China actually particularly interested in allowing non-Chinese foreigners to immigrate there ostensibly to do science but really so they can permanently settle in China and have children who are considered fully Chinese under law?
Yes. Myself and colleagues used to get outreach fairly regularly to join new faculty at universities trying to establish themselves in China. I'm in industry these days, but some of my colleagues report a significant uptick in these types of outreach over the past year.
I'm not the big Lebowski but this is the "opinion" of the majority of scientific societies in the US as well as watchdog organizations who have long followed science regulatory and spending action.
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.
Yeah, I mean it's bad in this really direct, near-term way. But we couldn't keep going the way we were going. It was insane. Pants-on-head retarded. And so my read, and my hope, is that this current period of trouble is the price for getting back on track. Treating truth as something that can be discovered. Funding people and ideas based on merit.
I mean...sucks bro. I can imagine that in much of science, where DEI and the wokeness is unrelated to the things you actually study, it was just lip service. And you were sometimes forced to hire idiots, I guess. But when you study human behavior, it's not just lip service - the DEI edicts, speech controls, etc. are about the things you study.
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
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
First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9.
What DOGE has actually struck is not the procurement budget for launch vehicles, but the destruction of the internal engineering capability to design them. The benefit of destroying that capability, in turn, greatly favors SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't want NASA to be a smart partner that builds its own rockets; it wants NASA to be nothing more than a giant wallet that just pays money.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
To be clear, DOGE's strategy is not actually for America.
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
> The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
It's genuinely amazing(ly depressing) how quickly and effectively "certain groups" can create enemies and whip up public sentiment to attack them and gain power because of it.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but he hasn't been part of this administration for a while. And also i'm not quite sure you have his views on NASA funding (one of his main customers) right, you're just making them up.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
No, this isn't correct. The Scopes Monkey Trial would like a word.
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
I mean, what's more important to you, discovering truths via scientific research and reports, or conforming to your political ideology? (or getting revenge for perceived attacks, I guess)
It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
> 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"??
You are 100% correct. The (horrible) abandoning of funding for these needed science projects is not science, but politics. My entire point. We need to try and bring these people back to reality not using science but persuasion/being politically intelligent in our speech with them, not dumb destructive (but feels good for a minute) Jon Stewart style belittling.
I never said half the country is irrational. I specifically called out that people in power do not care to live in a shared reality with the rest of us. They lie directly [1][2], or dismantle the institutions that would be able to push back on their lies [2][3]. Countless examples of this in the last few years.
I do think a non-trivial portion of the population has opinions that have unfortunately diverged from what a board of climate scientists or epidemiologist would say is the appropriate state of affairs, and yes this is a problem we all need to figure out how to correct.
Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel.
The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
Valuations are often an absurd fantasy. The notion is that Musk could find a buyer who would be willing to pay that based on the value of each share he owns. It’s not real money. He can borrow against it but not too much, and he will have to find a way of paying the lender back without selling stock. The money is not real.
If he dumped all of his shares the value of them would essentially go away, like with any commodity.
He gets to exercise power based on his valuation, and in that sense, it is real. He is now known as the world's richest person and first one point five trillionaire, even if he doesn't have one point five trillion dollar bills in his closet. He gets people to suck up to him for fractions of it - "do X for me and I'll give you shares worth a million"
No, no, they're definitely correct. There's no hard limit on the amount of money created. Excess money creation just results in inflation.
More to the point: Congress is being profligate in other spending, and miserly w.r.t. science, so it does indeed look like the science cuts are not motivated by fiscal responsibility.
Your quip about "basic economic theory" doesn't really address the point they're making.
Um, "basic economic theory" would include the processes that create money and the limits on them, which can be disabled, and what happens if the limits are disabled
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what had accumulated prior to ever electing him.
Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.
Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
Honestly, yes. I would expect that, or at least whichever party controls Congress to defund efforts that would seek to hurt them. The real abberation is that university funding has gone unscathed for so long. It's said too much and honestly I hate it, but consider the hypothetical: what if 80% of professors expounded right wing ideologies for about, 60 years? Would you not expect some kind of backlash?
Eh, I think there's a bit of a logical jump between "professors hate Trump" and "professors are expounding left-wing ideologies".
Yes, most professors are opposed to Trump. But when you're talking to a professor of, say, metallurgy, he's not using his classroom to rant against Trump. He's using his classroom to teach students about metallurgy, which is a pretty dang useful service to a modern industrial economy. Professor's personal political views aren't interfering with the economic and scientific value he's providing to the country.
Which is why the universities and research centers have largely been untouched until now. Until Trump, both sides could recognize that even if there was political disagreement between the professors and the politicians, the professors were still doing important work.
Trump took it personally, and on that personal basis he's now eroding our scientific and technological future. We're eating our seed corn, here.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I wonder who makes assumptions that these differences are marginal and refuse or deny any studies that conclude otherwise. The left version of climate change if you will.
You make a good point in that there are large, slow-moving, but statistically significant effects in climate change, gender, and race.
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.
What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites?
Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
> Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.
There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.
So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.
ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal
I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
> I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups
I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.
> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.
It’s not suppressed though, it’s just that the current evidence points in one way and much less in the other. There are plenty of review papers you can read to see how people weigh the evidence which you can of course disagree with:
https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)00678-r
No matter how noble your intentions are, if you reject science then you're anti-science. Leftists need to learn to admit that about themselves instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too.
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
Yes, the current pushback is crude.
Yes, real science is being damaged.
Yes, the people doing it are often stupid or vindictive.
Also yes, the academy helped create the conditions for this.
Also yes, almost nobody inside the system had the courage to object when the incentives favored them.
Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.
I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah
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.
> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented
Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.
> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.
---
It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.
Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.
Let's not pretend like research funding was money well spent before Trump. It wasn't. If tax payers actually knew how research funding works in practice, they wouldn't want any of their tax dollars to be spent on it.
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.
US Science needed this. Racism, sexism, plagiarism, and fraud were rampant in the academic community. It's going to take a long time to fully fix the problem, but we are on the right path currently.
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.
This should apply to politics and industry as well then, in your opinion? Cut all subsidies for industries that commit fraud, research or otherwise, like the oil giants for example? No pardons for cryptocurrency Ceo's like CZ and shutdown cryptocurrency?
I am saying it's one of many examples of which I personally experienced and those I know have also experienced.
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.
You are willfully blind if you do not think those have been major and prevailing issues in our insitutions. To kill a virus, it can take drastic measures, like a fever. But after it's over, the host recovers and is once again healthy
> How did we get here?
Careful what you wish for, that’s how.
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?
“Science is not a process, a credential, or an institution.
It is the unflinching pursuit of truth, carried out by the few, co-opted by the many.”
When did we start institutionalizing it? How about letting the truth be bent? What about the focus on consensus? That’s also what lead to the current situation.
This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get funding, something that is unacceptable.
You know what is detached from reality? Reading a comment criticizing Zionists, and somehow interpreting it as some long running stereotype about Jewish people, which the comment never mentioned. It's hard to believe that people are still doing this pearl clutching in 2026. Most Zionists are Christians, and a large portion of them, including the US Ambassador to Israel, believe in the Rapture. Connect those dots.
I don't think you're going to win much sympathy when you've demonstrated you can't distinguish between generically "jews" and "Israel."
You can hate the genocidal Israelis and how far the AIPAC/Israel lobby has crawled up the ass of nearly the entire US political apparatus without being a neo-nazi that wants to stomp out the Jewish faith.
Private enterprise is vastly more competitive than public institutions in every single facet of society. Defund all public science funding so we can have another 50 SpaceXs.
The government can't fund everything. Too much of the budget is tied up in transfer and interest payments squeezing out other more viable research. The federal government doesn't have unlimited funds. Something has to give.
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?
I know it's fashionable to say stuff like this, but you know what's also a rounding error by that logic? THE SCIENTIFIC GRANTS WE'RE DISCUSSING.
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?
Perhaps it could. And perhaps you think erecting tents on the White House grounds for state events, like a third world country, is okay as well. The government funds a ridiculous amount of "science", some of which has no utility. That's not the government's role. These types of projects can be funded by the university or private industry or not at all. Being a "scientist" and wanting to research some idea DOES NOT entitle you to taxpayer funding. Again, as I and others here have noted, the money is in interest, defense, and transfer payments. Personally, I'd like to see reforms on all social programs. If one is capable of working, then they work. Until you live somewhere that has a thriving economy in government money and see the abuse, you have no idea what you're talking about. Should government money be used to buy booze? Potato chips? I assure you that it happens everyday. I've seen it first hand. So fix the social programs and then we'll talk about funding fringe science research. And let's quit funding the 120+ foreign biolabs doing DOF research. We've seen that script before.
I agree with all of that but you don't put a dent in spending outside of tackling ICE budget. TSA is more neutral since a lot of funding from that comes from airline ticket fees.
These counter arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't sound like left wing talking points. No one on this thread nor in the media knows the reality of what happened in Iraq. That most here dislike Trump, I get it. But, to pretend that this administration is somehow behaving differently than others in the past is ahistorical and disingenuous at best.
You’ll get downvoted to hell for this comment but it’s a legitimate concern, especially as Europe throws more of its money into socialist nonsense. It’s time for Europe to start picking up more of the tab, NATO included.
Last year, the mood in my field, that has been relatively isolated from many of these impacts, was still very "these are uncomfortable times, but it's still possible to pull through".
Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more established scientists are maintaining backup options.
I too have re-evaluated my feelings and decided that while I am not yet at the point of actively looking to leave the US, besides the hassle of moving itself, I would be fine with having to do so.
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I do not agree. What do you mean by EU focuses on gender studies?
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.
Simpletons need their labels to handle complexity. Claiming gender stuff is a no-go, when picking a place and field of research is obviously moronic.
Putting aside all the other things I could point out, my field is one where all the major players are roughly on par.
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.
My own experience during my PhD was that a few, if any, PI cared about your growth as a scientist. All they cared about was progress on their project which sometimes are the same. Most of the time they are not.
Admittedly I have had the luck of a very good PI, and then a very good lab to work at.
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.
> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
I’m very familiar with the evangelical types who are running the federal government right now. Anything that doesn’t support the claim that the earth is only 5000 years old is considered a partisan issue to these fuckers.
While this is a good long-term heuristic, I'd describe the upper rungs of government as more cynical on matters of science and theology than a typical fundie.
The only relevant difference is that you might be able to push it back a bit on "strategic interest" types of arguments
It seems like they did all this to please Elon Musk and advantage SpaceX. The people at the top are nihilists. They don't even believe the things they say.
They would fund research to promote redshift and suppress blueshift.
The scientists need to market their research to exploit the biases of the administration. Sad that it's come to this.
It certainly is when people are typing the word "black" into the search field when deciding what programs need to be cut...
To be honest, research funding turned stupid before DOGE. I remember talking a guy who was struggling to write the mandatory diversity statement for a grant in quantum computing.
Whatever diversity sections were required in grant proposals are nothing compared to the situation right now.
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
It's every time with these freaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294782
Why attach this stuff to every grant? This guy was dealing was dealing cutting edge research using multi million dollar equipment. Stuff only a few people world wide know about. That’s difficult enough.
This leads to purely performative diversity statements that mean nothing in the real world.
Seriously. I hope everyone understands that this literally happened at a massive scale. So many projects were killed simply because the project name had a word on the banned words list. The idiots at doge and elsewhere have simply ctrl+f searched "woke" terms and ended projects without the faintest idea of what they were killing. All in the name of saving negative federal dollars.
Not to mention the petroleum industry funding anti climate change "science" for the past 50 years.
And the real partisan question is ”should the US fund studying the black holes”, not the actual science question
Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
> What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
Creationists.
>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
I was raised in a working-class family in Greece in the 1980s. We lived in what the average US person would describe as "squalor". Cockroaches crawling on our faces style.
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.
What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.
Meanwhile a substantial fraction of science research goes into improving the efficiency of farming, which pushes down food prices.
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
Yeah, that's the point I was making; not that those people shouldn't be interested in science funding, but that when you're in that position you're going to end up voting for whoever promises you lower taxes etc. (regardless of whether those promises end up being just hot air).
It's especially interesting because prior to the time of the election, the administration approved food funding to states that GOP run states rejected.
Sure, and it's a huge indictment of our K-12 educational system. Investments in science, as a whole, pay off many, many, many times in returns. Same with universities and other knowledge-building institutions. If you want to raise everyone's standard of living, the most certain way is to increase investment in those things.
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.
> A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
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.
Well it’s not like the budget cuts to science are being redirected to those people. It’s going to the already rich.
I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.
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.
This implies that the money saved by cutting research was fungible and not part of a still increasing deficit, that the government doesn't debt spend, and that there aren't positive externalities (including jobs, education, and supporting services in addition to outcomes from the research.
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.
I thought we all learned our lesson from DOGE. These savings don’t go to you, bubba. There is no check.
Plenty of poor people across the world have scientific curiosity
stupidest response. There are tons of gov waste that's 100 times more expensive, less effective without any returns. Wars are lot more expensive, net negative for common folks (positive for war machinery though..) And out of all this, you would steal money from research and put it to put food on table? :(
> What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who is certain they already know the answer.
A person who’s been told all the people doing the science look down on them. Partially true, too, based on how I’ve heard people talk about ”dumb redneck trump voters”
That's a form of collective punishment that rewards their stigma. It would be like revoking tax breaks for farmers because you dislike rural American voters.
I’m pretty for revoking tax breaks and subsidies from farmers since they tend to always complain about welfare queens while they have their hand out.
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've actually heard suggestions to do that, at least.
I spent nearly a decade disgusted with Trump but being contrarian by insisting that it was understandable why voters might support it, even if I felt they were wrong.
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.
But they should still give you money to run your studies?
Well, yes, they should be not-backwards.
If you cut funding for helpful science on the basis of ignorant claims, you're acting backwards. If you act backwards, you may get called backwards.
You should still change, become not-backwards, and fund science.
That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.
Like this from the article:
> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”
If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.
My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.
> If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes?
A society where funding depends on a person's political position doesn't sound free.
The better question is: Why is it that when republicans hear the word "racism" they immediately think people are talking about them? Are they afraid of what research on racism will show?
No that's a more partisan one, and is exactly the sort of thing OP was arguing against. If you want broad based support for research funding you will necessarily need support from a lot of people you personally find distasteful. You can either try to appeal to people across the spectrum and keep bipartisan support, or label half the country racist and deal with the resulting backlash.
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.
I don't understand. We shouldn't research whether institutional racism is causing problems? Because Republicans don't want it to be true? Is that the claim, or am I confused about what you are saying?
Part of the issue here is that the academy has lost the trust of Republicans. So even if there are results that institutional racism is a significant factor, if it's coming from someone who is "woke" in their views it'll just be dismissed. To them it feels like using their tax dollars to fund someone who is going to skew results so they have a club to beat them with. And a big part of the reason they've lost trust is that the academy doesn't acknowledge when it's being political (see "reality has a liberal bias" in this thread or your frame here, for that matter).
The way science is supposed to work, it doesn't matter who is doing the study. Anybody can read the resulting paper and see whether the conclusions are supported by the data. That's what science is. Saying they don't trust science is a pretty heavy indictment that they have lost their way. What are they proposing to replace science with, vibes?
You're portraying Republicans as fundamentally intellectually dishonest people.
I'm not one to argue.
> I don't understand. We shouldn't research whether institutional racism is causing problems?
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.
I will have a stab at legitimately explaining the viewpoint you profess not to understand.
"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?".
You have misunderstood what structural racism is. It is not about the majority of people being racist. Is about the systems being constructed in ways that lead to racist outcomes. You can have a society with zero racist individuals and if they continue to enact the racist systems (perhaps created by racist folks long dead) you'll have structural racism. I don't disagree with the idea that the mis-understanding you have is widespread though, and would certainly be a cause for folks not being comfortable with the idea (as they have mis-understood it).
I compare it basketball. Due to the goal being 10ft in the air, it structurally biased against shorter people. You don’t need actually size-ist for it to exist. It’s just inherent to how the system of rules are constructed
It's so disappointing that you have made the mistake of thinking that those two possibilities listed cover the entire set of possibilities.
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.
> or label half the country racist and deal with the resulting backlash.
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.
It's not propaganda, it's all the normal people on the left in my life who have in the last 5-6 years started calling anyone to their right on social justice issues racist. You're doing a lesser form of it here with "Clearly, nakedly something that anyone with a decent moral compass..." That makes a moral issue out of something that's clearly within the realm of politics in a healthy society (where to direct tax dollars). It's perfectly reasonable to think that I'd rather have slightly higher dollars spent on Medicaid funding than do that research study. If you agree with that, then it's clearly a political question, not a moral one.
Sounds quite reasonable when you put it that way, but unfortunately the entire domain of such research has been demonized and turned into a right wing meme, essentially disqualifying any such research from being funded at all. “DEI” is a rhetorical hammer and any funding for research that involves equity is the porcelain that the hammer is smashing.
So it’s no longer about whether we allocate funding to this or that, as a political compromise, it’s about the culture war.
It seems like those leftists have largely been proven correct.
Of course it's propaganda--the product of moneyed interests, as he said. It's ignorant, irrational, and dishonest to deny it. (And the rest of your comment here, and comments here, are in the same basket.) The statement was "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”" and then you immediately respond with exactly that claim.
It's not those on the left who are the baddies. The statement here was about those on the right using "DEI" to institutionalize bigotry. And it was a response to blatant lies like "label half the country racist".
And masking immorality and blatant bigotry as "politics" is a common "conservative" ploy. Of course "the effects of nuclear weapons testing on the lands and livelihoods of indigenous peoples" is prima facie a moral issue--nakedly, as he said.
Elsewhere you claim that
> Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus
It seems that there's nothing you won't lie about.
But enough wallowing in the mud with ____ ... I won't respond further.
Agree that asking for grants requires compromises.
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.
Alternatively, they've already decided that everyone who works in the field is biased, or close enough, that it's better to just burn it all down.
And, yes, this overlooks the times when conservative scientists like Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus and then come up with the exact same results, but... that's not considered important when they have so many other "examples" of "liberal science".
I know that ultimately, there isn't really any space for 'conservative science' in climate. Either they do bad science, so it's not really 'science', or they do good science and come up with the same 'liberal' answers. But I don't think conservatives have figured this out yet; they're still convinced that good science will prove them right.
> SDoH
= Social Determinants of Health
"If you're an irrational racist sociopath, why should you want to fund people who undermine your baseless claims?"
lol, are you implying science is dying because, you believe, less and less scientists are “conservative”. Do you have any notion of how ridiculous that sounds?
I'm not implying I'm stating that if you depending on the tax base of the entire country to pay your bills you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties.
> you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties
I'm not sure that that's possible. If someone is motivated by religion or finance to believe something that's simply not true, and your scientific evidence contradicts them, there's a fundamental misalignment. They won't support you, because the real-world evidence contradicts their beliefs, and you're bringing more real-world evidence.
On issues of climate change, evolution, age of the universe, etc., the hard science just straight up disagrees with conservatives. I don't see a way around that.
But one of the parties is explicitly anti-science. Are you seeing the problem?
