> 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.
gignico 2 hours ago [-]
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
IsTom 1 hours ago [-]
I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
adornKey 9 minutes ago [-]
It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.
Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.
tovej 5 minutes ago [-]
It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
Eddy_Viscosity2 54 minutes ago [-]
The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
defrost 43 minutes ago [-]
In the US, sure.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
jordanb 2 minutes ago [-]
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
It’s true. In the US reality itself has become controversial. Maybe the oligarchs’ lies are just as valid as objective reality? Who can say!
kakacik 41 minutes ago [-]
I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.
So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.
gignico 59 minutes ago [-]
Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
foxglacier 2 minutes ago [-]
Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
scrollop 1 hours ago [-]
And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
999900000999 9 minutes ago [-]
In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada.
It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.
Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.
Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
2 hours ago [-]
KolibriFly 2 minutes ago [-]
And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway
oersted 2 hours ago [-]
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
dmd 12 minutes ago [-]
One of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response".
Whoops, keyword match.
MemoryHoleHQ 2 hours ago [-]
Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
qnpnpmqppnp 1 hours ago [-]
Quoting the article:
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
MemoryHoleHQ 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ModernMech 24 minutes ago [-]
> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
MemoryHoleHQ 20 minutes ago [-]
It's called meritocracy. That's how society used to work: people applied and the best ones got the job.
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse" instead of more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
estearum 8 minutes ago [-]
You know you can't just put one topic into the grievance bucket (science funding), shake it around, then pull out a different topic (orchestral hiring practices) and expect to have a conversation, right?
brorfred 38 minutes ago [-]
Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?
Inclusion Plan
Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies.
The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators
It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders.
Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
MemoryHoleHQ 24 minutes ago [-]
All of this seems awful. I don't understand if you are a scientist from your text.
If you are, you should be called by your institution on why you are spending your working time doing this instead of proper work. If you aren't, and just one of those people hired to write proposals, the institution should explain why they are spending money with you. Someone has some explanations do give here.
This reads like some ideological Op Piece, not a scientific proposal. None of this has any place in science.
> ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals
Discrimination. Recruitment plans need to include the best individuals applying for the job. I don't care what is their background.
> They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution
Who is paying for this stuff? Why is there even a DEI office? Is this paid by taxpayer money?
> talent pool in climate change science
Oh. I get it now..
> peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives
Are we talking about scientific/work related common interests and objectives? If so, why do you need to pay someone to do that? These are adults, can't they do it themselves?
If not, why is this even in the proposal? Again: Who is paying for this?
> Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination
Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
inigyou 40 minutes ago [-]
Such is life in fascism.
This is why we used 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.
1 hours ago [-]
timr 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jfengel 41 minutes ago [-]
You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
mech998877 9 minutes ago [-]
The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
timr 38 minutes ago [-]
> You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.
Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.
nixon_why69 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
timr 16 minutes ago [-]
> To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
SanjayMehta 11 minutes ago [-]
There is no such thing as social science.
mold_aid 29 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps better than "if I don't like it, it deserves to have its funding cut"
fireflash38 32 minutes ago [-]
> work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing
Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth.
Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outcomes? Perhaps confounding factors?
timr 30 minutes ago [-]
Yes, we should fund grants to make sure that the heliocentric model is still wrong.
djeastm 8 minutes ago [-]
Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done? Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?
inigyou 38 minutes ago [-]
Like that program to study the mating patterns of sterile flies in Panama, right? They cut that because it was a $300k waste of money. Do you know what happened after they cut it? The US got a $300m infestation of those flies.
mDyJzDPmBdG 30 minutes ago [-]
How does it feel to spread miss-information on internet? The Panama barrier was broken by screwworms 2 years before the cuts. It was dumb decision but didn't directly cause current infestation.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
Thank you for providing your perspective. I really hope HN has a 'pre-vouch' button as I know your comment will be flagged in no time, even though it's quite articulated.
jfengel 39 minutes ago [-]
I believe it's a fairly common attitude. Thus far it doesn't seem to be down voted.
I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
timr 23 minutes ago [-]
You didn’t write a coherent objection, you just said I didn’t understand what I was talking about.
rjsw 24 minutes ago [-]
A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data.
Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
timr 19 minutes ago [-]
> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.
Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.
Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.
iwontberude 12 minutes ago [-]
Low effort flame bait
ModernMech 45 minutes ago [-]
So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
timr 42 minutes ago [-]
> So where are researchers who want to study topics you don't personally like supposed to get funding, in your view?
I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
estearum 11 minutes ago [-]
Just because the medical system hasn't adapted to the (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research doesn't mean it's not valuable or should be stopped. The takeaway from SDOH is that social determinants are by far more powerful forces on people's health than actual medicine.
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
ModernMech 19 minutes ago [-]
I understand you personally are of the opinion that it's bad research, but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
timr 11 minutes ago [-]
> but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
carlosjobim 25 minutes ago [-]
From anywhere except from the tax payer. Lord knows there are academic institutions sitting on a lot of cash.
ModernMech 16 minutes ago [-]
Why not, I pay taxes too and I want researchers to study things you don't like. I don't want to fund the military, should they get their funding from Lockheed? Lord knows they have enough...
carlosjobim 12 minutes ago [-]
Exactly: You and every other tax payer is entitled to have an opinion on how the money is spent, so why your original comment about "topics you don't personally like"?
dluan 1 hours ago [-]
What the fuck
timr 1 hours ago [-]
Intelligent response.
dluan 21 minutes ago [-]
America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Avicebron 1 hours ago [-]
It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
timr 54 minutes ago [-]
> It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
Avicebron 42 minutes ago [-]
My bad, on mobile, I think your stance deserves a more thoughtful critique.
Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.
estearum 10 minutes ago [-]
Note: There is always some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled literally all through the entire course of scientific history.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
iwontberude 8 minutes ago [-]
You are the one making a fool of themselves with bullshit strawmen. Why should we waste our time with a chud like you? It’s flame bait.
Schlagbohrer 1 hours ago [-]
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
Rebuff5007 2 hours ago [-]
> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
nkrisc 2 hours ago [-]
Science is partisan because “reality has a well-known liberal bias”, to quote Stephen Colbert.
johnp314 1 hours ago [-]
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Rebuff5007 23 minutes ago [-]
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
giladvdn 56 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. One side prefers being miserly on science while spending lavishly on needless wars.
rzwitserloot 41 minutes ago [-]
In normal times, what you say is obviously true.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
inigyou 33 minutes ago [-]
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation? Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
hackyhacky 56 minutes ago [-]
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
33 minutes ago [-]
ModernMech 27 minutes ago [-]
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what the US had spent prior to ever electing him.
I don't think I've ever met a leftist denying evolution.
ffsm8 50 minutes ago [-]
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
brookst 24 minutes ago [-]
It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
IsTom 46 minutes ago [-]
> any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot
I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
36 minutes ago [-]
joenot443 37 minutes ago [-]
Totally, but there’s a lot more to science than just evolution.
IsTom 6 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but that's one of examples OP gave and it doesn't match my experience. Doesn't leave a great impression of the rest of the argument.
Helloworldboy 39 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
cubefox 49 minutes ago [-]
It's quite common for people on the left to categorically deny that evolution could explain any cognitive group differences between human populations.
snaking0776 23 minutes ago [-]
I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.
Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.
MSFT_Edging 17 minutes ago [-]
Because if you give an inch to that line of thinking, it leads to broader dehumanization and mass tragedy.
estearum 5 minutes ago [-]
This is a good point.
There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.
Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).
These are basically the same thing! /s
irchans 54 minutes ago [-]
Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
svachalek 21 minutes ago [-]
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
KolibriFly 3 minutes ago [-]
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
changoplatanero 2 hours ago [-]
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
45 minutes ago [-]
Herring 7 minutes ago [-]
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
You probably don’t need the word science in the headline.
fabian2k 2 hours ago [-]
This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
bsenftner 1 hours ago [-]
It is far worse than "this administration", the population in general are vastly undereducated, to the degree they do not even realize how serious this is.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
alberto467 2 hours ago [-]
Science, or more specific to what we're talking about, public research which happens mostly in universities, has turned political long before this administration.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
orwin 1 hours ago [-]
> realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
fabian2k 1 hours ago [-]
What happens right now is vastly different than before. Of course there are different priorities in funding for each administration, but those are usually more gradual shifts and especially don't cancel running grants arbitrarily.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
thrance 1 hours ago [-]
Just lies upon lies. Always the same weak rhetoric of "it's both sides!". The truth is that science didn't get more political, the right is just going in a direction orthogonal to material reality.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
api 2 hours ago [-]
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.
svachalek 9 minutes ago [-]
The US situation is mitigated by both Russia and China deciding to make massive, foolish maneuvers at the same time as ours. However neither can match how stupendously we are lighting our future on fire in every possible dimension.
