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Hoooo buddy. At multiple levels. I've just read some BAAs. I've read a variety of papers from labs who cite their federal funding on all of said papers. And I've even talked to folks about their publications and been told, "Yeah, this is pretty dumb, but it's what the BAA called for and what the PM said he wanted us to do." And yes, I've even spoken to PMs who are totally out to lunch.
The problem is that understanding such requires significant domain expertise, and if you're a high-level politician, you have \approx no way of distinguishing between advisers who actually have such expertise and will be honest with you, versus those who are out of their lane or riding a grift.
Sounds like Trump is taking the best approach, then.
I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’m convinced that if Trump took a shit on the sidewalk, you would jump online to tell me it was the obvious way to revitalize struggling American neighborhoods.
Is there anything he’s done that you don’t actually like?
No, but I would ignore it, so you're directionally correct. I'm not interested in making problems for Trump, there are plenty of people perfectly willing to do that on their own.
It's especially funny that Biden was practically in diapers himself due to his physical and cognitive decline, and in fact it was the mainstream media telling me for years on end that he wasn't, and that he was doing fine.
Amy Barrett. Gorsuch was shockingly great, despite his ruling in Bostock, so I suppose I can't expect that level three times in a row. Kavanaugh seems like a squish, but he's not as bad as Barrett.
As for this term? Nothing yet. A+, keep up the great work.
In general, I dance with the girl that I came with, and fight with the sword in my hand. This is what I've wanted to have happen for years. I wanted an outsider in the white house. I wanted the deep state to be destroyed. I wanted an Andrew Jackson, slay-the-banks type figure. I'm not going to nitpick the details now. Slash the budget, burn the institutions, repeal the income tax, throw up huge tariffs.
You know, drain the swamp.
I didn't vote for Trump in 16 or 20 because I didn't trust him and he didn't deliver much, but after seeing the Biden administration I regret that. I learned my lesson, and so this first week has been exhilarating. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Trump to hit the ground running like this.
By what metrics are Kavanaugh and Barrett bad?
How much I like their rulings, of course, and their willingness to stand on principle, bite bullets, and fix wrongs that are long-overdue rather than maintain status quo.
Basically, I think they're too much like Roberts, who I hold in contempt. Kavanaugh, especially, looks like he's in the mold of Roberts. Barrett simply looks like O'Connor, and in ten years she'll be siding with the D appointees more often than not.
Gorsuch gets my respect because he says, "but for sex," and, "the treaty says all of Oklahoma belongs to the Indians." He doesn't narrowly rule to avoid disruption, he rules on principle and the actual laws as they are written. His willingness to bite bullets is a sign of principle and courage, characteristics I do not perceive in Kavanaugh or Barrett.
Can you give some examples of "bad" opinions by Kavanaugh and Barrett and elaborate on how Barrett and O'Connor are worse than Kavanaugh and Roberts? Gorsuch seems to be generally respected by his ideological allies and loyal opposition, alike, for the reasons you cite and more, but opinions of Roberts and O'Connor are more complicated (I can't remember anyone saying O'Connor was outright bad...), and Kavanaugh and Barrett are relatively new and lacking in major decisions.
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I mean, I don't know? There's still a lot of really good stuff happening. It's just a fundamentally hard problem to separate the good from the bad. The past approach has been, "Since we can't tell, we'll just fund pretty broadly and hope that there are at least enough good people around that some quantity of it gets oriented well; yes, we know that this will have some waste."
Obviously, the completely opposite response is, "Since we can't tell, let's just not fund any of it." I have a feeling that such a strategy probably doesn't perform better.
Any other strategy mostly comes down to people trying to figure out, "So, uh, how can we tell the difference between the good and the bad?" We then get different funding models, folks studying "progress" or "metascience", and then mostly question marks?
Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
It needs to perform substantially worse for the first system to be justified.
When you simply don't spend the money, you don't have to take the money from citizens in the first place. Simply doing nothing is far, far better than taking money from productive people to redistribute to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people.
We haven't even gotten into the fact that what you think is good and bad isn't the same as what I think is good and bad. Another reason why doing nothing is superior to doing anything.