The reason there’s no conservatives in science, or startlingly little conservatives in education as a whole, is because they’re incompatible ideologies. It’s like asking why there aren’t more polar bears in the rain forest.
This is a fictitious scenario invented to make the conservatives the victims… when they are the ones in power, killing the science. No amount of mental gymnastics trumps that fact
How about a reframe: When they are the ones in power, cutting funding to organizations that support their political opponents and goals they don't support.
I'll be the first to say this is a bad thing AND that they're going about it stupidly. But I'm also saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage your stakeholders over a period of decades.
Better framing indeed, I agree. Not sure this was a predictable outcome though, the sheer stupidity of defunding existing science projects based on politics is mind boggling. How do you hedge against capricious self sabotage like this?
Read this guy's other comments, like
> Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus
He's a dishonest con through and through.
If you know only your own position, you know little of even that.
I’m not convinced academia purged itself, at least not in any way that they should be ashamed of. Reality has a liberal bias, and my extremely conservative uncle at one point mentioned how he didn’t want his kids to go to college, because college turns kids atheist. Actually, learning things opens your mind, and so the standard conservative positions come off looking pretty stupid after critical examination, so conservativism (i.e. dogmatism) and learning are inherently at odds. Falsifying or omitting things just to suit the feelings of conservatives is wrong, even if the alternative is to “purge them” from academia by making their stupidity unwelcome.
Do you have any idea how smug this sounds to about half the people that need to pay for the scientific funding? I'm not a Republican, but even I'm turned off by this sort of attitude.
It's easy to offend them without even trying. Every day they find something absolutely absurd to be inflamed about. We should know when it's beyond sanity to try to pander to some persons.
Wouldn't want to research anything that might make someone question their beliefs. What you are saying doesn't sound like any kind of science I'm familiar with.
The guy claims that Richard Muller disproved the mainstream consensus of climate science. I don't think his claim of not being a Republican is credible.
I stopped caring about hurting the feelings of conservatives when they started intentionally fucking over everyone just to make liberals mad. Catering to their stupidity is called appeasement, and just ask the Europeans how that works out.
When someone is skeptical and wants ask questions, it's reasonable to hear them out. When said person fails to listen or accept basic facts (that allow establishing a shared reality), we should turn the volume down on them.
If Tommy, age 7, asks if the Earth is round, teachers should explain how we know the Earth is round and give Tommy a couple of ways to check. When Tommy comes back at age 27, having done no experiments, convinced the Earth is flat, and alleging a massive global conspiracy to hide that fact for domination, we should ignore Tommy. If Tommy persists, the amount of embarrassment and shame they face should be proportional to how loud they are.
Conservatives are the ones calling for fuck the feelings, why are they themselves so emotionally weak and always making an emotional ruckus at everything.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they thought it was a DEI thing.
If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.
This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.
> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is exactly the kind of expertise and competence we have in the Administration right now. It is totally believable that they would do a substring search for "black" and "trans" and defund black hole research and transistor science.
It is a little impressive how actively bad they are at this.
I haven't had that much respect for Elon since he called the cave diver a pedophile, but something I didn't realize until the 2025 administration started is how lazy everyone involved with it is. As far as I can tell, no one in that administration has, at any point in their life, ever examined any of their own opinions or actions, or looked up the "why" of any of the programs that they declared as "wasteful".
That or they're just idiots. Tough to say.
They have said in depositions that they just did substring searches or fed lists to chat gpt, it’s not even a question.
The real "partisan" question is, "What can the GOP leadership and their owners loot without immediate negative consequences for themselves?"
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> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
I don't think requiring prospective hires to write a DEI statement is equally as political as illegally cancelling already funded and approved research into e.g. racial disparities in maternal mortality, or health equity gaps for rural Americans (yes, it's DEI even if it's for predominantly white people).
It's not just research into things like that. As I mentioned elsewhere, one of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response". Someone replied saying theirs was canceled for "mineral inclusion". There are thousands of things like this. It's not about DEI, it's about getting rid of science, because science is at odds with their view of the US.
Legality is orthogonal to politicality.
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People that view DEI like this are incredibly lost. The vast majority of cases of DEI initiatives are so tame, and nothing like they are portrayed as. "Pledge allegiance to the left" come on be real. The modern conservative movement is so unserious.
I don’t like grading / judging / factoring skin color for anyone for any reason. I don’t think it matters how tame it is.
Please, please take a break from Fox News. This is so detached from reality it’s actually frightening.
I've never once turned on Fox News, but I have been in elite academia and I'm sorry to say the person you're replying to is dead on.
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.
> forcing prospective academics to pledge alegiance to the American woke left
This is utter fantasy.
You are making a completely separate argument.
So now we just require them to pledge allegiance to Trump instead.
No, there is no such requirement.
There is, they just hide it behind things like "Do you believe a president can have more than 2 terms?"
No university requires you to declare support for that belief.
It's not odd. If the institution of it is political, the removal of it is therefore also political.
It is not, however, based on who can claim to be the biggest victim. It is based on a simple statistical analysis of demographics.
In a previous project I ended up talking with a scientist who couldn't shut up about how she was 1/4th Indigenous and how many grants that could open for our collaboration.
If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany. That someone was doing this in 2022 was extremely off-putting. That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
> If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany.
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.
You're right nihilism is a never a productive reaction to have, but I find it a bit tone deaf to say it now after the past 10 years of ever increasing partisan capture of science agencies.
If being apathetic to a broken system makes you Nazi, what would be a better approach to the problem outlined by the person you were responding to? How would you keep political agents out of science institutions?
Someone once talked to a scientist who wouldn't shut up about how they could use their, let's call it privilege at this point, to help them both (use it for their collaboration), and now they are happy with seeing all science burn? Because that situation was like the 1930s Germany? Yeah no. And US science isn't getting less political with Christian fundamentalists and kleptocrats dismantling as much as they can as quickly as they can, so complaining about the previous situation more than the current one might be projection.
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If you cannot read, why write?
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So what, you think no one should study the conditions that lead to the rise of fascism? Kind of a wild take in today's world
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Imagine that your people had the land you'd been living on for countless generations invaded, taken from them after a bloody campaign, where the survivors were forced into poverty in concentration camps, where they could not leave, where many women had their fallopian tubes tied without even their knowledge, where children were beaten for speaking their language, where they were intentionally and deliberately kept in structural poverty for generations, and other horrors.
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?
>Imagine that your people had the land you'd been living on for countless generations invaded, taken from them after a bloody campaign, where the survivors were forced into poverty in concentration camps, where they could not leave, where many women had their fallopian tubes tied without even their knowledge, where children were beaten for speaking their language, where they were intentionally and deliberately kept in structural poverty for generations, and other horrors.
Yes, it's terrible what the English did in Ireland.
I think you can easily turn this around: scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment, DEI statements, and other practices that half of the country despises are saying that it's better to do no science at all than to set those divisive practices aside and just do science.
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.
This group of people you're describing ("scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment") is simply not real. The idea that academics would cling to DEI statements or refuse funding is beyond laughable, and could only be dreamt up by someone who has never experienced academia.
It happened directly at least once: https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-college-first-de...
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.
Williams College wasn't content to blindly follow a vague directive restricting their speech. They already received very few grants as the article said. You better bet most scientists at big institutions were tripping over themselves to police their own speech to ensure they aren't uttering any of the new forbidden words like "engender."
> These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.
Yes, some people have egalitarian principles. As much as you think there is a conspiracy against your group to keep you down it's just not true.
The French, who have "égalité" in their national motto, prohibit the kind of demographic tracking and reporting that US Progressives consider core to their project. Do you think the French don't care about egalitarianism? No, they just have a different concept of what that means. Just like many Americans.
Academics could broaden their horizons and consider the possibility that there are multiple perspectives on egalitarianism, and that the public that funds them is quite split on the issue. If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues. But I guess it's more fun to preach and condescend to people who disagree, and then complain when those people don't want to fund your enterprise anymore.
Your motte-and-bailey argumentation here is extremely tiring, and I'd encourage you to take a step back and look at what's being discussed here.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost...
US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.
> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.
Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_
No I don’t support any kind of assistance for the descendants of Holocaust victims. Yes, of course the Holocaust was a vile disgrace, but it was almost a century ago. At some point you have to draw a line under it and allow the descendants — who in many cases never knew the relevant ancestors — to live their own lives.
Up until Trump2, Ivy League schools were gaming the system to limit Asian students… but how could they, the Japanese-American internment camps weren’t that long ago.
The statistical analysis is step one, but those stats are (or were?) used as proxies for quantifying a persons victimhood. I dont actually think "victim" is quite the right word here, but the OP used it and it fits well enough.
Framing what's happening as simply 'removal of DEI' is horrifically out of touch with reality.
Correct. But not understanding how DEI drove a huge wedge into science (or at least its politics and institutions), and is actually a large component of the underlying rift, is just as horrifically out of touch with reality. The current crisis can be largely laid at the feet of the people who prioritized DEI over everything else, with utter contempt for opposing opinions. The current crisis is just the backlash.
Just having keywords associated with DEI could get a project defunded. Thee government isn't just defunding liberal projects. Look at the millions being thrown out on ocean monitoring because the Trump admin thinks global warming isnt a problem if you don't monitor it.
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Citation needed.
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).
Not about quotas? It's pretty well-known that the DEI committees don't review the statements blindly and somehow manage to choose people with the skin color they want.
For instance, in the past Berkeley's DEI committee let only 13.6% of the white people onto the short list for Bio professorships in one application cycle. And said that this was a "positive change". So, yes, we know about this because the people in the DEI committee wanted to brag about it.
This report is gone from the web now, but here's an archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221006090551/https://ofew.berk...
How the fuck are ocean buoys based on skin color?
I don't think DEI was political until Trump made it a dog whistle for white nationalism? Insofar as Trump platformed white nationalists, I suppose it's political, but you are confusing the causality.
> DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
Disagree. This is just defaulting to "it makes one of the political poles angry, it must be political".
DEI isn't about achieving or gaining political power for "the left", but anti-DEI is absolutely about gaining political power for the right-wing reactionaries.
DEI didn't just come from nowhere. Data supports the idea that groups with more diversity and representation are not only more fair, but also more efficient and robust. The point of DEI was to make our systems stronger by helping everyone participate. That means addressing structural problems that discourage and even prevent many people from participating. DEI didn't just come about because they wanted to see fewer white faces and more brown faces. It's actually based on Science!
There are just too many right-wing reactionaries, and as a society we humor them too much! Everything feels threatening to right wing reactionaries. They're afraid of vaccines for fuck sake! They believe that "DEI = hating white people". Learning new things threatens the cultivated ignorance that keeps their political masters able to control them, which is ironic because the little house cats think they they are lions.
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> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.
If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
True, also very precarious and unstable. It is now common not to get a long-term contract until your 40s.
Given the massive pay gap with industry and scarce funding, it's natural lots of innovation has shifted to industrial labs.
In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.
Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not.
In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law.
European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of.
Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them.
I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire.
The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.
As far as I remember, from when I was closer to academia, in NL postdocs had to be offered a permanent contract after 3 temporary contracts, with a maximum of 1 year per temporary contract, or something like that. I believe this wasn’t exclusive to postdocs and it is a general law for most professions.
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.
One of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response".
Whoops, keyword match.
We had one that mentioned "mineral inclusion".
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In the US, sure.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
As a leading exporter of coal Australia isn't really a good example of a serious climate actor.
Australia has the highest number of solar panels per capita in the world. Australia has extremely high uptake on EV's given the cheap solar.
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.
Australia's a good example of a country that sells out its resources for a pittance NSR in exchange.
We can talk about Indian coal companies (Thermal), global steel demand (Metallurgical), US natural gas extractors, etc.
Still, at least we have the vast areas untouched by modern man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww
Is that better than the US response? By the time the Royal Commission started, the total amount the Catholic Church in the US had paid out was approaching a billion dollars (back when a billion dollars could buy you instagram). Dioceses have continued to pay since then and many had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US.
That seems like a more severe response than a single cardinal getting arrested.
The comment I responded to seemed to imply that the US was hung between two paths and took no action.
I'm pleased to hear a response was made and hope Eddy_Viscosity2 sees your comment.
There were consequences, but only eventually as the depravity of what was happening became ever more apparent as the list of victims willing to speak out grew.
But in all the places this was happening, it was an open secret that it was happening for years before any meaningful response occurred. The first victims to speak out were not believed and even punished for how dare they accuse the holy priests of such behavior.
Will we see a similar tipping point for climate change where people on mass begin facing the issue head on? It hasn't happened yet.
I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
You're being downvoted, probably for being abrasive, but I agree with your overall point.
When I was younger and more naive, this > "the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient") i
is what I thought (american) politics meant. When people talked about things being political or arguments related thereto, this is what I imagined happening.
Then I grew older and saw it was mostly people whining about gays getting married or who was allowed to have an abortion or what activities minorities were allowed to participate in.
Very depressing, frankly.
Thank you, I don't care about some meaningless points here. Its often tough to be a critically thinking person in a crowd of folks who coast life deep in comfort zone who want quick convenient 'truths' and frequent dopamine kicks and couldn't care less about some higher or deeper concepts.
It's important to note that the US has the largest number of Protestants (across all denominations) among all countries.
It’s true. In the US reality itself has become controversial. Maybe the oligarchs’ lies are just as valid as objective reality? Who can say!
Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.
Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
After Vietnam, many accessibility features for folks in wheelchairs were mandated, this also favours the bicycle.
Grades in America are excellent for cycling. If you a mere mortal, going over an Alp in Europe will take all day and leave you pretty much unable to do much the following day. Meanwhile, in the USA, you can cycle over the major mountain ranges with considerable ease, when compared to the Alps.
Grid patterns are also most welcome on a bicycle. I know suburban McMansion land doesn't have grids, and getting lost in those places is cycling hell because the houses all look the same, however, Big Auto made these absurd developments possible, along with some white flight from cities where the black man dared to move to.
As for long distance commutes, what a waste. And for what? Many service sector jobs just don't warrant people driving two hours each way just to earn a crust. It all comes at a cost to community.
Although there is cradle to grave car dependency in the USA, one true fact about American people is that they are the best when it comes to hospitality. This matters on a bicycle and, sadly, in Europe, there just isn't the same hospitality.
All considered, warts and all, America is excellent for cycling, at least in the nine Westernmost states. The roads generally come with a handy 'edge' which serves as a cycle lane and the people are fab.
Bring back the streetcar, the broadway railways and Main Street. Kick the corporations to the kerb and the job is a good one. The richest country in the world got to the moon many decades ago. The roads already exist, the space for railways exists, what doesn't exist is the mindset, which has been reduced to cradle-to-grave car dependency.
> Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
where?
AMERICA.
> Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all?
There exist societies that have made different choices.
The car dependency isn't an act of God.
Yes, societies have made different choices over the course of 100+ years. How do you suggest a city like say, LA is fixed? What is a commuter from dayton ohio to cincinnati supposed to do?
The gp comment made it sound like something americans just choose, when the reality of the situation is it is a necessary part of life. The people participating in it didn’t make this choice. Literally everyone wants something better and no one wants to be beholden to $6 gas prices.
They do choose it though. Infra policies and budget allocations don’t just grow on trees. Every decision that got us here has been “chosen by Americans”.
LA could be fixed incrementally by improving frequency, signal priority, and dedicated lanes for buses. Then go from there, but technically there’s enough right of way to build out the rail network by sacrificing the monstrous car network.
The reality is that there will be short-term inconvenience for long-term gain, and it will only get worse the deeper we dig our heels in. And if there’s one thing that Americans hate: it’s short-term inconvenience.
Voters certainly don’t choose it. This is chosen by unelected councils appointed by representatives with motives not driven by the same motives as voters. What is to be done about that?
Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.
Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline.
If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
The anti-science right was a lot easier to ignore when they weren't actually ripping apart the US scientific apparatus, yes. How is that remotely demonstrative of a conspiracy?
> Scientific interest didn't magically change the day Trump took office. What did was the economic realities of scientists in the USA. The character of the wheeping and gnashing of teeth from the scientific community took on a new flavor once the bread source appeared in peril.
Sure, but again, this misses the point. Regardless of how conservatives talk about science, if Congress keeps on broadly funding research, then scientists can fairly focus on actions over words. It's only when Congress cuts funding that we're forced to reckon with the fact that most Americans don't actually prioritize science.
So: yes, it's the funding cuts that cause the frustration and sadness. But not because this results in a personal job loss, but because this shows how our country is going downhill.
Speaking personally, two of my siblings took government buyouts, but still then moved out of the country. You can be ok with your own personal job loss (particularly when it comes with a fat check), but unhappy with the direction the country is going.
It's kinda weird that you keep making this about the impact to personal finances, rather than the impact to principles. Wouldn't you feel frustration and disappointment if your homeland was acting contrary to your principles?
A lot of the people affected are people who want to leave their homelands and be in the US instead. So they were already putting up with their homelands acting contrary to their principles.
What a wonderful example of why we need more scientific education in this country, not less.
It is often hard to put an economic value on research in general. That makes the whole "labor market" highly different from the rest of the world.
GP is saying everyone should bend the knee to the power of the dollar, not that they care about a nuanced understanding of the world.
It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.
And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
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If the bible cited even 1/1000th as many studies and experiments as the IPCC Reports, it would be a very different book.
> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.
If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:
1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it
2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.
These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!
Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.
Interestingly, the IPCC reports themselves (not the summaries for policymakers) are quite optimistic. IIRC something like, if we do nothing to abate emissions, climate damages in 2100 will cause damage equivalent to ~3% of GDP per year. (With GDP being many times higher than now per capita). Hardly a catastrophic prediction!
I know, right? They bend over backwards to not be "alarmist," even perhaps a bit more than they should. But of course this wins them zero credit from their political opponents, which is an important lesson about politics: seeking middle ground with someone bent on destroying you is a fool's errand.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. The summary for policymakers they produce is incredibly alarmist compared to what their actual reports predict.
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On one hand we have the IPCC with concrete claims, detailed explanations, piles of survey papers expanding the details, and piles of novel and confirming work behind each survey.
On the other we have adornKey, with vague accusations and smack talk that feel like they came from a LLM, still stuck at gate #1. Sad.
> The IPCC has been in defensive mode for a few years now. They made claims that absolutely made no sense and haven't answered to obvious criticism for years now. Only now they are very slow in backpedalling. Why should anyone still trust them? You can read IPCC reports all day long - if they still contain obvious flaws - it's not going to impress... If you check related websites you find a lot of propaganda - and very little science. They stopped caring about using arguments years ago. I looked for science there and only found low quality rubbish.
> The only thing going for them is the argument from authority. But once you know people in academia this doesn't work any more. I personally know a climate scientists (he published 40 papers). He showed a lot of signs of mental issues - most likely he is completely nuts - From experience I've seen that competent guys don't go to work in academia - it's mostly a cargo cult society for guys from the 2nd and 3rd intellectual league. Just look at them - I've seen more religious nuts and real flat-earthers there than anywhere else. I know a lot of guys in academia and even the most sane one is still leading the UFO-club...
