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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   33666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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A quick report from the world of science and academia.

Strange times indeed. Grant proposals my lab has been working on for months have disappeared. I’m seeing and hearing of several nodes in my network which are in federal positions just disappearing.

I also advise students who are building software products for clients, and of both clients that are government agencies, NASA and US Forest Service, today I have learned that one has essentially cancelled the project at its end stages and the other has been MIA for weeks (Ironically, the cancelled product was a system that would significantly improve the efficiency of a key NASA analysis workflow).

Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.

The grant I’m relying on to complete my PhD is on shaky ground according to people close to the problem, and I fear that funding cuts could affect the only backup plan I have, which is continuing working as a teaching assistant. (A luxurious $15k per year + tuition remission). The key expert on my committee in the tech I’m using is at NASA and I fear for the longevity of his position.

Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.

I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.

I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.

When DOGE was first announced I thought, great! I deeply dislike Trump but maybe this will make it actually be quite worth it in the end if we can fix the behemoth of government and make it more efficient. Maybe the country will be able to start to build things again, like the tech guys say, it’s time to build! But what we got was quite different from that hopeful version of me had in mind. SV types spearheading the dismantling of the US institution of science. That was not on my bingo card! Why was this the first move of DOGE? Noah Smith argues that it’s an ideological purge rather than an attempt at efficiency, and I guess that makes sense. Ultimately science funding is quite small potatoes in the federal budget. So why is it among the first major target of the administration and DOGE?

I don’t want to catastrophize here. Science in the US is being weakened and downsized, and somewhat purged for touchy topics, but it’s not being destroyed. I’ll probably be able to pull through and finish my program, at least that’s my current hope.

Yet it seems quite obvious to me that these moves are going to significantly weaken the US against competitors such as China. Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine. I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as a big picture, long term thinker who understands the role of science and technology in human advancement. So I’m at a loss for why he would direct focus onto weakening science in the US as among his first moves if his interest really is with the medium to long term success of the US.

Just as a point of information, I'm an academic who's had direct experience with both REU (NSF) and some of the analog programs at NIH. They absolutely discriminate in favor of women and minorities (and strongly against men, whites, asians) sometimes to the point of outright exclusion, as a matter of policy. They are, strictly speaking, engaging in illegal stuff. The official rules for applying for these programs say they look for programs that encourage women and minorities to participate, but in the cultural and political environment of academia for the past 20 yrs (or longer), this has meant a very strong version of "affirmative action". I haven't looked into what's happened since Trump's recent "discrimination is illegal" orders have taken effect, but if REU programs are being shut down, it's probably not because they're considered wasteful, but because, as presently constituted, they are illegal. All this is true of essentially anything to do with education in any form, as I imagine most people here know.

My guess is that DOGE went after the just because its easy to cancel.

Given what you describe it sounds like you have options still. If the Federal gov won't fund you, then I would contact other places that might generate grants and are affected by wildfires, like the state of California or Canada, if your research is as helpful they would be interested.

Alternatively you'll need to bet on yourself. You can take out gov subsidized loans up to $20.5k a year, and live like your poor (roommates, donate plasma, meal prep every meal).

Even with a fellowship that probably excludes other employment, your graduate director knows this only makes sense under the old paradigm, and I think you could get a secondary employment as long as it doesn't interfere with your grad TA work and you don't advertise the fact.

Some people never have tuition reimbursement, and make it work. Life is often profoundly unfair, and one of the great lessons thats can be learned in grad school is transiting to an adult member of society.

There are four categories of government spending:

  • spending that hurts the US and the World (eg, funding LGBTQ+ agendas across the globe)
  • spending that is ambivalent to the US but helps the World (eg, PEPFAR)
  • spending that is good for the US, but may not be the best way to spend the dollar (eg, Science research/funding)
  • spending that is unambiguously a good marginal return on investment (I can't think of an example)

The first category should be defunded. The second category should spawn a discussion on what the purpose of government is. Is it to maximize global utility? At what point should we tradeoff between a citizen's wellbeing and another nation's citizen's wellbeing. The third category should spawn a both a practical debate on the tradeoffs between various alternatives (including returning the money to the taxpayers). The fourth we should keep funding.

However, I'm currently in favor of fast, indiscriminate cuts. We are dealing with a quickly metastasizing cancer and we need aggressive chemotherapy to address it. Chemotherapy so aggressive that yes, hair will fall out and the body will feel deathly sick. Once the cancer is removed, we can again discuss the latter three categories dispassionately and objectively, and fund areas that meet the bar.

The most important question for any such categorization system is where you put the 75% of spending that is the major entitlement programs. There is almost no point in even discussing whether one should approach the problem with fast, indiscriminate, chemotherapy-like measures or not without at least putting that one in a category.

Agreed. Something like half of the federal budget goes towards elder care, which populists usually recoil at when you talk about touching. But then they turn around and talk about the "bloated budget" and how ostensibly easy it would be to cut it, like its 99% subsidies to transsexuals or something.

It reminds me of when I was helping my brother with his budget. He was all 'if I could quit drinking I could save a lot of money' and I was flummoxed - most of his money he was spending on rent! If he'd just live out of his car the drinking wouldn't matter! He started on about how he'd maybe look for a cheaper place to live later but he felt the drinking was his most serious problem (it was the weepiest budget meeting I've ever had, let me tell you) and he should take care of that first. I just rolled my eyes.