Well, for one example, the biggest funder of such research is the DoD, coming in around 40%. The potential downside of killing them all and letting god determine which are his is that your country's enemies may surpass you in strength and decide to kill all of you and let god determine which are his. This is a threat that may, indeed, be the house of many grifts, but it is entirely possible that those are the stakes. If one cuts everything and then wants to see how the performance of the new system differs from that of the old, how would one measure? You don't get to access the counterfactual.
This is the case for basically all DoD spending in general. You have very few observables to determine the "real" "quality" of the expenditures. They only get meaningfully tested and measured very rarely (hopefully). DoD grift in general is legendary (as it is in every military in the world). Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money? Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius? Just stop taking that money from citizens and redistributing it to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people?
Isn't carving out DOD science totally doable and doesn't leave us funding people studying third genders in treefrogs?
Like yes, the government will always be funding some number of stupid people doing stupid things, because they are trained in the proper mouth noises to pretend that some stupid and worthless fish is worth anything. But it seems like we can cut down on absolutely useless science substantially without impacting military projects.
If one wants to, absolutely. But yeah, my main point is that separating the wheat from the chaff in all of these areas is a near-impossible problem. It is plausible to say, "Some areas are important enough that we'll tolerate more graft," but of course, determining which areas are which is a political problem. You may want to preserve DoD research funding, but I don't know if KMC does. He's almost certainly right that there is graft there, too, so you probably have to convince him (or enough folks that have the ear of the President or whatever) to tolerate that graft, because you're probably not going to be able to really distinguish between the good and the bad at a low level.
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Yeah, it's sort of interesting - you run into this problem sometimes with "civilian control of the military" where the military tries to bamboozle Congress, but I suspect "civilian control of SCIENCE" is an even harder nut to crack. At least there are a lot of Congresscritters who are former servicemembers.
Right. But unlike the military, there isn't actually a need for Congress to fund any science. Let it all be done by the private sector publicizing their breakthroughs as patents and citizen-scientists who want to spend their own time and effort and money doing research. Burn academia to the ground.
Who is funding fundamental research into topics like quantum mechanics that don't yield an immediate benefit but is still highly useful for society? The private sector probably wouldn't fund this research because the benefits accrue to a lot of competitors as well. Citizen-scientists can't fund it.
Is it? Honest question.
I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit that I based my opinion on this ChatGPT answer:
Okay...but all that I read here is "This stuff already worked before the current iteration of quantum theories, now we just understand it better" and not "novel quantum theories improved our ability to do this stuff". I'm not saying that's how it is, but that's all I gather from this chatbot response.
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Sure there is.
That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?
If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.
A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.
More like saying there is no need for the government to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage people to teach their kids to read. Which is true. When I was a kid in Peru, there were government schools, but they were seen as the last resort of the poor; anybody who could afford it sent their kids to a private school. Which, admittedly, was much cheaper since all anyone needed to set up a private school was a spare garage and enough money to hire a teacher, but that's just another point in favor of the free market.
I'm not seeing the "benefits", is my thing. Like, let's leave aside the nonsense where grifters get paid to do research on hating white males (not because it doesn't happen, but because it is too easy a target) and focus on the strongest arguments for government-funded public research; things like NASA and the LHC that are discovering real scientific data that it is impossible a private non-government actor would have done.
How does New Horizons probe improve my life? How does finding the Higgs boson? How does developing the correct theory of quantum gravity? Why is the government stealing money from me to pay people to do these things?
The beauty of market-driven research is that it only happens when somebody with money has a positive expected rate of return, which means convincing other people with money to pay for the results, which means that the research is expected to make people's lives better in some way.
Government grants have no such fundamental tether to reality.
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While some kids will teach themselves to learn to read, the most critical times to develop are when they are so young they arent reasonably given all sorts of freedoms. So parents need to be somewhat dictatorial in directing that part of development or else it can be entirely missed.
OTOH, government efforts at teaching learning have failed at nearly every level for a century ++
Now think about something more complex than merely reading. What are the chances government is good at enabling it at a wide scale?
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Well as pointed out above, there's a "military science" Venn diagram, but yeah generally speaking I think the .gov funding the academy is distortionary and bad.
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