Thank goodness honest citizens like "AdornKey" are around to pinpoint the precise reasons why the international community of climate scientists are crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant. I am certainly glad that "AdornKey" made this laser-focused contribution to my understanding.
While I wouldn't argue that academia is "crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant", I would absolutely argue that they are ideologically homogenous. The whole community is rife with political signaling and affinity groups.
Please refrain from personal attacks.
Does "he started it" count?
> It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics. Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled
Wat
I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.
I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.
This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.
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This is really vague.
Are you saying that some of the commonly-accepted science is significantly incorrect? If so, which parts?
> nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.
I’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.
It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
Not only that but with somewhat less fervor those having fairly strong faith in superstition really add up after a while too.
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.
By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist?
Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis?
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
Climate change denialist or alarmist is labeling. You belive in something and other don't.
Your arrogance to opposite opinion does not bring anything new to dialogue.
Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits.
I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
I asked a simple question. Your conclusions just proove how religious topic it could be for some. You completely ignorong a point and talk about your dogmatic opinion. Insulting others that not even agree/disagree with your pushed opinion does not makes you right.
Being right makes me right.
You don't even have a point? Besides a strawman argument about non-existent religious climate alarmists. There's nothing to ignore.
I have no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. You're either a bad faith troll or you're an idiot.
dude make an argument or dont, this kind of half assed "I know something but the man won't let me talk about it" is annoying and useless.
He’s probably a bot or paid to post misinformation to muddy the waters. The topic is highly financially charged despite overwhelming evidence on one side.
You’re clearly referring to something specific, what is it?
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the experimental framework for finding out absorption spectra goes back like 100 years and is basically high school level science. not only that, we have quantum chemistry models that predict empirical results from atomic configurations that are 20+ years old and match that empirical data to a very high level of accurany. there is plenty of ambiguity to attack in climate modeling, but you chose the most settled and fundamental thing to poke at.
make the argument explicitly. Here, I'll do it for you: doubling co2 levels should only lead to a 1c increase in temperature (~3w/m2 extra forcing).
That ignores all the other things that happen besides co2 forcing alone.
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You have no numbers at all, and your complaint is that lakhim's aren't exact?
One example is that whenever patents expire on some refrigerants or related process somehow magically at that same exact moment Dupont or other chemical IP behemoth magically find a new one safe for the ozone, the science magically all aligns at that moment, and congress/EPA finds the time to change the law before one iota of generic industry can squeeze out.
I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.
The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
>The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.
>Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.
This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.
> defending politicians as customers of scientists
I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.
> ... demanding politically convenient science.
and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.
> ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.
There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.
> What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts
The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."
> I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists
You can restate the ideology over and over. It doesn't change reality. There are many parties involved. I have agency as well. It's all very pedestrian to be reductive, but it's not compelling.
>You can state the ideology over and over.
This is rich considering it's the first time I stated it in this particular sub thread as the person I responded to was both too chickenshit to quote what I said or respond directly where I said it because it would betray that their portrayal was bad faith and full of shit.
The "reality" check, in fact, is coming for the scientists who are still suspending belief that they too were not better than the plebs who could be shit-canned in a millisecond by the whims of the "parties" involved (but muh reductive portroyal! Also science is in chaos!) and have to go on a "pedestrian" and "reductive" mission to use their "agency" to find a new "party."
Time to face the music, "scientists."
More noise. Lovely. Do you think how often you say something has any bearing on a base assumption from which all your conclusions are drawn, is not an ideology? Oh boy.
Of course not, go "make noise" about science being in "chaos", say it a lot. The "scientists" seem to have no problem saying the shock of their plight over and over with the hope it will change the "base assumptions" of the "ideologies" influencing their employment. But as you say, it doesn't change reality.
If it changes the minds of the voters, then different people will be in charge of the funding. Is that not how it works?
This is saying that "saying something over and over" will change reality. This was ridiculed by the person I was responding to so I decided to play along with it, but I'm open to that being true if we're revising that outlook.
Ozone is an interesting topic. CFCs seem to be very potent climate gases. But I haven't checked any calculations about them, yet. I'd love to see a good analysis of the absorption-spectrum. Adding something new to the atmosphere has a lot of warming potential - but the question always is how fast it reaches a level of saturation. For ozone and CFCs years of media coverage haven't brought any insight. Having 3 different updated versions of Dupont-products in the atmosphere could be good or bad - most likely people haven't bothered to check, yet... But they're all full of furious knowledge. People "know" that banning CFCs "cured" the ozone hole - but they don't ask why it shrunk too early, and why the situation hasn't changed at all for decades now...
I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.
> most likely people haven't bothered to check
Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.
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Your original claim was that people haven’t bothered to check. When someone pointed out there are tens of thousands of papers on the subject, you changed the question to find papers that answer my specific question.
Those are not the same claim. You went from arguing that the research doesn’t exist to arguing that you haven’t personally seen research that satisfies you.
Deal. Put $10,000 in escrow and point me to your lawyer to work out the details.
scholar.google.com is right there. Put in the work or talk to the hand.
In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada.
It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
> It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.
Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.
> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.
Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.
But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!
Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.
The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
AFAIK the peat is already releasing gas very quickly.
> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
What a pointless comment.
"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.
If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.
That's a ludicrous proposal.
A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'.
This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
There's a reason it's called a "problem." Doing the thing on your own is not a solution to it.
Sure we can all do our part as best possible, but this requires systemic change.
Required reading: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow."
It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.
Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.
I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.
All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
> 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.
No I'm not, because no matter what we do there is always a Climate Change Guy saying it's not enough and we're all gonna die if we don't do better.
That's a straw man argument.
Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Besides that; all the nice and shiny things you mention - the busses and trains and the cement - can be produced and operated at fraction of their current CO2 cost. Wind mills and PV panels offset their CO2 cost by magnitudes if they are replacing fossil fuel industries.
There's a middle ground between "lets burn it all to the ground" and "let's go back to the savanna".
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
There have been many systemic changes since we started to understand the physical mechanism behind climate change and the dire consequences of unmitigated climate change.
Within 20 years Europe has shifted to almost 50% renewables in their electricity production, the US is at 25% and China at 30% (and rapidly growing). Demand has been cut massively through energy efficiency laws. CO2 emissions have been reduced enough that the IPC now sees the RCP8.5 scenario as unrealistic.
We've already changed quite a lot. And this despite you not cutting back on meat or on driving. Think about it.
> There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
You don't do "it" to please some leftist eco-warrior, but because "it" is a unsustainable lifestyle. Whatever shape "it" actually takes.
> I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.
You did it, you torched the strawman.
So you're saying that no Western leftists espouse degrowth policies that, if carried out, would lower their living standards while enjoying the luxuries our nonzero-carbon world provide them?
This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary
And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway
Some individual projects are not worth the money on their own, but maintaining the ability of as many researchers as possible to continue to be at the top of their game, having ever-improving research chops in general is worth more than money can buy.
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.
Such is life in fascism. This is why we used to try to avoid fascism. It sucks.
Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.
When ever asks about or attempts to defend fascism/strongman style systems with some kind of excuse that they "get things done", THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....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.
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.
You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
> You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.
I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
> To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well? Do you think we have it all figured out? Is Economics solved as well?
> Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well?
I didn't malign all social sciences.
> Do you think we have it all figured out?
No.
Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
I mean, yes, there's some shoddy ideology-as-science at various universities but those people all still have jobs. That's not what got cut by DOGE, apparently.
> Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.
No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.
But I appreciate the subtle insinuation!
From TFA (more like 10th graf after a lot on the NASA project):
> research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,”
That sounds like science to me, they're trying to quantify health outcomes relative to community environment. Later research can use the figures, just like with your black hole observations.
One could say that maybe they should measure low-income communities in general with race as a dimension, but that doesn't make the whole thing "bad science".
Literally the thing I quoted in the top comment on the thread. Go read that comment.
Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process. Thanks for reminding me that you quoted that, I'm just not understanding the objection from then until now.
Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".
>Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process.
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.
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I don't follow. Are there not sciences that primarily study a type of human relationship? Economics, for instance, which covers our financial relationships with each other.
Economics is not a science either. It's a collection of factoids with correlations retrofitted to claim causation.
This is all it is: "if x goes up then y goes down."
Having mingled and worked at length with PhD-level folks in both STEM and the social sciences, rest assured: social scientists are some of the smartest researchers out there, almost to a frightening degree. So your dismissal is genuinely chuckle-inducing to me.
Perhaps better than "if I don't like it, it deserves to have its funding cut"
The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
This is a narrative that doesn't match the reality.
Reported failures to replicate are pretty similar in other fields, including in biomedicine. The replication crisis was just first highlighted in social psychology; lots of other fields just don't report these failures to replicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis). It's a bit like shooting the messenger.
It's funny reading through the comments in this thread because there are people claiming that sociology both (1) is so obvious that the effects replicate at such rates that the research is useless because everything is known a priori and (2) that nothing replicates at all.
Also, criticizing fields like social psychology and sociology for focusing on social phenomena seems a bit strange because that's what the fields are about. It's like criticizing biology for having too much of a bias toward living things.
> The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences
This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.
> > And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
> The 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.
Well put. It's easy to attack people attempting to work on hard problems for not achieving perfect results. Which they don't. Because IT'S HARD.
Weirdly, these critics never have useful suggestions to improve anything, it's all just personal attacks at one remove.
I mean, frankly, we wouldn't need a lot of these studies if people in power were slightly more willing to just believe (usually minority) people who talk about the problems they have.
Black soldiers were denied home loans after ww2; white soldiers were not; many white families therefor benefitted from owning a home (appreciation of value and safety/stability) in ways that black families did not.
Do we need a study on that? I mean, it doesn't hurt anything, but we could also just read some reports and talk to some people and then realize "hey this is messed up"
Do you have a specific example of a wasteful STEM research project that was cut?
My (perhaps wrong) impression was that wastefulness was given as the reason for making the cuts, but that the cuts were done broadly and indiscriminately [1].
In other words, the actions don't match the stated goal of reducing wastefulness. They seem more like a punishment for the members of all scientific institutions, and deterrence for curiosity-driven research.
[1] For example, the cuts to the STEM grants & projects didn't seem attached to any evidence of said projects' wastefulness.
> work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing
Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth.
Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outcomes? Perhaps confounding factors?
Yes, we should fund grants to make sure that the heliocentric model is still wrong.
I just want to say that what you say makes a lot of sense to me and I am happy people like you are pushing against the narrative.
Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done? Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
> Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done?
Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.
> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.
> I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.
Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
The keywords search cuts were not exactly skillfully enacted.
> Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".
Well, assuming that this is not an apocryphal story, and that there's no other relevant missing details (e.g. "research into silly topic X also used the word engendered"), etc., then that's dumb. I'm not going to argue about hearsay.
I will say this: before you believe such claims, you should verify them. They're often misremembered or completely made up. In particular, I'm not sure how anyone would know what keyword search was used to target their grant for review.
Like that program to study the mating patterns of sterile flies in Panama, right? They cut that because it was a $300k waste of money. Do you know what happened after they cut it? The US got a $300m infestation of those flies.
How does it feel to spread miss-information on internet? The Panama barrier was broken by screwworms 2 years before the cuts. It was dumb decision but didn't directly cause current infestation.
A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data.
Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.
Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.
I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.
Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.
> Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research.
I mean...not to be too flippant, but they don't. They're busy with hard problems to actually get people out of poverty, and don't have to worry about pesky partisan politics getting in the way. Plus, like, Mao is not that far in the rear-view mirror, y'know? It would be at least a little bit ironic to spend a lot of time researching that question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_in_China
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.)
Thank you for providing your perspective. I really hope HN has a 'pre-vouch' button as I know your comment will be flagged in no time, even though it's quite articulated.
I believe it's a fairly common attitude. Thus far it doesn't seem to be down voted.
I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
[flagged]
From your original post,
> repeating things we already know
Not a terribly scientific stance.
> while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel
There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
> randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold
You ignore the political and economic system within which the scientific system sits.
> if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor
Again, your normative standard for what is legitimate.
> simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas.
They're trendy for a reason. Science is, at it's core, questioning things because someone cares about it.
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research.
Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all.
This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can also tell "good research" thanks to years and years of advanced training, which I have used here to tell you that most of this stuff you like is bad.
> Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
If you can't do the experiment, you don't deserve scientific funding. Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
> thanks to years and years of advanced training
That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority. Unfortunately, advanced training is not unique to you, and so, you don't get a singular say on what's good or bad.
> so let's not have any standards at all.
Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
> Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
And there's your actual point. You hate that science is so affected by the politics of those who control the funding.
But that's always been the case. Wars have done more for physics than curiosity.
> That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority.
How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you...
Anyway, I'm just telling you that I actually do have enough experience to know the difference between a good question and a bad one, and I'm applying that experience here.
> Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
No, your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times. Here, I'll quote you:
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.
You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
Reducing uncertainty is great. I'm all for it. Sometimes it's even worth paying for. Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
> How exactly do you think that scientific grants are evaluated right now? I have some bad news for you
A problem of authorization can be solved with delegated authority. I'm saying your use of it is as evidence for your reasoning is weak. Those are two different problems.
> your point was that there's no normative standard for evaluating science. You said it like, three times.
Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all." You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
> You like the research, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about, and who am I for having an opinion anyway. And then I tell you that I actually do have some relevant knowledge, and you dismiss the knowledge as "normative". Convenient!
You're placing words in my mouth. I didn't say I like the research, I'm saying I don't like your grounds for dismissing it. I don't dismiss your expertise but I reject it as sufficient evidence for your argument.
> Doing the 150,000th derivative observational study finding that poor people are sicker than rich people is not an example. Poor people are sicker than rich people. Let's move on.
If you cannot see the hubris here, if you cannot see how unscientific it is to conclude (reductively) the results of an experiment before the experiment, then we are at an end. Let's move on.
> Yes, but you equated me saying "no normative standard" to "no standards at all."
No, I concluded that from a process of deduction, but fair enough. You're arguing that nobody can be qualified to critique the thing you support.
> You setup a false dichotomy. My larger point was that what's normative is political. And you saying your standard should be the norm is also political.
Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
It's just another way to try to arrive at the same place through the back door: my standard is wrong, because it's "normative" (or "political", or whatever other word you use in the next post), but your standard is (again, for some reason) not those things.
You don't like what I'm saying, so you reject my ability to say it. And when I catch you in this fallacy, you'll slip back to arguing that all research might be relevant to someone somewhere, and who are we to judge anyway, man, and blah blah blah. You're obviously just being big-brained and magnanimous.
Well, your deduction was unsound. And continues to be unsound. You can critique anything as long as you know you can be wrong too.
> Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
You're hand-waving. Your stance is political but not irrelevant. Your stance is philosophical (resting on chosen assumptions) and not empirically irrefutable.
Not acknowledging that is why you fail to convince.
You've made this argument about you and your ability to "catch" people. You have no argument that stands on its own construction.
Having read through this whole discussion, and as an outsider: they're approaching this from a much stronger and consistent position than you. This is most obvious given how far you've moved the goalposts along the way.
Maybe they've been more consistent but the strength of their position is not measured by my inconsistency.
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 we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
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.
I may have moved some of the goal posts but you refuse to engage with your own bias. I think we can move on.
> 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.
I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? Listen to the folks who have the expertise? Like sure, don't believe that they have the expertise or whatever, but ask for proof of the expertise, don't just handwave it away because you don't agree with the expert. Nothing that they've said has appeared to be inconsistent with their claim of expertise, however.
So... maybe trust the person with the experience? Or, if you have a contrasting experience, present that instead. But this is not what you're doing.
> What is their actual point? That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
My read is something like this: Their point is that the scientific method (aka "science") is fundamentally about rigor. If some science doesn't have rigor, it's fair to question its quality, because without rigor, you can't trust any of the results. There's too much possibility for error. The social sciences are notorious for lacking rigor. It's part of the reason there's a repeatability crisis in the field.
> 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'.
That's really not what they're saying at all. You keep trying to spin it that way, but I haven't seen that indication of that particular intent.
> 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."
No! They're not saying "these questions don't matter", they're saying "the people doing the science to 'answer these questions' are doing it badly, because they know what good science looks like, and that ain't it."
> isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? Listen to the folks who have the expertise?
No. We look at the best model that explains and predicts the most observations.
> Nothing that they've said has appeared to be inconsistent with their claim of expertise, however.
What expertise have they shown? How did you determine they're an expert? This is what they said in their original post: "if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor"
That has no expertise required. That's a political stance of what "actual, legitimate science" is.
> If some science doesn't have rigor, it's fair to question its quality
Yes, and I'm saying rigor should be pragmatically determined by operating conditions. All fields cannot instantly achieve the same level of rigor; instrumentation and methodologies need to develop over time. It's fine to say there's a problem with repeatability, it's not fine to say the researchers are illegitimate. Mine is a political stance as well.
> You keep trying to spin it that way, but I haven't seen that indication of that particular intent.
Our interpretation is at odds. You have not argued against it either. What makes their stance apolitical?
> the people doing the science to 'answer these questions' are doing it badly
And I'm saying that's in the nature of tough problems. Do you want to study tribal behavior? Culture? How nation states interact? How slavery has ripple effects across centuries? Tough shit, experimentation is hard. That doesn't make it bad science. That framing is thoughtless.
What is your point man? Can you state simply? Is it that cutting funding for "science" is bad, without exception?
Beyond doing the best research you can do, given the conditions, there is no apolitical norm for what makes a researcher legitimate or illegitimate.
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.
So you elect leaders to make those "political" decisions. I don't see the problem here. I think no politician or leader would say that they are "obviously" right, but they don't have to be. That is what a leader is supposed to do. If they only did the absolute "right" think, they will do nothing.
And about the "good/bad cutting", I think it only mean in relative terms, because funds are not infinite...
You're not being very rational. Please be civil and respond to the points, rather than give a "no you".
As I expected, the comment I wanted to 'pre vouch' is dead and flagged now.
> I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
I expected your comment is upvoted, as HN community generally does to 'you don't know what you're talking about' kind of comment, so no.
So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
> So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
I understand you personally are of the opinion that it's bad research, but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
> but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
> I am against bad research.
Most people are against bad research, but not everyone agrees with you on what bad means. Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine. So where does that leave us on the question of who gets research funding? Or did you have a different definition of "bad" in mind that doesn't consult your biases?
> One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions
Who decides what's a relevent question? The president? Political parties? B/Trillionaires? Big Tech / Oil / Pharma ? You?
> Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
Sorry I ignored it, but you only included it as a footnote to your reply, so I wasn't sure you were actually serious. You gave two ideas really: fund stuff at random and fund continuations at random but holding a minimum objective bar. I'll take them in turn:
> just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
This is more or less how the system operates now. You get a PhD, you go to a good institution, get some results, publish some papers, submit a proposal, and then it's a dice roll from there whether it gets funded or not. You said you had a career in research so you know this. How do you do "basic review for research viability" to your liking that's different from what's done now? Because now it's done by experts in their respective fields. You seem to think that means "bias is built into the system", yes? How do you evaluate basic research viability without consulting people specifically for their biases 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.
> Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine.
"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"?