Schlagbohrer 1 hours ago [-]
No other country punches itself in the face as hard or as often as the usa does.
collinmcnulty 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately there is another possibility: a return to great power competition.
marcyb5st 1 hours ago [-]
I don't see that happening. The US debt will hinder any big expense that could keep it in any game long term.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
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.
brnt 7 minutes ago [-]
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
inigyou 31 minutes ago [-]
The US can just hyperinflate to pay its debts.
bsenftner 1 hours ago [-]
Nah, that fantasy is over, with the new Era of Moron Power. The future of humanity of absolutely Asian. Western culture is Rome on Fire.
api 1 hours ago [-]
The irony is that the people who screamed the most that Rome was on fire aggressively pushed for what you brilliantly call Moron Power.
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
franktankbank 54 minutes ago [-]
I'm sorry but Rome certainly didn't have airplanes.
Havoc 2 hours ago [-]
Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals
simonh 2 hours ago [-]
They're not own goals, they're achieving what they set out to do.
__patchbit__ 1 hours ago [-]
They're the uniparty metastasizing since JFK was assassinated for refusing them nuclear weapons, which they stole piece by piece anyways.
K0nserv 1 hours ago [-]
Unironically parroting uniparty lines is moronic. Sure there are problems with the Democrats, but both-sideism is at this point being wilfully blind.
As an external observer to US politics it would be great for the country to move past the two-party system, but to say they are the same is ridiculous.
Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
svachalek 14 minutes ago [-]
It's not an opportunity to improve until the source of chaos is removed. You don't rebuild from a hurricane while the winds are still 150 mph.
dmpk2k 5 minutes ago [-]
You're right, and yet it's also true that existing institutions have ossified. There is immense inertia.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
> The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
More efficient than any foreign actor
athrowaway3z 55 minutes ago [-]
There used to be a time when you came across accounts from 100 years ago - and you'd just be flabbergasted by the whimsical stupidity when laid out so plainly.
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
tokai 2 hours ago [-]
But that man is a foreign actor.
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Whatever happened to stripping criminal immigrants of their US citizenship and putting them in a torture cell in El Salvador?
Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.
inigyou 29 minutes ago [-]
Policy doesn't matter any more. Every case is judged as an individual case. Elon hasn't had his citizenship stripped because he's powerful and the president likes him, that's it.
Nesco 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
panny 16 minutes ago [-]
You guys can't see it can you? You're just in the filter bubble. Let's take this quote from the article, shall we...
>“The most passionate and creative scientists are very intuitive and very driven by emotion and curiosity,” says Gregory Feist, a psychologist at San José State University who studies scientists. “Until Trump, they’d been able to keep political questions out of mind.”
See, that's a filter bubble state of mind. "Driven by emotion" evidently means calling anyone who disagrees with you a "science denier." You were being politcal all along. Now that the people you spent the last 30 years insulting are in charge, they want blood for all the bad things you said to them. Only now is it "Oh no! I don't like being political!"
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." You bit the hand that feeds you and you stopped getting fed. Whether you like it or not, both sides, the red and the blue, are your government. If you attack either, you're attacking your government. That's not a wise decision when your government pays your salary. You can't just let someone like James Hansen run off at the mouth for decades and not expect blowback.
jdw64 2 hours ago [-]
Reading this article, I think Elon Musk is a genius. He's truly smart. He's cutting the budget of his smartest competitor, NASA, so that when national scientists and engineers are thrown out onto the streets, they'll end up at SpaceX.
Not only that, but real innovations like cancer treatments require decades of unprofitable 'basic science' grunt work. Musk and his friends don't care about saving humanity 30 years from now. He talks about going to Mars with nonsense lies to fatten his own pockets. And by filling the science advisory committee with VCs instead of scientists, he has turned science in America from a 'pursuit of truth' into a 'Silicon Valley VC portfolio.'
Elon Musk is a genius. He will destroy the growth engines that could produce his future competitors, and he will reign forever.