Just because the medical system hasn't adapted to the (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research doesn't mean it's not valuable or should be stopped. The takeaway from SDOH is that social determinants are by far more powerful forces on people's health than actual medicine.
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
> (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research
I'm telling you, these same "astounding" findings were around 20 years ago. I learned about them when I was an undergraduate. They haven't changed.
Things can be astounding and still be old news. Quantum mechanics were astounding in 1930. Doesn't mean we should firehose money into standard model research. The world moves on.
> You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
No. Next question.
I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research, and so I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?
> I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research,
Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".
Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.
> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".
Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.
Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.
These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.
You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?
> Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.
This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.
OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.
> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
That result is hilarious, I really love it. If I have to guess perception of rural means they adopt what they think of as rural food and lifestyle which leads to worse health, can't say without reading the paper of course, but still its hilarious.
>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.
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?
It wasn’t a “theory” (at least no more than any other scientific fact), and telling me that someone found a relationship between two things doesn’t tell me that someone proved the relationship was causal.
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.
> It’s a perfect example of research that does nothing except making people feel virtuous for doing the research.
You could say the same for basically any of the fundamental sciences since none of them translate to any appreciable short-term economic value. What is the point of continuing research in physics or mathematics? Math theorems don't convert immediately to industrial output. Why invest even one dollar into astrophysics instead of having people stargaze on their own dime? Should the US outsource basic research to other countries?
Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste". The vast majority of questions there's nothing interesting or useful to discover. The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category (except you, obviously, you do know this, but just don't want to share the secret sauce)
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.
> Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste”
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.
I already described very precisely what this particular researcher's work (if true to description) would be valuable for. Quantifying the harm of things we know is bad is very important for pursuing lawsuits and writing laws. Would you like to comment directly on that claim?
And yes I agree broadly there is a lot of waste (and foreseeable/detectable waste) that falls into this category, but it seems like you're either suggesting that you know the specific targeted programs fall into this category or you're comfortable assuming that all the programs of this shape fall into this category.
> This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.
Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao. There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
> I don't know [how to mitigate health disparities]! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!
Huh? I didn't claim to have all the answers lol, you did.
> Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao.
OK, cool. Let's not do more of that, then. I just said that I could see the difference between the questions, and that they're not likely to get funding elsewhere, not that we should absolutely fund more black hole space telescopes.
> There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?
No. Not in the same class as "are poor people sicker than rich people", or "does gravity cause things to fall down". Next question.
FYI we've discovered precisely 0 (zero) things in cosmology or physics more broadly, or even material science, in the last 100 years that aren't derivable from relativity lol.
Does your tirade copy/paste to that entire field too?
From anywhere except from the tax payer. Lord knows there are academic institutions sitting on a lot of cash.
Why not, I pay taxes too and I want researchers to study things you don't like. I don't want to fund the military, should they get their funding from Lockheed? Lord knows they have enough...
Exactly: You and every other tax payer is entitled to have an opinion on how the money is spent, so why your original comment about "topics you don't personally like"?
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America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
> America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research
This sounds very bad! But since I'm not arguing in favor of technical decline and irreparable harm, it doesn't mean that my argument is wrong.
> let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose,
I'm confused: is science funding a welfare state for people who want to be scientists, or is it a meritocracy by which we fund the development of science?
> and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut,
Well...yes.
> when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Erm, so what? I can't have an opinion on bad science?
You're not making the decision either, but apparently you're allowed to have one.
The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.
If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
> The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Well golly. Mind numbing!
> Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
What "false beliefs" are those?
> The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from.
You literally just bragged that you were a member of countless NBER meta-science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors. Tell me more about how the "universal lesson" is that you don't pick and choose. We do it all the time.
You just don't like my opinion, but you can't argue on the merits, so you resort to this stuff.
> You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from.
Great. I'm not doing that.
This isn't hard: there's such a thing as derivative, bad science that is unlikely to lead to novel results. It's fair to critique research on those grounds. "Social determinants of health" is a perfect example of this kind of science. I don't even disagree with the conclusions. I just think the science is terrible and shouldn't be funded. It's not just this area: observational nutrition research is generally abysmal science, and shouldn't be funded, yet is common. There's a replication crisis across the sciences, with certain fields being overrepresented.
This is not an imaginary problem.
Arguing that we don't filter science for quality, is of course, dumb and wrong. We do it all the time. It's just that some fashionable fields are able to bypass this test, because some folks substitute politics and indignance for logic.
> You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
You know, for a person who wants desperately to appeal to scientific authority, you resort to personal insults a lot. You'd think, if you were truly on the winning intellectual side of this, you could deal with the actual argument.
It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
> It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
My bad, on mobile, I think your stance deserves a more thoughtful critique.
Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.
Note: There is always some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled literally all through the entire course of scientific history.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
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Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
Quoting the article:
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
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I'm not going to bother to write an essay like the other person.
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.
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Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?
Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies. The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders. Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
Don't feed the trolls... MemoryHoleHQ is not arguing in good faith.
I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
Yeah, but, like, what's the worst that could actually happen by eliminating crop diversity?
Potato monocultures fed literal millions for a good while, Shirley it can't hurt to see grain cropping go that way.
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>Let's all work together
Nah
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> Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
Since this can only mean the DOGE witch hunt we all clearly remember, I think Elon Musk was paying for it? But now it's just taxpayer money (if there is anything left after "contributing" to all of Trumps many funds).
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Mate, if you had to make a new account just to try posting this nonsense, it might be time for some self-reflection.
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> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
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You know you can't just put one topic into the grievance bucket (science funding), shake it around, then pull out a different topic (orchestral hiring practices) and expect to have a conversation, right?
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So when are you going to talk about the scientific grants?
> Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate > this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to > blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse" > instead of more
You should really shouldn't subtly misrepresent the argument. The article states that blind auditions made orchestras much more diverse in some categories, but did not make much of an impact in others.
As far as I can tell nobody except Anthony Tommasini is calling for blind auditions to go away. His position position is just weird and using it to represent the opinions of most of the left is more than a bit disingenuous.
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There is a far deeper problem, a systemic and foundational one; and unfortunately the whole system and all its components are all so vetted to the current rotten and distorted system that no amount of good intentions or personal dedication or will can overcome it. Unfortunately for us all we are at the precipice of a chasm and the forces of nature are upon us.
I work at a research lab that was previously supported by an R01 grant that did not get renewed last year. It’s been tough and the staff (including me) have been moved to part-time employment.
However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.
So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
yeah, if you're morally willing to shove children out of towers a lot of things can become possibilities.
Petyr Baelish got stabbed to death while on his ladder, I don’t think that’s a good analogy
Yep, Sansa climbed the ladder better than he did. As she says to him at the end, "Thank you for all your many lessons, Lord Baelish. I will never forget them."
"I'm a slow learner, it's true, but... I learn."
It’s a fine analogy and you’re just showing off your game of thrones knowledge.
My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.
I'm surviving on consulting income for a wide variety of clients right now in this space, and let me tell you it's brutal and extremely difficult to get entry to this space for people that don't have a wide network and lots of industry experience. Academic experience typically doesn't count.
In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
There is some history to why it is as grim as it is right now (sunny skies will return, don't worry!). A lot of funding was around ~2019 from the VC people, and biomed PIs were getting their startups funded and hiring from the recent PhD cohorts. The horrible environment in STEM academic hiring needs no introduction, so the talent pool was rich. Early stage drug development and biotech is horrendously risky, so most don't make it past ~5-7 years. Now there are lots of people looking for a job, and the only surviving companies are the extremely hiring averse ones.
Did you mean to write, high interest rate environment?
"Academic experience typically doesn't count."
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.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
>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.
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
>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.
That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
>Academia creates the foundation industry sits on.
Depends on the industry. All the researchers I know in academia are just wasting government grant money not delivering anything useful. Their words, not mine.
Some is useful shure, a lot is bullshit though.
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
This conflation between "useful" and "profitable" is maybe the most annoying motte and bailey that industry people like to employ.
I really don't get why it's so commonly stated. It's so obviously dumb once you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's like people arguing that improving the track or improving the shoes doesn't win races because at the end of the day it's the runner that crosses the finish line. Sure, but to discredit everything but the runner is so myopic. Let them run barefoot and run on glass shards, then watch them lose
> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.
That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.
I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.
To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic
Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former. I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize. - person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y
Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.
I can’t speak to this particular sector; however, I have found academics to lag 5-7y behind the realities of the business world I operate in.
Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.
If it’s constantly 5-7 years behind isn’t it moving at the same speed just with an offset?
If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.
only if they are always going in the same direction
That may depend on the field. My experience (in bioinformatics method development) is that people in the industry can't afford to work on state-of-the-art problems. But once a problem has become established and it's important enough to be worth their time, they will eventually come up with a better solution due to their superior resources.
Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.
Sure, but it would seem the solution would be to hire the recently minted PhDs and teach them through more senior staff how to operate in the real world, just like in literally any other profession.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
Because that's ultimately their goal! It's just smoke, mirrors, and complaining so they can get the cheap labor.
I don't know if it's so much that talented people are being locked out, as much as it is that communities everywhere, not just industry, are requiring a level of people skills that academic people lack but nonetheless thrive without.
Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing?
i like academics, don't misunderstand me.
> do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing?
yes, or at least largely overlapping circles
They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done.
Persuasion based on pathos or ethos instead of logic is also communication
okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something.
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?
> would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker?
I've had worse. Mostly much better, but I've had worse.
> claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating
There is no communication there. No concepts for them to communicate. It is just math.
Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect
I would say you communicate to the model and you interpret the model's outputs. I would not say the model communicates back though.
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.
> Models don't know anything across iterations yet.
Can you expand. They have both context and memory?
Most models do not have any persistent state or output that is separate from their input. They consume a stream of tokens and then output a probability distribution. The probability distribution will always be the exact same for that particular stream of tokens. There is no internal state, thoughts, mood etc., only prediction based on the input. "Memory" is usually just something injected into context by the harness and updated by usually a tool call from the model.
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.
My rock collection causes concepts to enter my brain, but I don't think I'd say they're communicating with me, nor I with them.
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Academic's, FTR, have to have a huge amount of people skills. Their job isn't just to discover, it's to share.
You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.
Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work
> The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard
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 low, capital is willing to go to riskier enterprises like biotech in order to get a larger return compared to the alternatives.
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.
This doesn't work the way you imagine.
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.
High interest rate environment usually means the government specifically is paying a better rate on its debt. Then other interest rates are downstream from that. Government interest rates aren't connected to returns on investment (or only very indirectly).
Tech investments don't come with interest payments usually, so if interest rates go up it pulls money into government and corporate bonds which are much lower risk. Why take a gamble on new tech that might lose you everything to get 10% ROI, if you can get 6% "risk free" in bonds?
You're using "high interest rate" to mean "biotech has great returns right now".
Everyone else is using it to mean "the Federal Reserve has set the interest rate high right now"
Very different situations.
The difference between those two situations can't be determined by observing the level of interest rates. That's my whole point.
It absolutely can.
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.
We are not convinced that we will be happy in the industry and part of it is the visa issues. She currently has a valid visa until 2029 but she just doesn't want it anymore.
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how exactly did you jump to the conclusion that American ?citizen? taxpayes are propping these two people up financially? They are presumably both paying income tax in the United States as well, probably a lot of it based on his wife's profession.
Why would they want to stay in a country actively trying to dismantle democracy and science if they have another option?
Because it hasn't had as much time to dismantle democracy as all of the other democracies in the world have. lol
Why assume that this is about finding a job?
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
Just out of curiosity, where did you move?
I’m going to keep it vague beyond saying that I don’t have to worry about going bankrupt from healthcare.
That narrows it down to about 50 countries :)
So pretty much any other country.
promotion is a good reason to move. good luck!
You are a fool if you think these companies are hiring enough to meet the labor needs. So many Phds I know are looking for work and yes they’ve applied to probably 500 jobs mostly in industry.
A lot of people in academia are mission driven - they don't care about the money, they care about the application of their work to benefit humanity and don't want to exist as a cog in a private corporation's profits. I think this mentality of "scientists just want to get paid a lot of money" is contributing to the anti-science views that are so pervasive in America these days. Some people are motivated by more than just profit.
And/or corporate culture has some major drawbacks compared to universities and national labs.
Terrible response. Just so you understand, private companies are not doing the kind of foundational research that public funded institutes were doing.
> considering moving internally
does that get you a new fed administration that isn't idiotically anti-science?
I feel like you missed the point of moving overseas.
I'm sorry but this is so naive
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well lot of ppl are always moving out of america but few actually do. thats obvious by now.
Emigration out of the US right now is at historic, record-breaking levels. Have any other uninformed comments you'd like to make?
you pulled that number out of your ass?
Did you not notice my use of the word uninformed?
Keep your head in the sand, that will help things.
When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. -Confucius
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
I've read that too. Yet, I've also read stuff like [0]. The truth is probably somewhere it between
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01902-0
I'm sure they do genuinely have those problems but it's not like Western research has been free of such scandals.
> When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. -Confucius
I don't think I believe that this is a real Confucius quote.
Canada, Europe, China.
not much talent is going from US to Canada, it's almost always the reverse if you look at top canadian universities
Here’s evidence from 2025. 2026 has increased.
https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/Resources-American-S...
Canadians/dual citizens moving back?
It never ceases to amaze me the selective reading skills required to remain ignorant when facing clear evidence.
US citizen moves to Canada on a CUSMA visa:
Canadian citizen moves to us on equivalent CUSMA visa: Canada's immigration system is just structurally tilted toward brain drain. It's all stick and no carrot.I don't know what a CUSMA visa is - I thought CUSMA was a trade deal?, but it seems very convenient to compare the standard Express Entry points-based immigration track versus (nothing) on the US side. Convenient is an euphemism, reality basically the opposite of what you're saying:
Moving to Canada:
- Rational points-based immigration system with transparent rules which you can actually look up and prepare for, start your life as a Permanent Resident with all but voting rights compared with a citizen, become a citizen in a few years.
Moving to US:
- Wait years for an H1B with a yearly lottery with 15% chance
- Wait another 10 years for a Green Card, equivalent to a PR card - Wait another ? years for full citizenship
>US citizen moves to Canada on a CUSMA visa: - 30-50% pay cut
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.
>Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
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.
> But what about "free healthcare". Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
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.
>People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.
Clearly, all those people who lost everything or even became homeless from some health issue despite paying insurance all their lives must be fictional
How many people per capita become homeless from healthcare in US vs how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?
Quite a lot for the first case apparently (see 1).
The U.S. had roughly 770,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2024. Even if one-third of cases involved medical debt as a contributing factor, that gives 200 homeless people per 100,000 residents with healthcare costs contributing to their fate.
And obviously way more affected if we expand from complete homelessness to a housing downgrade (e.g. from a nice home to renting some appartment or going to a trailer or some motel) to cover medical costs that would have been trivial elsewhere, and even more so for those.
As for "how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?", we know in Canada e.g.: 15,474 deaths while waiting ≈ 38 deaths per 100,000 people per year. And that's dying while waiting, not dying because of the wait. A lot of them are heavily impacted/elderly etc and would have died anyway with or without procedure (and the wait time of some of those could be comparable to a typical US wait time, or be totally independent from the healthcare system, and based on e.g. donor list priority, etc.).
To contrast, this report (2) estimates around 200,000 deaths/year ≈ 59 deaths per 100,000 Americans from lack of access / insurance/access-related mortality.
In recent years about 40% of uninsured adults reported delaying, skipping, or not obtaining needed care or medication because of cost. Even among insured adults, about 8% reported doing so. Gallup found 38% of Americans said they or a family member postponed medical treatment because of cost in 2022, the highest level in its long-running survey.
Keep in mind that about 8.2% of the US population that's uninsured (compared to ~ 0 in Canada). And that's not counting the US under-insured, claim denials, and costs that exceed deductibles and annual limits that all heavily burden even the insured in the US. In fact most US citizens with medical debt ARE insured.
1. https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/medical-debt-home...
2. https://pnhp.org/news/estimated-us-deaths-associated-with-he...
How many ?
Yes, that's what I asked. Why are you repeating it?
He repeated it because you asked it as if implying it's an argument against "socialized insurance" as opposed to a mere question.
>you asked it as if implying it's an argument against "socialized insurance" as opposed to a mere question
And how did you come up with that conclusion? Are you reading minds? No, I genuinely asked to know, since many factors are important, there's no winner out of the gate.
But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be. Good day.
>And how did you come up with that conclusion?
I didn't, the parent commenter did. I simply answered your question on why HE did it, and even said it your question was put "as if" it implied it, not that it necessarily implied it.
Of course one could also come with that conclusion from reading your lengthy comment at the start of the thread pissing on socialized healthcare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581228 and trivially putting two and two together too.
>But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be.
Of course you will. Conveniently frees you from having to take into account my sibling comment with numbers and references :)
Yes, Canada gets many immigrants from the most populous country in the world (1M Indians in 2024) - should that be surprising?
It also gets immigrants from the China (772k), UK (427k), Germany, France (100k each). Saying its all stick and all those people are desperate is an insane take.
Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
>UK (427k), Germany, France (100k each).
Over what period of time?
>Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
No, but if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US. Similar with EU. Ambitious people don't like being lowballed.
Those figures I cited were a snapshot from 2024 (https://ourworldindata.org/migration) Data is cumulative of course. I couldn't find a yearly breakdown on statcan. Doesn't change my argument though.
>if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US.
Immigrating to the US, not emigrating. People emigrate from a place and immigrate to another.
And the thing about hypotheticals is you can't prove them. That's just your opinion.
>And the thing about hypotheticals is you can't prove them.
You can prove it by how many canadians move to work in the US versus how many Americans move to work in Canada. This discrepancy will scale if immigration barriers to the two countries would be the same, but since they're not we have to extrapolate based on other data.
The free healthcare only matters if you get permanent residency.. Otherwise, it's just like the world's most expensive insurance plan thanks to the pay cut.
In terms of people in the tech industry I know of who moved to Canada from countries where they get a legitimate pay boost there.. Yes, it makes sense for them. If they never attain permanent residency, at least they made more money than they would have back home for a few years.
However, I've rarely seen one of them turn down a chance to get an additional huge pay boost by moving to the United States afterwards. In fact, it's common for top tier companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
I don't think Canada can compete on pay, but there are certainly people who could get that top pay but would trade it for a chance to live permanently in Canada. I'm guessing those are the sorts of people who have already taken pay cuts to work in highly specialized or speculative areas of science and technology. These are great people to have because they are low risk and high reward in terms of impact on the economy.
Sadly, if you look at any forum for Canadian immigrants you'll find a huge amount of depressing stories about never attaining permanent residency or of grinding for years to game the point system in a way that is soul crushing. It is a broken system on both sides. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does. If you make above a certain salary, you can get a blue card. You can accumulate time on the blue card in any country in the EU (except for Ireland, which has their own similar system if I recall). After 5 years you can typically apply for permanent residency, in Germany just 2 years so long as you attain B1 German (very practical for usage in daily life and doable in the timeframe without cramming or cutting corners).