The smart thing about Elon Musk and his friends is their ban on international cooperation among scientists and their word censorship. They seem to think that viruses like Ebola will enter the country by getting a Trump card issued. Clearly, smart people like them cannot understand ordinary people like us. To them, it's only natural that everything comes through a visa, so they probably think viruses come through visas too.
Elon Musk's lecturing about border etiquette for viruses can be described as a kind of elite duty. Indeed, injecting morality into something immoral is 'noblesse oblige.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9.
The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
jdw64 1 hours ago [-]
What DOGE has actually struck is not the procurement budget for launch vehicles, but the destruction of the internal engineering capability to design them. The benefit of destroying that capability, in turn, greatly favors SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't want NASA to be a smart partner that builds its own rockets; it wants NASA to be nothing more than a giant wallet that just pays money.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
To be clear, DOGE's strategy is not actually for America.
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
alberto467 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry to tell you this, but he hasn't been part of this administration for a while. And also i'm not quite sure you have his views on NASA funding (one of his main customers) right, you're just making them up.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
2 hours ago [-]
crises-luff-6b 47 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Weallneedclima 30 minutes ago [-]
I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year:
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...
But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.
Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
spwa4 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
you might be an american, and know this, but when you say "complaining" it's a negative tone.
If you support US Science, you need to say "more rightly pointing out that..."
emsign 2 hours ago [-]
Good. Very good.
TavsiE9s 2 hours ago [-]
Could you please explain? I fail to understand your comment.
jr_isidore 1 hours ago [-]
He means GGP saved GP the chore of reading by pegging the article as a typical Elon hit piece. You know how HN articles can be so longwinded.
TavsiE9s 55 minutes ago [-]
Thank you.
Rendered at 12:31:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.
It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.
Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.
TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.
That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.
If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
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.
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
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.
Whoops, keyword match.
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.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse" instead of more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
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.
If you are, you should be called by your institution on why you are spending your working time doing this instead of proper work. If you aren't, and just one of those people hired to write proposals, the institution should explain why they are spending money with you. Someone has some explanations do give here.
This reads like some ideological Op Piece, not a scientific proposal. None of this has any place in science.
> ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals
Discrimination. Recruitment plans need to include the best individuals applying for the job. I don't care what is their background.
> They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution
Who is paying for this stuff? Why is there even a DEI office? Is this paid by taxpayer money?
> talent pool in climate change science
Oh. I get it now..
> peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives
Are we talking about scientific/work related common interests and objectives? If so, why do you need to pay someone to do that? These are adults, can't they do it themselves? If not, why is this even in the proposal? Again: Who is paying for this?
> Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination
Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
This is why we used 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.
I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.
Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.
Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.
To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.
You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.
There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.
(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)
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?
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?
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'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].
One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".
[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!
You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"
But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.
Oh stop with the silly straw men, already. I think research is good. I did research for decades of my life.
I am against bad research.
> how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!
Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.
I don't think you're being a sincere interlocutor, but you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science? The current system sucks at this, and is not only loaded with bias, the bias is built into the system.
We probably not do worse to just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.
Come on. I wrote a multi-paragraph post with an argument (I am the OP), and the parent wrote: "what the fuck" in response.
Reply to him and ask him what he thinks is so offensive, don't ask me to make an intellectual rebuttal. I honestly shouldn't have responded at all, but I couldn't resist because of the commenter's profile. It's just so common to see someone in science who won't even engage with an argument like mine, and dismisses it with profanity/insults.
Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.
Did you not study the history of science at all during your jaunt through academia?
Not to say we need to just lay down and accept the badness, but it's total nonsense to suggest that your exposure to some badness is an indictment of the enterprise.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
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."
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation? Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
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.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rBNtOCCSSRc
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.
I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
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.
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
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...
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
There has been a massive, decades long educational failure in the United States, and probably the entire western hemisphere of culture: no where are people taught how to manage disagreement. due to that, we have this moronic destruction taking place where "idiots of authority" see no reason not to dismantle anything that irritates them, and nobody has the langage to explain nor the peer power to stop the desolation of our entire supporting infrastructure. All because idiots of power do not like being told and proved they are wrong. So, power removed the education that taught people how to debate without emotions, and here we are.
That's the simple reality. Administrations impose their politics, but also universities do the same, and they're not any more noble for doing so.