The implicit reasoning seems to be that if you can stay out of trouble and earn a good living for 5 years. You're probably worth keeping around. I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Check out all of the people cramming French to try to increase their odds in the Canadian lottery for example. Canada probably doesn't get the sorts of genuine francophones they seem to be looking for--cramming for an exam with a verbal component is not the same as fluency--and the people entering the country are doing so by playing arbitrary games instead of living a real life.
And of course the French is just one example, there are also all of the useless courses and degree programs. The points-based lottery encourages and rewards the accumulation of arbitrary points, or in other words, a sort of dissimulation.
I suppose you could argue that Canada is selecting for people who are willing to diligently jump through hoops. If so, that does nothing to address brain drain.
> companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
Nobody would mind the lower Canadian salaries if they also came with a matched lower CoL, but that's not what's happening IRL. Similar issues across the EU where some very expensive to live areas don't pay proportionally high so the issue isn't necessarily pay but CoL. However as a worker your only option is demanding more money from your employer as you can't lower the CoL of the area. So there we are.
>The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does.
That's not a pro for the EU citizens as they get lower quality immigrants than Canada or anglophone countries with a stricter points system.
>I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Blue card system is also heavily gamed thanks to unscrupulous EU employers wanting to wage dump the local workforce, and much more easily because there's no multiple points criteria.
How much is this actually happening? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but the net migration flows haven't changed much. British Columbia did a big push to bring in American medical staff, and have only had a couple hundred move so far. Compare that to the number of Canadians moving south on TN visas, and I'm not sure it's significant.
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.
> How much is this actually happening?
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.
Exactly. The US is a leader in technology pretty much exclusively because of immigration. As that reverses, we can expect the US to fall behind, and fall further behind, over time.
Maybe. We’ll see. I just know the reality is not a mass efflux of Americans to China. That’s idiotic.
60% of all CS researchers in America are not American. 55% of all engineering researchers.
When everyone goes home America loses the majority of it's research output, plus the extra Americans who choose to join them. I suspect a great many Americans will choose to join them, for personal or professional reasons. Why try to get a grant in the US, where the rules change whenever Trump sneezes, vs a stable, consistent system in the rest of the OECD?
Are people really moving to China? A country that will never give outsiders citizenship?
For a country that has been a "brain magnet" for a good century, a "brain drain" might just be "talented people from wherever choosing to go somewhere else".
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
Probably more that China is producing more new talent through education, and Chinese scientists and researchers moving back to China.
HK will give you right of abode which is almost as good as citizenship so long as you stay in HK. I suppose you could still be deported for high crimes or some such but that almost seems like the best case scenario if that happens.
you wouldn't want citizenship anyway; safer to remain a foreigner while living/working there, even long-term
where in Canada? i've _never_ heard that, but if so, great.
Personally, I would go to Toronto. Decades ago I used to work for a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto and had development offices in the states. There was a project I needed to do with a distinguished engineer that required me to move to Toronto for a few months. I really liked it. TBH, there are very few cities in the US that I would say are on par with Toronto, and none are better. Now the Winters are brutal, but they're brutal where I'm from so that's not a dealbreaker for me.
totally understand about winters and miss them, personally. i'm from pretty near toronto but us side of the border, a bit further west.
Canada? For lower salary and lower life quality?
Higher intangible quality of life, lower spending power.
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.
There are a lot of QOL disadvantages to being an immigrant on a visa anywhere. I moved to NZ for the next couple of years recently, and my QOL has dropped in many ways from the move. My much lower income buys a lot less housing here, so I went from a 2 bed apartment to myself to a moldy studio. I'm extremely far from family and friends, and there are weird cultural gaps with most everyone around me because we grew up on different media, sports, and education systems. I'm constantly having to figure out how things are done here, from taxes to bank accounts to renting, and I know I have different worker protections, but I don't really know what exactly they are. My status in the country ends after my visa is up in 2 years, and I don't know if I will even be able to extend it with a sponsor because there are health requirements that I may or may not meet for the visa I would need.
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.
Everything you have said here is also quite true.
For many people, it does get better with time, though.
He said Canada man. If you had other reasonable options when leaving you wouldn't pick it so lets not pretend anyone moving there from the USA didn't fail already.
Eh? I've got a relative who moved there after years of working there on a visa under a mid-6-figures job.
Did you know: some people like Canada?
Relocation to the European Union is at all-time highs.
I'm in Australia.
For anyone thinking of migrating to Australia, please add to your considerations the increasing groundswell of conservatism and support for anti-immigration and the very recent proclamations of anti-multiculturalism of the newly popular One Nation party:
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.
And yet despite their majority, Labor still seem reticent to make big changes of the sort people are asking for, and backpedal on their initiatives and promises all over the place.
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.
She's been doing that for decades with no traction.
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.
But where on the planet are you going to go and escape that?
And welcome to our little odd ball land. Just remember, if an Aussie offers you a 'Golden Gay Time', take it and you will be pleasantly surprised. ;)
And do you meet other people who recently moved, or talking about moving there too ?
Quite a few Ozzies who were in the US (especially Bay Area) and have decided to move back, but so far no other people with no real connection.
the things i’ve read say primarily western european countries and a distant second being various southeast asian countries.
my guess is southeast asia may overtake europe in a decade or so considering how wildly popular asian culture is with teenagers.
where to?
My family is looking at Missouri to Spain.
Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.
Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.
Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.
americans pretending they aren't immigrants by using the term expat always cracks me up
The terms "expat" and "immigrant" are not synonyms. There is a material semantic distinction in American English.
Most Americans that live overseas tend to be expats rather than immigrants. Those two terms don't convey the same meaning.
whatever makes Americans feel better about being immigrants or migrant workers is fine by me
Expats have to pay taxes in their home country. The US is very difficult to temporarily not be in.
It's not fine by you, since you brought attention to it.
a person who temporarily or permanently lives and works in a country other than their native country. I mean, some Mexicans and other latin americans go to the US to make money and buy a home back in their countries. And still by they're not called expats?
For me, expat implies a temporary stay, often tied to your job.
I guess I think of "expat" as a possibly-temporary state where full assimilation is not the goal. American expats also pay American taxes unless they give up US citizenship.
Technically of course you are right.
> American expats also pay American taxes unless they give up US citizenship.
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.
I'm not sure I follow. I am a US citizen and have never lived abroad, but my understanding is that US Citizens living abroad must still pay the US a full federal income tax. It's graduated/progressive, of course, so the actual percentage may vary, but it should probably be between 15% and 40% of income. Not what I would call small. I don't think they can deduct local taxes, can they?
Many countries have tax treaties with the US, and there’s also the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE), which excludes up to 132.9k of foreign income; so many US citizens abroad will indeed pay no US income taxes.
That is mostly only true if you have no significant investments. If you have investments, the tax situation is not good as an American even under tax treaties.
If you are normal wage slave with limited savings then yes the exclusions mostly work.
There's a huge exclusion.
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.
Thanks! I did not know that. That changes a lot.
americans pretending they aren't refugees by using the term expat is almost too ironic.
if you're living where you were born, how can you be an expat?
From what I understand, Spain has their own set of politics worth losing sleep over; perhaps as an expat you won't be as attached though.
Most American ex-pats don't really understand that the thing that makes ex-pat life so attractive is that, for most of people's lives, being American in a foreign country has traditionally conferred a wide range of benefits (this is most clearly exemplified by the way Americans living in a foreign country refer to themselves as "ex-pats" not "immigrants"). The ex-pat solution assumes American exceptionalism as its foundation.
Historically Americans have benefited from income asymmetry and a fairly wide-spread desire by foreign nations not to cause too much legal trouble for US nationals abroad.
I have quite a few friends that do live, quite happily, abroad. But the common pattern for them is a.) fluency in the native language b.) historical association with the country c.) fairly large cash reserves so they can ignore any economic problems these countries are facing.
expat is usually synonymous with fire/retire early. most people move to spain or portugal and see their purchasing power multiply.
That sounds more like FIRE / geographic arbitrage than expat in the traditional sense.
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.
Americans didn’t invent the term or the concept of “expat”, colonial Europeans have been doing it in Africa and Asia for centuries.
I don't see the parent comment saying that we did invent it.
*Brits
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, my European nation did a lot of bad shit, but don't put the idea of an "expat" on us.
Most places have their own politics. What differs is how often they come up. As a foreigner you're usually spared the involvement in those discussions because people think you're not interested and don't want your outsider opinion anyway.
People also embed themselves in different communities when they move anywhere, even to a different city or state in the same country. It's a clean reset.
It doesn't always last forever. I know several people who tried to move somewhere, including internationally, when politics got heated in 2016. Most of them came back eventually with a realization that politics is everywhere, it's just a matter of how much you're embedded into the places it's discussed.
Politics is everywhere, but the state of US politics today is exceptionally bad by Western world standards. I hate the government in my country, but their corruption and incompetence is nothing compared to the Trump administration.
In that sense most EU countries are a positive upgrade.
I (American) worked in Spain (Cáceres, Extremadura) ~2015-2017 in tech. It was a wonderful experience. Extremely talented, hard-working, and friendly co-workers. Great health-care and education systems. I think since then rising housing prices partially due to migration have become an issue, but it's a really, really nice place.
To add context Extremadura is a member of the "poor" Spain. To US people could be useful to think on a sort of New Mexico.
Pros: Great food, interesting cultural past, only one language to deal with and not complicated accents to grasp (more important that most people think), gorgeous wild areas, uncomplicated people, maybe a little on the introverted side at first, but solid gold after a while.
Cons: Risk of poverty sadly high, bigger than many US states (but with better government support and healthcare). Harsh continental climate very hot and very cold. Not for everybody (but US has plenty of places with similar or worse weather). The trains and communication roads are also under-average for the country and many people don't really speak English.
In many of the non highly touristic places you can live well if you can adapt to the cons. Housing prices are lower, life expenses cheaper and buying a house should be affordable with a decent job (Don't try this in Barcelona or Madrid). Portugal is close, and is even cheaper, to the point of some people living there and working in Spain. To support the same standard of living in Barcelona, Valencia or Madrid you need to plan in advance, to stomach the stress that unavoidably come with big cities, and earn much more.
In Spain if you can speak English well you will be automatically seen as a great researcher.
More pro: Spain may be one of the best places in Europe to raise kids (culturally, especially), though a good chunk of the country has emptied out of its young people - so it can vary by region. It's a shame that their birth rate has gotten so low. Crime overall is very low, especially if you're not tied directly to it.
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 internet infrastructure, the fiber optic network seems to be quite robust these days. There are still places where it isn't available, but compared to e.g. the US it's another world entirely. Even small cities typically offer 1 or sometimes 10 Gbps hookups in many areas.
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!
Also American, and I'm interested why you praise the education system. I have a child who will be entering the Andalusian system at some point and although it seems better than my Oklahoman system, that is, uh...damning with faint praise.
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.
America just ended a nearly 2 decade experience of failing to teach kids how to read English due to a NZ teacher scamming the English speaking world.
So doing better than that isn't too hard.
and we've already moved on to the next snake oil - letting LLMs teach our kids!
gotta be ready for the crazy heat in the summers, they don't call it extremadura for nothing. unironically best lodging is rooms that were dungeons in the castle.
Apart from being the nexus of the current hot button issue - immigrants and housing costs.
"The grass is always greener", "the enemy you know", etc. etc.
Man Spain is mentioned as a top destination with expat influencers, youtubers and now even on hn. I get the feeling that something is going to crack at some point. You must be pricing out locals and they can't be happy about that.
Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.
Sounds like the locals are just racist then?
Being a rich fuck used to 5x+ the local median income is not a "race". So it can't be racism.
I suspect that indoorfish's point is that, in the US, when similar situations happen, and get similar reactions, then accusations of racism fly.
people in the US complaining about gentrification get called racist?
People in the US stating that black lives matter get called racist. So, yes.
That topic at least involves matters of race though? Not saying you're wrong, just that it's perhaps not the best counter-argument.
The point is that people in the US absolutely do get called racist all the time for all manner of things.
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.
No, not generally.
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.
Spain has its own load of problems, like any other place. Big cities have lowered their quality of life a lot since the 2008 crisis.
Science is massively underfunded respect to what US was enjoying. Expect cuts in your salary. Physicians earn much, much, less, but students can follow public university studies without being put a crushing debt load around their necks.
Science is also being invaded lately with political and bureaucratic BS. Universities have less resources and are always scammed in the ranks that benefit Asian and US universities.
We expect one month of Holidays each year, by law, or to be compensated for it if we agree to spend this time working. Most researchers volunteer to work extra hours or weekends if needed to finish the experiments.
About cultural differences. There are not "white" people and "hispanic" people in Spain. Is either the same thing, or it does not really matter.
"Negro" means "black", and is just a color. Some people are racist, specially out of the big cities, and even more are classist, but if you are black and people describe you as a man negro or a woman negra they don't mean to insult you, they are just describing you. There is not such ridiculous term as an "Afro-spanish", if you have born in Spain or earned the nationality, you are as much 100% Spanish, as any other.
In fact, you are either Spanish, or foreign. If you learn the language well you "are honorary Spanish". If not, you will be always be the "Moroccan" or the "Gringo", but not the "black" or the "white". Europeans had mixed their bloods for ages and people here consider themselves as much "white" than you (if not more) and will find the distinction offensive by unnecessary.
As long as you act as a reasonably civilized person, only the extreme right idiots will care about your tan. Avoid this European MAGA like the dangerous plague that they are.
In restaurants, you need to call the waiter and say what you want. If you want the bill, you need to ask politely for the bill. Don't wait to be noticed or you will wait forever. You will not be chased off the table normally, that would be rude.
You will receive the amount of food expected traditionally in the area (not the humongous portions normal in US unless you visit the North).
Tips are fully voluntary. Unless you go to a very exclusive place you should tip between 0 and 2 dollars and don't need to argue why. (Forget about that X% of the service. We hate going out and being forced to do math).
People will benefit also of the environmental regulation. I assume that a big chunk of the morbid obesity epidemics in US came from unregulated contamination.
To end, a couple warnings, specific from the country:
In small populations near mountains and forests, wildfire crime is a recurrent problem. If there are cows or sheep roaming wild in the area, expect wildfire mafias. Assure to remove any flammable materials near your house and to have an escape route plan.
Dry riverbeds are dangerous. Engrave this in your brain. Locals use this places as parkings, but will run to remove the cars if there is rain expected. You shouldn't park in this areas, never, ever, try to cross a current of water or rescue your parked car if there is water, and should avoid buying any property in this areas. The place is called Rioseco for a motive. Each year a few expatriates die in the Mediterranean caught by flash floods.
Housing is really expensive in Spain and Portugal right now. I live in BC and mid/small cities there are actually more expensive than here
https://old.reddit.com/r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer/comments/1thk1bn...
Cheaper than 120k?
Sure, you can find something with various budgets. As other said, that house is far away from the city centre (the reddit OP says so in the thread). You'll also probably need to spend a lot on upkeep and retrofits with buildings this old.
Something in the city centre is more like 4800 euro/sqmt (https://www.idealista.com/sala-de-prensa/informes-precio-viv...).
Just browse idealista in the city you want and you'll see its not such a bargain as people might think. Mid-sized cities I've checked (Vigo, Valencia, Granada) all have similar prices, around 400k for a 2-3 bed older apartment, or twice as much for a newer one.
Who cares if it is outside the city center? Looks like it is plenty urban. Even better, more real businesses priced towards locals paying 120k for an entire building, and no seasonal tourist businesses taking up space in the market priced for whoever can afford a four figure vacation to Valencia. Besides, OP said it was 20 mins by car to the city center. That seems perfectly reasonable in the american frame of reference towards distances to points of interest. The place looks turnkey too. Unfinished attic is pretty typical even in the US.
If it looks like a good deal to you, by all means, hasta luego. I was just saying that specific Reddit post is not really a good average case for housing. Check idealista and see the average homes there first.
That must be outside of Valencia city at that price. And anywhere near Madrid or Barcelona (where most of the good jobs are), forget it.
It'll be 350k for a 100m2 apartment or even more expensive in the popular neighbourhoods.
Op said it's 20 mins by car to the city center.
That is far by European standards. Op is Spanish.
20 minutes is 20 minutes whether you are american or spanish.
> 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.
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.
What are you talking about? They will move to Spain and be financially well off means they will be ignorant of local issues and live in a bubble? How did you make that stretch? Sure they may not be very political but that doesn't equate to living in a bubble. People choose to engage with politics at varying degrees, as is their right.
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?!
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So you are saying that American dream became an optical trap?
I applaud you for that!
Where are you heading?
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Just because some people call us a democracy doesn't mean you can shunt responsibility onto arbitrary folks.
The US populace isnt "Arbitrary" it should be directly accountable for the actions of the government it funds and supports.
We didn't. We can't vote. If anything, last three years I worked in fraud detection in healthcare - my work is currently being used by the medicare audit team. So respectfully, we only wanted good for this country.
I live in a state where my vote for President basically doesn't count, so you can fuck right off with that.
Ok, so you think your responsibility ends with voting? You build and fund a giant death machine and "welp my vote for death machine leader doesn't count so nothing else can be done"?.
How about throwing a few direct action ideas my way. What should I be doing in your mind?
No idea what the most heavily armed civilian population on the planet could possibly do about its tyrannical government?
We are approaching a situation where everyone else on the planet is going to have to do it for you. It would be much cleaner for everyone involved if you dealt with this before it got that far.
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> We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
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.
Fair question - our concerns are multidimensional. Funding cut + Visa uncertainty + ICE arresting us and putting us in detention + us visiting another country but not being allowed to enter back are a few of them.
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The US is still dominant for research spending and high impact scientific publications and medicine. I too would be interested in where they think it would be better. Israel and South Korea are the only two that might provide more opportunities depending on the area of interest.
> She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become.
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
There are less than zero theres there. This comment is negative there. It's not even here. It's nowhere.
Put the chatbot down, you’ve got psychosis. You can’t next-token-predict your way into actual research.
No. AI is not doing science. And also no, science is not being held back by "pearl clutching" and "unwillingness to let brilliant non-science geniuses in."
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
It disheartens me a great deal to see how the US (in particular, but they are not alone) has turned its back on good science, largely, but not exclusively, on the back of populist politics.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
Don’t fret. Science had to confront issues before- the Catholic Church, the earlier Chinese dynasties, Nazis, etc.
Just have faith (in science, not sure about the U.S. - empires come and go)
I think we agree. I certainly agree with what you've written. You may not agree with my opinions, and that's fine.
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.) """
> 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)
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.
Heard from some friends & accomplished scientists at a national lab: "if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research"
Points taken and appreciated. Thanks.
honestly my friend, i did not understand your comment.
I appreciate the feedback.
This is what happens when we are $40 Trillion in debt.
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.
Funny, because while science and research funding is being cut…the debt is still rising faster than ever, because I still see taxpayer money flying towards useless things more than ever.
social security and medicare?
That, interest payments, UFC fight night flyovers, ballrooms, wars, tax cuts.
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.
The massive increases to military spending would be a big part of it. Have to feed the war machine at all costs apparently.
all military is ~1/6 of ss and medicare. new military expenditures is a rounding error
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Defense (DoD) budget is $900 billion now. When you also account for veterans' health, expenditures on nukes (goes to the DoEnergy), military stuff in space (goes to NASA), border protection, etc., the total national security spending tops $1.5 trillion. That's not counting the interest on past wars.
Medicare + SS is about $2.6 trillion. With Medicaid, it's up to $3.3 trillion, but this still gets you nowhere close to "all military is 1/6 of ss and medicare".
Even if we are more conservative about how we count "all military" - for instance, include veteran's health and nukes, but not CBP - it still doesn't get us close to the 1/6 number.
Would you explain your reasoning and numbers a bit more?
medicare, medicaid, ss is > 4 billion and dod is 1 billion, so its more like ~< 1/4. sorry i forgot to mention medicaid, also my bad. i was eyeballing a pie chart.
Yeah, but I do think you need to count nukes, veteran's health, space launches for the Air Force, etc, also under "military spending". Better not to ignore them just because they're not properly under DoD.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You’re going to need to justify both of those claims.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
you listed some rounding errors
Interest payments, wars, tax cuts are rounding errors?
guess you also listed some non-rounding-errors
reparations to Iran
tbf, it's unclear to me at this point how much of that is going to represent $$ out of the American pocket. A lot of it is "guarantees of financing and investment" by other gulf states. Probably we're subsidizing Iran re-investment, and the costs of that are intentionally ambiguous.
If its USD dollars that are going to be spent, its not different than Fed literally printing money out of thin air and sending to Iran. The mere consumption of these dollars will have some effect on global inflation and will strenghten Iran long term
Maybe you should complain about the other leeches on your economy, like, eg, the military.
Science funding is a minuscule part of the US budget
It's an economic crisis where they cut taxes and start wars though
Starting wars was stupid and dumb and I hope the next administration cuts military just as severely but cutting spending severely isn't wrong.
Being friends with Israel and giving them billions of dollars annually was a dumb idea. There would’ve been no war between USA and Iran if there wasn’t such a close friendship with ridiculously acting Israel.
> are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum
It depends. Do you want to be rich?
People don't "fund" science, they "invest" in science.
There is a big difference. Often, each dollar invested will return multiplied by five, ten or more.
But you can also spent 14 millions painting a pool in a different shade of blue or much more building the Barbie's disco dance house and will end with... the same pool, or a disco dance house that you will never be allowed to use. Is your money after all.
The losers whining loudest about the debt just started and lost a war with Iran and now they’re sending Iran $300 billion.
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.
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raise taxes on the rich, cut pentagon funding by 90% and you solved society
Cutting military should be done, yes. But everything needs to get cut.
No, cutting R&D is the same as eating our seed corn. These programs pay off a lot in the long run, because they're a core and unavoidable part of technological progress.
They also tend to pay off big in societal progress. As an example, researching teaching and learning better results in better education, which results in better-trained kids and a more productive society. Research into clinical psychology leads to better therapy and emotionally healthier and well-adjusted people. Etc.
Science funding is one of the best investments we can make into the long-term success of the country, and it's a gross mistake to cut it. Literally one of the biggest mistakes we can commit. Science is a big part of what keeps us moving forward, and it is outlandishly cheap compared to the benefits.
Cutting public services and lowering taxes is what we've been doing since Reagan, and look where it lead us. And you still want more of that!?
To fix society, you need to bring money down the ladder, from the ones whose wallets got indecently fat in the past few decades. Public spending (outside of police and military) and higher taxes for the rich are the only way to go, lest you want society to get completely consumed by the neoliberalist death cult.
Some of the science spending was to help us prevent catastrophe and save our descendants.
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.
How much money has Trump just quite literally blown up in an idiotic, pointless war that has served no purpose other than granting Iran Billions in reparations?
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.
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
What's a better way, that's not the Chinese way?
What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
More decentralized decision-making (in the hands of universities and institutes), requirements for permanent positions as a requirement for funding, more funding of individuals and programs rather than projects, more randomized funding (lotteries etc), requirements for trainee positions to be tied to projected permanent positions, more early career development and retraining funding, etc etc etc.
The traditional model was actually pretty solid: a decentralized system focused on universities and institutes with lots of independent funding of individuals, with protection of those individuals. The shift toward funding of universities by a centralized institution (the US federal government) based on temporary projects with no protection of the individuals behind the projects, led to the pyramid schemes and vulnerable attention-seeking that you see now.
Academics in the US has been a tinder box for years. This past year or so has been like setting fire to the tinder box rather than cleaning up the fire hazard.
What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
This is obviously an overly simple narrative, but one real factor: the Bell Labs model was built around giving brilliant people a lab and a bunch of funding, and leaving them on their own to explore for a while. Lots of blue sky goofy research, a lot of which ended up being useful. That has its own problems, including “which few brilliant minds get this opportunity?” and “how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”
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.
“how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”
do we even need this? i think accepting that some will produce nothing useful is just cost of doing business. certainly better than imposing bureaucracy in name of accountability
Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future.
What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.
I’ve seen it claimed that higher taxes on corporate profits incentivized that lab model. Better to invest in risky research than have that money taxed away. When the regulatory environment changed, shareholders insisted they should get that money through dividends and stock buybacks, and goodbye Bell Labs. I don’t know how accurate that argument is, but it certainly sounds plausible.
My father worked at Bell Labs. He said the rules of the monopoly signed with the US govt drove innovation. AT&T, which operated Bell Labs, could charge cost plus a fixed percentage, but it was based on costs from N years earlier. I believe N=3. Anyway, if AT&T improved costs, it became more profitable.
The profits of the company depended on innovation. The employees knew that. And it innovated.
Sounds like this is what's still done in last decade Amazon who didn't report profit for so long. Though it's also stopped by another regulatory change that no longer regards S&W dev as R&D for tax purposes, but I don't remember the name.
I've heard that before and it makes a lot of sense.
Each of those companies had a profitable near monopoly, and were heavily vertically integrated.
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.
Bell Labs, which blew the rest away, was entirely government-subsidized in the form of the AT&T monopoly on telephone service. I'm not sure if AT&T was required to run Bell Labs or if it was just an enlightened policy that they were able to implement because of their unique circumstances, though.
> What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
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.
That's a good question, and I'd also add the Manhattan Project, the NIH, the NSF, NOAA, Fermilab, NIST, NCAR, and academic research including the state "land grant" universities. Every complex system has failure modes, but there must be success stories to learn from in all of those programs.
Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.
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Bell labs and IBM made gobs of money in their respective hey days
It was high capital gains taxes.
That meant the optimum for corporations was to invest the money in R&D. The cost of paying dividends was too large, so the advantage gained from developing competitive products was actually worth it.
As a bonus, high capital gains taxes also fill the state's coffers, which can also be used to fund research.
But as the western world has cut taxes down down down, the behaviour of big companies shifted to short term gains: dividends and stock buybacks.
Private equity is also to blame, because they set short term performance targets that remove the incentive for long term planning. The MBAs that have been installed as executives that follow PEs favorite playbook are another issue.
Those places grew out of an approach that had its origins in WW2. It was pretty obvious to the powers that be the USA won because science and engineering produced more and better weapons, transport and logistics than the enemy could. They eventually squashed both Germany and Japan with sheer industrial might.
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.
For profit capitalism, and smashing of near monopoly pricing power, and questionable morals.
A research system can adapt to lower funding if the rules are stable. What it can't adapt to is grants being frozen, staff disappearing mid-project, forbidden vocabulary changing
The real issue here is impoundments.
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.
Most people are still not aware of the extent to which the US government has been overthrown.
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.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.
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.
I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.
Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.
What a weird argument, sorry. You're positing that those working in science aren't doing it for your decided "correct" reasons. Does this go for other industries as well? We should fire all bus drivers that aren't in it for the love of the game? Can't one still provide value?
I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.
Booooo
Yeah just milk those suckers dry. Hope dare they try to do something good and ask to get paid
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.
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.
American exceptionalism is regressing to the mean.
Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density.
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.
> The technology sector is propping up the US economy
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.
"But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since."
The reason is copyright law keeping the monopoly going
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.
```
Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.
My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing.
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.)
@josephg Being from the EU myself, I'm surprised in the same way you are. There is certainly something good going on there as well, at least when looking at certain technologies in isolation, where the US leads.
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.
These are companies built in the heyday of American hegemony. The concern is not around dominance of existing science. Rather, the issues are:
- 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.
I see. So some of the damage done today will materialize decades from now. So we have to plan for that.
> 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.
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.
It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now.
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.
> Uh....that's more the fault of a president
Who so far has been put into office twice by?
Voters, but a minority of them.* Then kept in office by a minority (43%) of Republican Senate legislators.
* Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".
Yes, largely the fault of a people's imperfect system that their ancestor's elected representatives largely built and they inherited.
There are only one people that have any chance of changing that system though.
By your figures, about 50% chose Trump, twice.
Enough to condemn the US forever in the eyes of the world. It’s no longer seen as a reliable ally or a desirable destination by the majority around the world.
Strictly speaking, that Presidential race was not enough, since Trump alone would have been far-more survivable. A mere repeat of 2016-2020 would have been shameful and humiliating, but not the same kind of diplomatic self-implosion.
What is enough involves the outcomes of other elections/candidates, where almost all the Republican party decided that this time around they were going to go into full-steam ahead with Trump's whims and crimes.
He has, as predicted, destroyed the very idea of America, and all those who voted for him and are collaborating with him deserve the consequences, particularly his followers who he reliably uses then betrays. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t vote for him though, the slide into fascism is beginning and many don’t recognise it yet.
> 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.
Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts.
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...
Wow, you're pretty obnoxious.
Guess you're right, though
You tried calling them out with a “gotcha” to make yourself look smart and then got told off, but they’re the obnoxious one?
> This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. [...] Wow, you're pretty obnoxious.
As the saying goes: "Don't start nothin', won't be nothin'."
Grifty ignoramuses...?
The world didn't want American leadership.
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
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.
A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview:
"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."
And if you are any kind of strategic thinker when faced with that problem, you will do two things
1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.
2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.
China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.
Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.
R&D is hit or miss. And a lot will miss. It's really no different from the VC model where 90% of their startups will fail but the 10% that succeed will make up for the rest.
Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.
I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.
Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make
The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?
They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
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...
> Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
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.
Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.
The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.
Even with perfect information regarding R&D outcomes, capitalism is competitive.
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.
Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.
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.
The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.
"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.
If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.
Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.
> Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.
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?
Their needs are met.
They are turning to racism because of their wants and fears.
Except their need to be racist. Sorry, it's pretty easy to be any kind of bigot with all your needs met.
Yeah there are plenty of rich racists. But I think the racism party would take a haircut if people didn't feel screwed over.
I think this is true. When needs aren't met, they are more likely to follow a cult leader.
I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
Bingo. Michael Wolff illustrates nicely how Trump is the literal embodiment of the "greed is good" 80's culture.
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.
It's a bit reductive to pin this on Ronald Reagan.
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.
Or you could go all the way back to Reconstruction. The same way that an embittered Germany led to WWII, we are living with an embittered, mutant form of Confederate culture taking its revenge on the Union that put it down 160 years ago. The current culture war intermingles Southern Christian Conservative and Neoliberal interests. They're angry that the world has rapidly grown more progressive, as much as they're angry they lost their war. It might only take 5-10 years and eventually swing back, but it could also get worse, if their leaders become more extreme (strongman leaders often do get worse, as do religious extremists).
That's exactly how Professor Sean Wilentz put it on one of his podcast episodes. He referred to it as "the politics of the aggrieved" I believe, while tracing the literary and legal influences from then until now.
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Trump is the embodiment of a culture that was willing to make that vote. Of the populace that was tricked by The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal. Of the media more concerned with engagement than information. He spent his lifetime curating the image that made him uniquely positioned for his role, even if he didn't expect to get it.
I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
> Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years,
Any citations on this?
Sure
https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/
I'd be shocked to find anyone surprised by this.
That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.
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That human industrial activities are the primary direct causation of the currently observed climate change is a scientific fact, proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
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.
When we are talking about a context in which affirmative action and diversity statements were normalized it absolutely is hand-waving
No it's not.
If scientific investigation shows that there are many causes that have a relevant impact on "A", then saying that "A has multiple relevant and possible causes" is not hand-waving. It's stating the fact.
Hand-waving is to pearl clutchlingly throw out vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements" without properly stating what the mechanism is supposed to be and without providing any evidence that it is relevant in the last.
You know, polemic tribal whistle-blowing like you are doing. That's hand-waving.
>vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements"
And this is circling the wagons. Sorry but I can't believe someone who is intellectually honest is capable of writing such thing. You are either blatantly ignorant on this matter (and shouldn't be talking about it at all) or taking me for a ride.
It's preposterous that I have to explain how requiring a document in which you state allegiance to leftist ideals has an impact on the political makeup of admissions. I don't have enough frontal lobe damage to take you seriously.
So you admit you were lying. Gotcha.
There are not many reasons for climate change, it is in fact just humans. That should be obvious.
Ok, so we establish that "Climate change could seem to have many causes, but educated people know that human activity is the proven cause of the majority of the change."
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.
Let's just talk about the recent (past 500 years) change in the insulation properties of the planet's atmosphere.
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.
What in my comment makes you think I'm disputing anthropogenic climate change? It's about the pattern of logic you are applying.
You seem to think that because Climate change is a messy topic with one real explanation, every other messy topic must also have a single true explanation. No, it doesn't work that way
Except we weren't talking about climate change. We were talking about you lying. You said one thing, and the link you provided did not support your claim.
If you make a claim, and the thing you say supports it does not support it, kinda sounds like lying. You trying to make this about climate change just proves even further that you know you are a liar.
> That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
Well, a key difference is that race is an intrinsic immutable attribute, and political views aren't.
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.
> race is an intrinsic immutable attribute
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.
I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.
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.
Which categories are these though? William Z. Ripley's 1899 The Races of Europe or more, say, Steven Coons Carleton's 1939 treatise?
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
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)
> The categories are quite arbitrary, can vary, and can change. Yes, race is a social construct.
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".
Well I'm glad that you've apparently got a lower density of rank stupidity in Australia such that you've never been in situations where you've just had to let it wash over you while avoiding provoking it! In the US we've got an epidemic of it, quite obviously.
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
Australia was once awash with "real British" people who constantly attempted to lord it over all - it really doesn't pay to let self denoted elites get away with that shit.
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
> I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.
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.
White vs black skin, a very obvious category in a conversation about DEI programs or systemic bias in the US.
> that race is an intrinsic immutable attribute
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.
Ok fine, let's call it "ethnicity" then. Would you and your sibling care to comment on the actual point of the parent comment thread?
> fine, let's call it "ethnicity" then.
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.
What's horseshit is derailing a discussion about political bias in academia by quibbling over use of the word "race" when it wasn't even essential to the point.
People can't change between white and black skin. "Racism" exists in the US. Your gaslighting is embarrassing.
u/xdennis You think it's a fun fact that Charlie Kirk died? Crazy.
> It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.
I didn't argue anything.
I made a point to say that the link did NOT show a purge happened. It's funny because you are supporting my comment by literally providing another link as if to admit that the original one didn't support the claim.
But hey, pretend I said stuff. You're the one who thinks CK's death was fun.
I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism. I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.
> I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism.
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.
This is such a wildly elitist take
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&...
> 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.
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".
> My friend, I simply stated a conclusion that is very commonly accepted, including by conservatives (hints: populism, religion, gender roles).
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!
> "Commonly accepted" does not mean "is true".
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.
> 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.
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.
> I'm not buying this sudden retcon.
I mean it's right there in black and white. Yes, we've gone on a few tangents since then.
> literally what you were replying to in the aforementioned post!
No it's the AEI complaining that there aren't enough conservatives in higher education. There aren't any stats on summer barbecues MAGA adjunct professors weren't invited to. There aren't any anecdotes about an infowarrior instructor missing out on networking events. Just look at the quoted words above my request to see what they are in reference to.
What if its just self selection?
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.
And it's more than the self selection force of conseratives being too frightened that college will change their worldview. Take a liberal and a conservative with equivalent postgraduate degrees. Now offer them their choice of a faculty position or a C-suite career track. Based on the values that define their respective ideologies, is it a coin toss for which path either chooses?
Or even that the categories are shifting. People who hold perfectly reasonable classical Conservative viewpoints are now excluded from the Republican party. An institution failing to shift more right doesn't make it biased.
What if it's not that?
Let me give you a hint: the concept of DEI statement to apply for a position exists
FTA
> The lack of diversity among professors is problematic for both education and research, ostensibly the overriding purposes of universities.
I basically did a spit-take here. Lack of diversity is suddenly--and only--a problem when it doesn't include conservatives.
The funny thing is that racial and cultural diversity is higher amongst faculty than the general population. For decades America has attracted the brightest and highest-achieving college students and researchers from around the world, and those people eventually get faculty positions and advance their careers. It has gotten to the point that we hear people (usually conservatives) complain that some fields are dominated by non-white people.
And shock, as it turns out, American conservative viewpoints are actually a minority in the world. If higher education were actually representative of world population, 1/5 would be Chinese, 1/5 would be Indian, 1/5 European, and only 1/20 would even be American. If we were generous and say that half of America is conservative (it's not), then only 1/40 would be an American conservative. Most people in the world are not American conservatives. This is just a fact. They say that reality has a liberal bias. For the record, I don't believe it has a liberal bias, because American liberalism is just a weird grab bag of outposts on the cultural war front, but reality absolutely does not support a rightwing view.
We hear conservatives whine and moan about diversity exactly when it suits them, and we've all seen just exactly how they feel about diversity.
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It’s a pretty commonly repeated theory amongst far right / reactionary “thought leaders”. They call it the “Long March Through the Institutions”. I think the comment you were responding to was ironically referencing it.
The phrase wasn't concocted by the right wing, it's was coined by a left-winger as an explicit plan of approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
> To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.
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.
Yes, often one wing of political thought leaders will adopt terms and ideas from the other wing to serve as a foundation for their theories. I never suggested that the term itself was invented by someone on the right, merely that it’s a term widely used to describe the very specific idea of a calculated political effort to expel conservatives from academia. Ironically, Rudi’s ambitions were much more grand than simply transforming academia, he wanted to transform society.
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.
It's not especially a "right wing theory" anymore than climate change is a "left wing theory"
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...
You misunderstand, the idea of the “Long March Through the Institutions” is that innocent conservative intellectuals are the victims of a central, coordinated campaign for them to be expelled from academia in order to transform academia into an institution that serves leftwing agendas. It’s an explicit rejection that such a transformation could occur naturally, and can fairly be considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream specifically because it meets Barkun’s criteria for conspiracy theories:
as well as the lack of a smoking gun.I don't really buy that idea, but like the one black guy at the Country Line Dance, you get the strong vibe you are not in the right place, and kind of just want to leave, regardless of how people are upfront treating you.
The people you’re talking to don’t understand why you would ever want to have the Wrong Kind of Person around an institution as sacred as the university
Yeah you may not believe it personally but there are definitely many in the reactionary right who do. It’s not difficult to find their forums.
More likely that conservatives turned liberal once the right went all in on anti-intellectualism.
Of course the real question is: what does conservative even mean any more? The joining of Falwell and Reagan fucked both conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
Yep, it's at least partly this. I watched a lot of "moderate" academics become "liberal" after Trump's first election.