Research groups need to have more independence and that can only happens through a very meritocratic funding process, and also, at the risk of sounding like a STEM lord, by being very cynical and realizing that not all fields of research merit the same amount of funding. Countries like China have already realiezed this.
Unless america does it _very_ different than the rest of the western world, this is already the case. STEM research receive way more public funding and have way more PhDs than other fields, in my country it's almost two order of magnitude (this has to do with the cost of instrumentation mostly, but not only).
On the "science have turned political", yes, but that has always been the case. You can be political and non-partisan. UNSCEAR has been political from its creation, but is still non-partisan, anybody can use its research to make partisan proposition on nuclear. Same for WHO, it was _obvisouly_ political, advanced the interest of the first world in poorer countries, but it stayed non-partisan. This is probably the same for any medical research: obviously what is researched is political. Non-partisan though. Just because heart attack research was done by, with and for men, women also benefit from the research (although to a way lower degree until like 2010).
The only counter-example i can think of is the GIEC group3. I don't think it is partisan, but i can hear arguments that say that it is, and debate. But it has the lowest amount of funding of the 3 groups, and Group 1 and 2 are not partisan at all.
And if you think this administration is prioritizing science with actual applications, I have a bridge to sell to you. The cuts they made are not sensible policy, they are inherently destructive and wasteful. They aborted studies that were still running, so a lot of money was spent and we'll never get any results from that because they were not finished.
Science will appear political to you if you claim that climate change isn't real, that vaccines and Tylenol give autism, that oil prices will soon go down when the wells are destroyed, that the economy is hotter than ever when everything's going to shit, that the weather channel is just anti-American and woke when they predict rain for the UFC Freedom 250 held for the emperor's birthday...
Seems to be playing out.
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...
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?
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
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.
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.
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
More efficient than any foreign actor
Now we lament that in 70 years somebody is going to chuckle when they read such non-sequiturs as: The great Texas protein crisis of the late '20s was made several orders of magnitude worse - if not right out caused - by the first trillionaire's purge of the government. At the time justified as a cost saving measure while the president would spend >35% more than its income while saying things were going great and had never been so great at anytime in history.
Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.
>“The most passionate and creative scientists are very intuitive and very driven by emotion and curiosity,” says Gregory Feist, a psychologist at San José State University who studies scientists. “Until Trump, they’d been able to keep political questions out of mind.”
See, that's a filter bubble state of mind. "Driven by emotion" evidently means calling anyone who disagrees with you a "science denier." You were being politcal all along. Now that the people you spent the last 30 years insulting are in charge, they want blood for all the bad things you said to them. Only now is it "Oh no! I don't like being political!"
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." You bit the hand that feeds you and you stopped getting fed. Whether you like it or not, both sides, the red and the blue, are your government. If you attack either, you're attacking your government. That's not a wise decision when your government pays your salary. You can't just let someone like James Hansen run off at the mouth for decades and not expect blowback.
Not only that, but real innovations like cancer treatments require decades of unprofitable 'basic science' grunt work. Musk and his friends don't care about saving humanity 30 years from now. He talks about going to Mars with nonsense lies to fatten his own pockets. And by filling the science advisory committee with VCs instead of scientists, he has turned science in America from a 'pursuit of truth' into a 'Silicon Valley VC portfolio.'
Elon Musk is a genius. He will destroy the growth engines that could produce his future competitors, and he will reign forever.
The smart thing about Elon Musk and his friends is their ban on international cooperation among scientists and their word censorship. They seem to think that viruses like Ebola will enter the country by getting a Trump card issued. Clearly, smart people like them cannot understand ordinary people like us. To them, it's only natural that everything comes through a visa, so they probably think viruses come through visas too. Elon Musk's lecturing about border etiquette for viruses can be described as a kind of elite duty. Indeed, injecting morality into something immoral is 'noblesse oblige.
The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
This is a classic monopoly strategy that cloud companies used to employ all the time: destroying the customer's internal capabilities[1]
[1]https://www.medianama.com/2024/09/223-google-files-antitrust...
The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they are killing their own country's science,' while someone like you might see it as 'smashing the power institutions of the opposing camp.' I think this is simply a difference between an external and internal perspective.
Honestly, just looking at the ban on international cooperation mentioned in the article, it comes across as nothing more than a desire for control.
He is a genius though, great results on the market.
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
If you support US Science, you need to say "more rightly pointing out that..."