If you're a scientist by principles and a moderate by political views, and the right-wing party comes out in opposition to science, well, it's fair that you might then join the "pro-science party". Being pro-science becomes a liberal position.
So it's not that conservatives were "purged" from the ranks of academia.
Sure, but isn't the response worse than the problem? When intellectual standards are abandoned (as opposed to correcting a specific bias), discourse degrades into mindless anger, conspiracies and leaders who defraud their own supporters.
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.
Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
I think conservatives don't really know what they are, and that's a big problem. I think Sagan discussed this. Like science is a pretty well established "institution" dating back centuries. Intellectualism dates back kind of as far back as humanity, almost every large civilization I can think (that left records) of had strong intellectual presence (including Greeks, Romans, etc.).
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.
Conservatives views are not anti-science, so much as they are a demand that science only be allowed to answer certain questions, and only answer those questions in specific ways.
That is anti science. It’s just faith based dogmatism. You also see it with conservatives calling belief in the scientific process being able to produce knowledge being called scientism like it’s just faith based.
They literally look down on the idea of updating your previous beliefs.
Liberal views are very anti-science on race. Some famous professors even lost their positions just for adopting the statistically correct position that the majority of the difference in outcomes between races is accounted for by IQ, which is mostly immutable after childhood, not some societal conspiracy against certain races.
Which famous professors would those be? This is an active research area, with papers published year-round.
James Watson the guy who discovered DNA was stripped of honorary titles based on comments related to race and IQ. there was a lot of discussion about that recently when he died.
Before I reply, let me ask: is that your best example?
Does he not meet the criteria of a famous professor?
Maybe you could start with an actual practicing scientist. One problem you're going to run into here is that, as I said, this is an active area of study. If these papers are firing offenses, someone ought to be telling HR.
Person 1: give me an example of someone who was kicked out of academia for uncomfortable truths.
Person 2: [gives examples]
Person 1: oh ho! But those people are not in academia any more! They're not "practicing scientists"!
Person 2: ...
Yes, me and my Calvinball rule of "actual scientist prevented from publishing on this subject".
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.
...I don't think Watson was kicked out for "uncomfortable truths", but because his conclusions kept overstepping the evidence he presented, and in particularly sexist or racist ways.
Again, to be explicit: he did not establish that his claims were true.
That is why it's quite worthwhile to ask if Watson is the best example available. The guy was pretty openly and casually sexist, and his racism wasn't much better.
Even stipulating the imprecise language here, he couldn't "establish that his claims were true", because he did not work in these fields. This is a pop science argument where any "scientist" can just "do science" to answer deep or controversial questions, but obviously that't not how science actually works. His racist comments pertained to several highly specialized fields of study, none of which he worked in. You might as well have asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
"just for adopting . ."
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.
I mean I like to hold my cards closer to my vest than this, but if we're just going right at it:
(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.
Not a Nobel prize winner (his advisor was though), but Stephen Hsu was a fairly high profile case. I remember watching a 2008 Google lecture of his on YouTube in 2019 and wondering- wow, the kind of research people could present a decade ago. Lo and behold...
This is closer, but again:
(1) Lost an administrative position, retained his tenured academic position.
(2) Did not practice in the space. As I understand it, he got jumped for appearing on Stefan Molyneaux's show (Molyneaux is a proud, open white nationalist, though that was not as obvious at the time) and saying he was agnostic about group differences.
The key thing here is, again: Hsu doesn't publish in this field. He himself loudly pointed this out! He's a physicist, not a geneticist or a psychometrician/quant psych.
From what I can tell, the mob attack on Hsu was not well founded. It's not my claim that there haven't been brigaded attacks on academics; there obviously have been. Rather: it's that the scientists who actually practice in this field and actually publish results continue to do so, largely without drama. "Group differences" in "intelligence" (or proxies like EA) are not verboten in academia.
There's an example of a scientist who published on group differences and lost his job, but that example won't do the work this thread hopes it'll do; he was fired for good reason.
"Liberal views" are not anti-science on race. "Liberal views" tend to reject the reductionism and selectivity of "race science" that points to arbitrarily defined measurements like IQ as being the sole explanation for things we can easily prove have multiple better, non-arbitrary explanations.
Bluntly, racists have decided IQ measurements mean they're not racist instead of wondering whether IQ, as a measurement, is itself racist.
Race science is just about the apex of pseudoscience. Academics haven't rejected it because it doesn't mesh with their liberal politics, they've rejected it because it's junk.
Watson's comments are not based in scientific fact. First of - there is no such thing as a "race". Putting people in classes based on the colour of their skin is ludicrously simplistic, ignoring the incredible genetic diversity in the human genome. There's simply no viable scientific concept that is able to capture the features that "race" is supposed to capture.
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...
Simple people are drawn to simple models of the world. IQ is an extremely simple model.
For real. We are doing race science on HN?
Turns out racists love tech news too.
Are we just ignoring all the major societal factors that happen to children before and during childhood?
Yeah, I recall that average Irish citizens and Irish immigrants were measured to have pretty bad IQs around a century ago. This changed with improvements to nutrition, health, less alcoholism, and education.
So the research shows that IQ is not purely innate. And this is, at this point, rather old research.
Funny how Conservatives are always so big on the free market, except when no one wants to buy their ideas.
The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.
They want the 1850s.
1850s was the beginning of the railroad boom. You're thinking 1750s.
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The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
What education cuts? Education spending per pupil has skyrocketed since the 1970s.
I think it's the 20's all over again. We've even got Robber Barons.
I don't think this era of ignorance and anti-intellectualism can be compared to a previous point of time in modern America.
We funded research in the 1950s . This is more like the 30s.
"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.
In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
My point is simple. Real world is highly complex and dynamic system. It is not a linear relationship e.g European scientists never came --> US remained backward.
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.
You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.
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.
Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.
In the 50s taxation on wealthy individuals reached almost 90%.
And somehow they still managed to be very rich!
Americans, broadly, didn't vote—those who did are obviously brainwashed cultists.
Back to the 1930s.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.
Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions.
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.
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As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school.
I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.
On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.
im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades
Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, but national labs do hire foreigners/non-citizens, albeit possibly not from all countries with eligibility for all roles.
Are you thinking of affirmative action?
Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence that affirmative action was no longer required and thus ruled against it in new cases.
> affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President.
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...
I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
Yeah, it's just nativist nonsense from completely the uninformed.
Stop vagueposting and make a proper argument. This isn't X where you get paid for posting bait.
When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China.
The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
Others have observed this as well, but it is considered a disputed finding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program
My 1.8 GPA is literally discriminated-against, too. So unfair!
it's more like skin color, ethnicity, and religion
Who is the one that discriminates? You mean the white american prof?
My undergrad program in the late 2000s had very, very few white profs.
are they Americans?
You’d hafta ask them I suppose, if they’re alive. This was over 2 decades ago. My guess is no.
Not really true but white Americans love to say that. Americans are the biggest bullies and and victims.
I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
Well why Americans are not willing to take those PhD offers that pay barely above poverty line for 5 years or so? The answer is obvious, they would rather take a job in industry that pays miles better.
There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
I get all that. I grew up in Santa Cruz and wish I could go home but can't because of the cost. I can't imagine having to leave my entire country. I'm not trying to put down immigrants in those positions. I am inspired by immigrants. I am inspired by foreigners who come here.
But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'.
I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive.
H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it).
OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
A good and balanced take, this. Too bad we don't even allow those on the political stage anymore :(
All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
I think it is misunderstanding to think that Phd Salaries will increase to high level if immigrants left. Will NIH or NSF dump 3 x more money? If that is the case are civil servants in USA getting super great salary (a friend works for DMV in NJ and she says pay is awful)
> There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with.
> Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc.
Long flights and leaving friends/family behind? You mean like... most undergrad students in the US? Sitting on a plane is the argument?
By which it is implied such trips are obviously non-starters for foreign students. This is the most evident during Thanksgiving and Christmas when most undergrad students in the US reunion with their family and friends.
You’re ignoring the important bit, the inbound flights.
What tax dollars are you referring to? America famously does not pay for people to go to higher education at any real scale.
They're talking about PhDs, many of which are funded by grants.
Post docs and PhD’s working in labs get Grants sure. grad students however which is what we’re talking about here, do not. Or at least not government ones.
I'm a white American and I've heard a handful of my fellow white Americans say this, but they can't actually show me real world examples or show me how it actually affected them.
It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!"
When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens.
Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
None of this addresses that it's basic human nature. Nor provides any way to improve anything.
"I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything.
"Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude." Pick one of the above. You can't pick both.
"It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this." It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.
I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.
Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?
It's actually kind of a hard problem.
There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?
Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?
This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.
Just do as DOGE/Musk: ctrl+f for "diversity" and deny all grants. Even if it had nothing to do with "woke", for instance diversity in bacteria cultures or whatever...
That's the machete. Now present a way to do it properly.
I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.
As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work.
There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.
Ah yes, nothing incentivises focus on "real work" like having to check that your abstract doesn't contain any words that trigger the administrations' censors after some ignorant edgelord's algorithm defunded your study of transgenic mice or black holes.
Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place
and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.
Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.
"R&D is a cost center" what an insightful take.
What a depressing view of the world.
https://archive.ph/zn6FI
and it's 100% Russell Vought
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
If Vance somehow gets the reigns and/or 2028 it will be even worse because Vought will get even more power/control
* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
It's 100% christian evangelicals (bible fundamentalists) that inserted themselves into the republican party after the counter-culture movement of the 60s. They hate freedom and liberty, full stop.
At Heritage, in the break room over the microwave, there's a sign: "science delende est."
Surely, you mean over the coals. :-)
Vought has openly declared himself as a Christian Nationalist. Christian Nationalism as a whole is dead set against scientific research.
You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.
the recent drama about science funding to me highlights one of the main problems with our grant-based distribution system: which is that it is unsurprisingly very frail to fast-moving changes in government and society at large.
science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.
these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
> a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
you can do this, you just need to find a chump who is willing to spend the money.
this exists and the chump is howard hughes
You either get a slow moving multi party democracy or you get winner-takes-all presidential mechanics that can reshape the country every four years. You can't have both.
First of all, multi-party democracy needn’t be slow. Parliamentary systems in multi-party countries often react faster than the US. This is due in part to legislation being systematically easier to pass.
Second of all, winner-take-all presidential mechanics don’t imply a four-year cycle of funding instability for research. That only happens if the president has sufficient control of funding. Which, through the administrative state (which is supposed to basically be a delegate of congressional authority), really is supposed to be insulated in large part from presidential, partisan politics. With increased centralization of power in the president (which, imo, is largely just an ~evolutionary response to Congress’ sclerosis), this insulation is lost, exposing research more to the four-year cycle of heavily partisan presidential politics.
Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals
They're not own goals, they're achieving what they set out to do.
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Unironically parroting uniparty lines is moronic. Sure there are problems with the Democrats, but both-sideism is at this point being wilfully blind.
As an external observer to US politics it would be great for the country to move past the two-party system, but to say they are the same is ridiculous.
You have to remember that many of us are worried about the effects on everyone but the people pulling the levers are only worried about effects on themselves, and (at least in the short term) they are absolutely benefiting (e.g. enriching) themselves, regardless of how much damage it does to everyone else.
> The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
More efficient than any foreign actor
But that man is a foreign actor.
Whatever happened to stripping criminal immigrants of their US citizenship and putting them in a torture cell in El Salvador?
Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.
Policy doesn't matter any more. Every case is judged as an individual case. Elon hasn't had his citizenship stripped because he's powerful and the president likes him, that's it.
Musk can afford the Trump Gold Card
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There used to be a time when you came across accounts from 100 years ago - and you'd just be flabbergasted by the whimsical stupidity when laid out so plainly.
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
My wife has a Masters in Biotech and has presented in national conferences. Anyone has a good lead on where the next science hub would be? She is amazing at what she does, but the current status has her studying SWE so she can land a job, and that really kills me on the inside.
Honestly its been a long time coming. Acting as if academia and ivy leauge level research isn't incredibly sick is dishonest.
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.
burning it all down is not the way to go though
Define "burn it all down" because it deff isn't
whatever the current admin is doing classifies as burning it. if not all the way down, then halfway down
If the deffinition to you is anything the admin does then that's hard to argue.
the admin cuts funding by 40% ~ cutting something by 40% is bad for it ~ burning something down is an euphemism for acting on something in a way that's bad for it. what are you not following?
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It's crazy the science funding was cut so much, but I wonder if even after the cuts it might still be better than what we have here in Europe.
There's been a Europe -> USA brain drain for decades due to the better funding, salaries etc. they can get there.
There was a lot of talk last year about Europe creating funds to attract US researchers burned by these cuts - I haven't heard much about that recently, but if it worked it could potentially have created/started a reverse brain-drain.
After the election my very first thought was that this is the start of the Chinese century, since America has voted to step down.
Seems to be playing out.
No other country punches itself in the face as hard or as often as the usa does.
And if you tell us to stop, we’ll punch ourselves in the face even harder just to prove you can’t tell us what to do.
Never underestimate the power of American spite.
The US situation is mitigated by both Russia and China deciding to make massive, foolish maneuvers at the same time as ours. However neither can match how stupendously we are lighting our future on fire in every possible dimension.
What are the foolish maneuvers that China is making?
China is undergoing a 2008 style financial crisis due to real estate speculation and deflation due to very weak domestic spending.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
Refusing to bail out real estate speculators was bold and painful, but I'm not sure it was wrong.
Not at all what’s happening. China’s government privatized real estate and was the engine of the bubble by disallowing localities from taxing and only allowing revenues via land sales. See above how central planning in the CCP has forced massive debt upon localities.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
The citizens with real estate were the speculators. They gambled on being able to squeeze even more out of the next guy and they lost. In the US, we would just have taxed the kids (again) to bail out the homeowners (again). I have a hard time calling that more responsible.
Not is but the obvious one was COVID policy during 2020-2022. It triggered the closest thing to a domestic unrest you can get in China after 1989, a large exodus of middle class, and an almost 50% crash in their real estate market. The last one is very deadly and still ongoing because that is how China financed its growth for decades.
At this point they can use the Gaben strategy and easily win.
That would require making babies and not making mistakes. Humans are generally/historically better at the former, but these days both seem to be a challenge.
Up to 40% unemployment or very low employment.
What? 4.6% https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.NE.ZS?locat...
That's because they've reclassified unemployment status. Anyone working 1 hour out of N months is not considered unemployed.
Unfortunately there is another possibility: a return to great power competition.
I don't see that happening. The US debt will hinder any big expense that could keep it in any game long term.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-in...
> Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
[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...
> high debt > Use Total Debt
I never seen that metric used anywhere else aside China
Almost no other country has it's government pretending to be so many different entities.
It is absolutely a Chinese century. Even the comment above isn’t wrong per se - great power competition is normal during the interregnum, ie as Arrighi described it - one hegemon is rising while another is declining. But eventually one of them does rise and the world conforms to that - ie America in post WW2.
Well China cant seem to make a single friend beyond North Korea and Russia. Everyone is a bit wary of them.
I mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
God, this is depressing.
I think it's difficult, if you're a millenial/zoomer/whatever we're calling these things, to understand just how much of the world genuinely liked and respected and wanted america involved in their local affairs.
America obviously wasn't perfect and many, many more people than trump were involved with squandering all of this goodwill, but we still had some left over before he showed up.
Its not a static system. Things will swing back and forth like a pendulum. And through those oscillation we move forward. Diff today is everyone is getting their heads filled 24x7 with a whole lot of info their grandparents never had to digest about how the system moves.
Maybe AI is not a good example. It is extremely efficient as money burning machine, but for everything else...
The US has DOUBLE its current power production in proposed expansions, mostly solar and batteries. In 2004 it had like 20%. The US grid is set to grow.
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
Look at GDP growth in the US vs EU over the last 10 years or so if you want to talk about innovation. Europe has been stagnating economically and real productivity growth is critical to a modern economy. The large hadron collider does some impressive research, but it doesn't move the sort of innovation in practical machinery and infrastructure that powers a modern economy.
All that GDP growth in the US is advertising. Google isn't some sort of innovator. They sell advertisements.
What practical machinery and infrastructure has the US innovated in that time frame?
Google's research team invented the Transformer Architecture at the center of LLM "AI". A huge invention.
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.
Comparative GDP based on more current methods (well, decades too at this point) rather than the graphs you are probably seeing show a stable co-trend over the past quarter century.
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/us-europe-comparative-productivi...
As an European, yeah, we probably are doing really good with basic science, but what about innovation when it comes to productivity? Why there is no AI lab (apart from Mistral) in EU? Why there is no European model (and hasn't been probably ever) in the pareto fronteer? Or any other really innovative company in the last while (I believe Spotify was the last European unicorn that transformed the landscape in the market they operate into).
Don't get me wrong, I rather lose the superpower race but enjoy my privacy and work benefits that folks in the US dream of. But the topic was superpower competition and I don't see the EU going anywhere in that front.
We are fragmented, among the top 4 EU economies 2 are struggling with debt (France & Italy), Germany economy is stagnating and the amount of bureaucracy hinders any attempt at innovation, ... .
If you can find any European university without an AI lab, I'd like to see some names. Meanwhile we have places/initiatives like this, making open models https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/research/research-fields/inform....
Fragmentation isn't really there in science and development, fragmented financing (basically the main point I'll cede) is being worked on, and markets will always have to deal with European diversity; we're not all going to speak English tomorrow and eat the same, dress the same, etc.
The US can just hyperinflate to pay its debts.
And kill the savings of what remains of the middle class. Probably they will do it though, as it is a slow thing and is not felt by the average Joe like a tax hike or loss of benefits. So the policians won't trigger an outrage by doing so.
hyperinflation is very fast, but I think they'll do it, by accident because they don't know how anything works, but I think it's impossible to accurately predict when.
> And kill the savings of what remains of the middle class.
I would assume majority of US middle class' savings are in the real estate or securities. Why would hyperinflation kill these?
Nah, that fantasy is over, with the new Era of Moron Power. The future of humanity of absolutely Asian. Western culture is Rome on Fire.
The irony is that the people who screamed the most that Rome was on fire aggressively pushed for what you brilliantly call Moron Power.
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
I'm sorry but Rome certainly didn't have airplanes.
I'm referring to this, which has aged quite poorly:
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-ele...
Not to the extent I'd like — it stopped working on Huawei too.
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sure: https://mbs.edu/news/why-diverse-teams-are-more-profitable
That was debunked: https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters...
Oh hey, a good faith argument. I thought about going and googling for more studies supporting my position, but I'm not sure if that actually has much of a point?
Maybe I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.
Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.
Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.
Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?
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We've banned this account. HN is for curious conversation, not this.
> "real" diversity of thought isn't allowed under globohomo. The goal, of course, is handouts for race communists and to further solidify communist control of political
What the fuck?
For a Chinese century you'd need there to be anyone in China in a century. With the one child policy they have run out of young women and are running out of middle aged men. The Chinese, and Asian, population pyramids make Europe look young and vibrant.
(Biased) opinion is completely ignoring the crux of the issue! Cuts stemmed from the reproduction crisis, which is decades in the making. Politicians steering the field is a direct symptom from massive moral failures within. The bad apples have finally spoiled the entire harvest. Add-in the current administration's stupidity, with it's joy of heavy cuts everywhere, and the field becomes indefensible in the overall federal scope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that.
But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.
From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.
[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
I think all the following can be true simultaneously:
The whiplash cuts are stupid, short-sighted and causing major damage
The bullying tactics around protests and immigration are villainous and are eroding one of our greatest institutions
Science and higher education have fallen short of their ideals and need reform
https://archive.ph/zn6FI
This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
It is far worse than "this administration", the population in general are vastly undereducated, to the degree they do not even realize how serious this is.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
_Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater [0] talks about this too.
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.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfc542q
Science, or more specific to what we're talking about, public research which happens mostly in universities, has turned political long before this administration.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
> realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
What happens right now is vastly different than before. Of course there are different priorities in funding for each administration, but those are usually more gradual shifts and especially don't cancel running grants arbitrarily.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
Just lies upon lies. Always the same weak rhetoric of "it's both sides!". The truth is that science didn't get more political, the right is just going in a direction orthogonal to material reality.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
A sociologist or historian who's funding has been cut all the same reads these comments, takes a drag of his cigarette and thinks to himself this all could have been avoided if they'd have paid attention to his field over the decades but deep down he knows that it was impossible all along.
The fact that people think the current state of chaos is a consequence of recent developments clearly tells us more about why it is in chaos than those types of people have the capacity to hear or understand.
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
Yeah, while it's particularly bad lately, I'm remembering Richard Hofstadter's book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", which one the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for tracing the religious, cultural, and economic roots of american anti-intellectualism.
These problems are not new.
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So maga actually means make china great again.
Chaos is putting it mildly. It's on the verge of non-existence. Can't have infrastructure nor propensities for investigating truths when the administration's most vital interest is the ability to tell lies about anything and everything.
Where do you go if you’re looking to leave the US with family and you only speak English?
Complicated question... Do you have marketable skills that could land you a job in demand with a visa? Or sufficient savings to "buy" residency somewhere?
To the beach. To relax. Don’t become a burden on other countries. Learn the language first if you really must move.
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!
Scientific American is not the organization to be providing commentary on this as it is in the center of the maelstrom and often cited as an example of the cultural shift that preceded the backlash.
No wonder Trump is referred to as “nation builder” in China since he’s building them up by tearing down America.
tbf I don't think Chinese citizens are faring any better than the West reporting on the ground, it's also possible there are numerous problems coalescing at the same time for humanity on a global scale.
Fair call, we are in an era of converging crises.
I've often idly thought that if I had a billion dollars in play money, I'd set up a copy of Bell Labs.
Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
It's not an opportunity to improve until the source of chaos is removed. You don't rebuild from a hurricane while the winds are still 150 mph.
You're right, and yet it's also true that existing institutions have ossified. There is immense inertia.
This will get downvoted to oblivion, but it's not obvious to me this shakeup is a bad thing.
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.
I think the core of the problem is a profound disrespect for the rule of law and competent leadership in this administration. This is an administration that does not believe in competence because it has never experienced it. It doesn't believe in laws because it thinks everyone is as corrupt and wicked as they are themselves. It doesn't believe in science because science doesn't produce evidence for the facts they've chosen to believe in.
That total R&D spending number is heavily private sector, and is often not what a normal person would consider research, as there is a tax incentive to identify activities as R&D.
To clarify - CORPORATE R&D is up to $1T, while academic R&D is $115B
That is certainly a massive increase in spending... Seems a bit hard to believe.
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).
Of course it is, that's this administration's goal.
I think there will come a day, shortly after the arrival of “AGI”, that people will declare all the useful science humanity could possibly do has already been done, and there is no need for scientific research anymore. We solved everything that could be solved.
Science will become purely for recreational purposes, maybe funded by millionaires, billionaires or even trillionaires looking for a specific set of outcomes.
>Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure.
"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.
More scientists need to get into politics?
Commenters are taking seriously an article that quotes the guy who was literally the lead author of Proximal Origins about the state of science. No matter what good points the article brings up elsewhere, this one act alone places its entirety in the trash for me.
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.
Nearly 40 trillion rollers in debt.
Make that $40.3 trillions.
I think the number to Iran grew since the $300b number.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
...which is why there are no emerging far-right-populist political movements in welfare-heavy societies like the UK, France, and Germany, right?
You didn't read the article, did you? People there are getting radicalized because of cuts to social spending.
This will not be a popular comment, and I love science and scientists. I have spent my career working with scientists and investing in science. But the research community as a whole has a credibility problem. Does this problem merit financial cutbacks? I can't say, but it sure makes the rhetoric and justifications easier for those doing the cutting.
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.
I don't think any of this gets better by cutting funding.
If there is a better way to hand the future to China on a platter, I honestly haven't seen it yet.
All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress.
But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.
I agree. Unfortunately there’s a well-established pattern of the new administration not rolling back most of the nonsense put in place by the previous administration. For example once you get addicted to the tariff revenues there’s not much will to roll them back.
The article buried the lede. DEI was the bridge too far that lit a massive tinderbox among the electorate who wanted the vast majority of what happened with DOGE, to happen. DEI was the appetizer, and once the teeth starting biting it found a lot more than anticipated (USAID). The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
> The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.
Yeah, if only they had tried to appease the fascists harder and earlier. Thanks Nigel.
MAGA idiots think about nothing but owning the libs. The barbarians have taken over the country.
envy is very destructive feeling.
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
Wait a second you're kind of right. That's why they always want to pretend they "could've done physics"
Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
> This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).
Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!
Is China actually particularly interested in allowing non-Chinese foreigners to immigrate there ostensibly to do science but really so they can permanently settle in China and have children who are considered fully Chinese under law?
Yes. Myself and colleagues used to get outreach fairly regularly to join new faculty at universities trying to establish themselves in China. I'm in industry these days, but some of my colleagues report a significant uptick in these types of outreach over the past year.
> It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from,
No, that is just your opinion.
I'm not the big Lebowski but this is the "opinion" of the majority of scientific societies in the US as well as watchdog organizations who have long followed science regulatory and spending action.
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.
Yeah, I mean it's bad in this really direct, near-term way. But we couldn't keep going the way we were going. It was insane. Pants-on-head retarded. And so my read, and my hope, is that this current period of trouble is the price for getting back on track. Treating truth as something that can be discovered. Funding people and ideas based on merit.
So that is their, possibly biased, opinion.
Pedantry isn't really an admirable trait.
I mean...sucks bro. I can imagine that in much of science, where DEI and the wokeness is unrelated to the things you actually study, it was just lip service. And you were sometimes forced to hire idiots, I guess. But when you study human behavior, it's not just lip service - the DEI edicts, speech controls, etc. are about the things you study.
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
> Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
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http://archive.today/zn6FI
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I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year:
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
> I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Realest comment in this entire post
The Dow is at 50,000! Why can't we all just be happy about that?! /s
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First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9.
The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
What DOGE has actually struck is not the procurement budget for launch vehicles, but the destruction of the internal engineering capability to design them. The benefit of destroying that capability, in turn, greatly favors SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't want NASA to be a smart partner that builds its own rockets; it wants NASA to be nothing more than a giant wallet that just pays money.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
[1]https://www.medianama.com/2024/09/223-google-files-antitrust...
To be clear, DOGE's strategy is not actually for America.
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
> The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
It's genuinely amazing(ly depressing) how quickly and effectively "certain groups" can create enemies and whip up public sentiment to attack them and gain power because of it.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but he hasn't been part of this administration for a while. And also i'm not quite sure you have his views on NASA funding (one of his main customers) right, you're just making them up.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
But not as smart as bernie madoff, who had much better results, right?
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No, this isn't correct. The Scopes Monkey Trial would like a word.
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
I mean, what's more important to you, discovering truths via scientific research and reports, or conforming to your political ideology? (or getting revenge for perceived attacks, I guess)
'just let the bully beat on you, otherwise they will be justified in escalating'
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you might be an american, and know this, but when you say "complaining" it's a negative tone.
If you support US Science, you need to say "more rightly pointing out that..."
Good. Very good.
Could you please explain? I fail to understand your comment.
He means GGP saved GP the chore of reading by pegging the article as a typical Elon hit piece. You know how HN articles can be so longwinded.
Thank you.
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Please don't do this* here.
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.
It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.
Ok, but that doesn't make the GP a good Hacker News comment. It simply repeats a cliché, and a good HN comment should be more substantive than that.
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
> 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"??
You are 100% correct. The (horrible) abandoning of funding for these needed science projects is not science, but politics. My entire point. We need to try and bring these people back to reality not using science but persuasion/being politically intelligent in our speech with them, not dumb destructive (but feels good for a minute) Jon Stewart style belittling.
I never said half the country is irrational. I specifically called out that people in power do not care to live in a shared reality with the rest of us. They lie directly [1][2], or dismantle the institutions that would be able to push back on their lies [2][3]. Countless examples of this in the last few years.
I do think a non-trivial portion of the population has opinions that have unfortunately diverged from what a board of climate scientists or epidemiologist would say is the appropriate state of affairs, and yes this is a problem we all need to figure out how to correct.
[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...
Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel. The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.
Definitely. We should ignore it and it'll go away by not going into these damn climate conferences. There are so many of them!
Exactly. One side prefers being miserly on science while spending lavishly on needless wars.
In normal times, what you say is obviously true.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
Valuations are often an absurd fantasy. The notion is that Musk could find a buyer who would be willing to pay that based on the value of each share he owns. It’s not real money. He can borrow against it but not too much, and he will have to find a way of paying the lender back without selling stock. The money is not real.
If he dumped all of his shares the value of them would essentially go away, like with any commodity.
He gets to exercise power based on his valuation, and in that sense, it is real. He is now known as the world's richest person and first one point five trillionaire, even if he doesn't have one point five trillion dollar bills in his closet. He gets people to suck up to him for fractions of it - "do X for me and I'll give you shares worth a million"
> Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. […]
Try harder to engage in dialog. Basic economic theory contradicts your claim. You need a much stronger logical argument to have any credibility.
No, no, they're definitely correct. There's no hard limit on the amount of money created. Excess money creation just results in inflation.
More to the point: Congress is being profligate in other spending, and miserly w.r.t. science, so it does indeed look like the science cuts are not motivated by fiscal responsibility.
Your quip about "basic economic theory" doesn't really address the point they're making.
the US can trivially and renewably acquire infinite money (in USD). It is an infinite resource.
Wealth on the other hand....
Um, "basic economic theory" would include the processes that create money and the limits on them, which can be disabled, and what happens if the limits are disabled
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what had accumulated prior to ever electing him.
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Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.
Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
American politics are so absurd.
Honestly, yes. I would expect that, or at least whichever party controls Congress to defund efforts that would seek to hurt them. The real abberation is that university funding has gone unscathed for so long. It's said too much and honestly I hate it, but consider the hypothetical: what if 80% of professors expounded right wing ideologies for about, 60 years? Would you not expect some kind of backlash?
I’m sure the same justification was trotted out in Hungary when they purged the intellectuals there, too.
Eh, I think there's a bit of a logical jump between "professors hate Trump" and "professors are expounding left-wing ideologies".
Yes, most professors are opposed to Trump. But when you're talking to a professor of, say, metallurgy, he's not using his classroom to rant against Trump. He's using his classroom to teach students about metallurgy, which is a pretty dang useful service to a modern industrial economy. Professor's personal political views aren't interfering with the economic and scientific value he's providing to the country.
Which is why the universities and research centers have largely been untouched until now. Until Trump, both sides could recognize that even if there was political disagreement between the professors and the politicians, the professors were still doing important work.
Trump took it personally, and on that personal basis he's now eroding our scientific and technological future. We're eating our seed corn, here.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
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This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
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I don't think I've ever met a leftist denying evolution.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I wonder who makes assumptions that these differences are marginal and refuse or deny any studies that conclude otherwise. The left version of climate change if you will.
You make a good point in that there are large, slow-moving, but statistically significant effects in climate change, gender, and race.
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.
> any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot
I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites?
Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
And that's the most anti-scientific attitude a person can possibly have, what you just said.
> Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.
There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.
So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.
ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal
Totally, but there’s a lot more to science than just evolution.
Sure, but that's one of examples OP gave and it doesn't match my experience. Doesn't leave a great impression of the rest of the argument.
For the record, I provided a counterargument and it got flagged and downvoted.
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I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
It's closer to 70,000 years. If not, then explain the Australian Aborigines.
Oh good point, sorry got the years mixed up in my head somehow.
> I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups
I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.
> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.
It’s not suppressed though, it’s just that the current evidence points in one way and much less in the other. There are plenty of review papers you can read to see how people weigh the evidence which you can of course disagree with: https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)00678-r
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026699
https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000131
Because if you give an inch to that line of thinking, it leads to broader dehumanization and mass tragedy.
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
(Eugene T. Gendlin)
No matter how noble your intentions are, if you reject science then you're anti-science. Leftists need to learn to admit that about themselves instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too.
This is a good point.
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
These are basically the same thing! /s
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Yes, the current pushback is crude. Yes, real science is being damaged. Yes, the people doing it are often stupid or vindictive. Also yes, the academy helped create the conditions for this. Also yes, almost nobody inside the system had the courage to object when the incentives favored them.
Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.
Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.
I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah
don't call me shirley
> Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects.
Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle
"The Cost of Excess" The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) (2021) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o...
"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
> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented
Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.
> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.
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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.
Let's not pretend like research funding was money well spent before Trump. It wasn't. If tax payers actually knew how research funding works in practice, they wouldn't want any of their tax dollars to be spent on it.
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.
There's an emergency!!! To find out what it is, pay me!!!
or do your own research
Fascist are defunding critical studies that would rocket the US ahead in science. Studies such as:
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!
US Science needed this. Racism, sexism, plagiarism, and fraud were rampant in the academic community. It's going to take a long time to fully fix the problem, but we are on the right path currently.
No it did not, and even if there was a correction needed, this most certainly is not that correction.
President of stanford was fired over fraudulent research if that's not rampant then what is?
What do you want more than the firing?
If a CEO commits a crime does that mean the entire industry must ne shut down?
What sort of reasoning is this?
Broken window theory to the extreme.
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.
This should apply to politics and industry as well then, in your opinion? Cut all subsidies for industries that commit fraud, research or otherwise, like the oil giants for example? No pardons for cryptocurrency Ceo's like CZ and shutdown cryptocurrency?
I am saying it's one of many examples of which I personally experienced and those I know have also experienced.
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.
You are willfully blind if you do not think those have been major and prevailing issues in our insitutions. To kill a virus, it can take drastic measures, like a fever. But after it's over, the host recovers and is once again healthy
Idiotic sentiment. "I needed a tooth removed, but the Dentist removed all my teeth! Thats ok, technically he did fix the problem!"
> How did we get here? Careful what you wish for, that’s how.
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?
I'm confused, is this some comment on the krebs cycle or something?
Naval had a great tweet recently:
“Science is not a process, a credential, or an institution. It is the unflinching pursuit of truth, carried out by the few, co-opted by the many.”
When did we start institutionalizing it? How about letting the truth be bent? What about the focus on consensus? That’s also what lead to the current situation.
> How did we get here?
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.
Science has always been in Chaos. I know of zero laboratories doing “science” that isn’t biased or otherwise tainted with politics or money
The US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from there
You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing
This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get funding, something that is unacceptable.
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You know what is detached from reality? Reading a comment criticizing Zionists, and somehow interpreting it as some long running stereotype about Jewish people, which the comment never mentioned. It's hard to believe that people are still doing this pearl clutching in 2026. Most Zionists are Christians, and a large portion of them, including the US Ambassador to Israel, believe in the Rapture. Connect those dots.
I don't think you're going to win much sympathy when you've demonstrated you can't distinguish between generically "jews" and "Israel."
You can hate the genocidal Israelis and how far the AIPAC/Israel lobby has crawled up the ass of nearly the entire US political apparatus without being a neo-nazi that wants to stomp out the Jewish faith.
Private enterprise is vastly more competitive than public institutions in every single facet of society. Defund all public science funding so we can have another 50 SpaceXs.
The government can't fund everything. Too much of the budget is tied up in transfer and interest payments squeezing out other more viable research. The federal government doesn't have unlimited funds. Something has to give.
The president said we dropped 250 million dollars worth of bombs in a single night last week.
> Something has to give.
Just so I’m not misunderstanding, you felt that science funding should be the first thing to give? And that other recent controversial expenditures should take priority?
What’s the military budget again? How much did the war we lost in Iran cost?
Trump's tax cut on the wealthiest 1%? $1,000,000,000,000 over ten years.
Daily cost of the Iran debacle: $2,000,000,000.
We sure as shit have money to fund research.
We prefer to fund second yachts, third vacation homes, and bombs.
Or Europe and Asia can handle more of the cost.
Down voted, imagine that. Predictable as sunrise. So what should be cut?
Trump's ballroom.
Trump's "irs lawsuit settlement fund"
The salaries of all the lawyers being paid to justify illegal and discriminatory executive orders.
ICE's budget.
TSA's budget.
"Border Wall" construction costs.
Should I go on?
Most of those things a tiny rounding error. Interest and social services are the only thing the government actually spends money on.
I know it's fashionable to say stuff like this, but you know what's also a rounding error by that logic? THE SCIENTIFIC GRANTS WE'RE DISCUSSING.
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?
Perhaps it could. And perhaps you think erecting tents on the White House grounds for state events, like a third world country, is okay as well. The government funds a ridiculous amount of "science", some of which has no utility. That's not the government's role. These types of projects can be funded by the university or private industry or not at all. Being a "scientist" and wanting to research some idea DOES NOT entitle you to taxpayer funding. Again, as I and others here have noted, the money is in interest, defense, and transfer payments. Personally, I'd like to see reforms on all social programs. If one is capable of working, then they work. Until you live somewhere that has a thriving economy in government money and see the abuse, you have no idea what you're talking about. Should government money be used to buy booze? Potato chips? I assure you that it happens everyday. I've seen it first hand. So fix the social programs and then we'll talk about funding fringe science research. And let's quit funding the 120+ foreign biolabs doing DOF research. We've seen that script before.
You left out military spending. It's kind of a big one.
I agree with all of that but you don't put a dent in spending outside of tackling ICE budget. TSA is more neutral since a lot of funding from that comes from airline ticket fees.
There is only 5 items that matter:
Interest on Debt.
Social Security
Medicare.
Medicaid.
Defense.
I'm not trying to balance the budget here, just find a few billion for research.
These counter arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't sound like left wing talking points. No one on this thread nor in the media knows the reality of what happened in Iraq. That most here dislike Trump, I get it. But, to pretend that this administration is somehow behaving differently than others in the past is ahistorical and disingenuous at best.
You’ll get downvoted to hell for this comment but it’s a legitimate concern, especially as Europe throws more of its money into socialist nonsense. It’s time for Europe to start picking up more of the tab, NATO included.
All of Europe is capitalist since 1989. What is "socialist nonsense" according to you? Nationalized health care?