If I have a company that for every dollar in revenue is currently spending $1.05, and is currently spending 10c on something utterly unnecessary while the other 95c is going towards making said revenue, I am absolutely going to point them towards cutting said unnecessary thing even though it's less than 10% of the total.

Was the rent truly so high that it cut into other necessities? He probably wasn't entirely wrong, and from the sound of it, he probably has other motivations for quitting drinking.

I took it as sarcasm (ie the love out of your car bit seemed like the giveaway). That is, when you are in a hole cut out the stuff that is easily cut out. Rent is harder to figure out and is a necessity.

You might not solve the budget until you address rent but you’ll slow the bleeding.

This trend applies to state budgets too. Here in MA our largest line item will soon be home healthcare for the elderly. This program is a triple FU to young people between the wealth transfer from young to old, the way it keeps housing resources tied up in an inefficient manner, and the pitiful wages being paid out to the PCA workers themselves.

Cutting it, or even reducing its growth is politically impossible. The media coverage of even feeble efforts to rein in the spending has been viscious.

I may be naive or simply out of the loop and not following what's going on with DOGE this month vs last, but is the point to actually defund science? Or is the point to "break stuff", in order to stress-test the system and find out what's actually important, so that we can then focus on just the important stuff, while cutting out the stuff that was previously being funded but not likely to help anything? Basically, by downscaling, the stuff that's actually important will come forward and be made apparent, so we can continue to fund it. That's at least what I thought they were trying to achieve.

I'm not saying what DOGE is doing is correct, or that they're actually managing to successfully achieve the goal of cutting out only the waste. But I see a lot of people saying that DOGE no longer wants the US to do science research, and I guess I just doubt that that is actually true.

Or is the point to "break stuff", in order to stress-test the system and find out what's actually important

If this is the theory, it strongly suggests that they're barking up the wrong tree, because government programs don't have the same feedback mechanisms (or goals) as private firms. If you shut down something important in private industry, you have the clear feedback of your company going out of business losing money. There's no analog for government funded research. Nothing is going to explode if you defund a bunch of really important basic science. The government won't collapse. It just... won't happen. The losses will take the form of foregone gains. The closest thing you'll get to financial feedback is angry people yelling about it, but that contains very little useful information.

Trying to apply start-up logic to government activities is a mistake. If you want to figure out which research is worthwhile you're going to have to do serious investigations and exercise your best judgment, but that's pretty much the opposite of 'move fast and break things'.

You might be right. I in no way think that it's evident that DOGE is taking good steps that will bring about positive change with certainty. But I'm just sick (as I have been since 2016) of people ascribing evil or stupid motives to Trump that he probably doesn't actually have.

Also, sort of a nitpick, but having been in companies that have taken the break stuff and downsize approach, losing money isn't the only, and certainly not the earliest, feedback signal leadership looks for in deciding what to reinstate. Applying pressure downwards by defunding stuff causes your reports to take the initiative to make a good case to you what is actually important, which does a lot of the legwork for the "serious investigations", and lets you apply your best judgement more easily.

That is one theory of what they’re doing.

But man, idk. I think seeing the research experiences for undergraduates (REU) being shelved across so much of the country is what got to me here, in addition to watching my own students have to deal with shelving their year long products (on the same day).

If we’re choosing not to support and train kids who are into science and trying to learn, we’re really losing out.

If that is their strategy, I hope that information can flow to them somehow and the things which train up the scientific workforce get repaired sooner rather than later.

I hope that information can flow to them somehow and the things which train up the scientific workforce get repaired sooner rather than later.

Yeah, me too. It is a scary time, no question.

Part of me wants to say, "it's been a scary time for the past 5 years due to the government destroying the economy with their stupid covid responses, and now they're just trying to take unprecedented drastic measures to fix it", but I don't know if I fully believe that.

It's a dilemma in my beliefs vs my hopes. I don't really believe that tearing down the system, or even coming close to doing so, is ever really a good idea. But I always hope that something can make things better. I would have said in the past that technological advancement was basically always that force that makes things better and saves us from economic depression, but this time, the technological advancement that's on the horizon may be just as dangerous. So it makes me want to hope that an attempt to fix the system will actually save us instead, despite my rational judgement. But really, that's just emotions, and it's not something to be trusted, just as I tell leftists who want to tear down the system.

I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.

In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.

  • -13

In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.

This isn't really the sentiment. The problem for researchers is most of them are going to be in the academy. The academy is one of, if not the main, core of rot in the system. This means it was also going to be the place where it would be impossible to miss muscle when trimming fat.

Also, if we are being honest, its probably an extreme chore trying to separate actual science happening at universities from Faucian "science"

Also, if we are being honest, its probably an extreme chore trying to separate actual science happening at universities from Faucian "science"

Say what you like about Fauci, the gain of function experiments he funded really produced results!

I agree with your take wholeheartedly. Forward leaning governement investments in technology, education and science produced a lot of the prosperity that we currently enjoy in the USA. Seeing these things dismantled over a quasi-religious dispute is disheartening to say the least.

Well it isn’t just about woke for me. It is about the very real and very looming debt spiral. Arresting that means cutting bullshit and sometimes even valuable things. A lot that goes through the academy is bullshit and zero value add—even in STEM.

NSF, NIH, etc. are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. The gains you’d get here are minuscule.

And to be doing it while proposing legislature that continues to skyrocket the debt.

It does not seem to be about cost cutting.

You don’t need to balance the budget. You need to slow down the deficit and increase growth.

A lot of the tax numbers are fake since they are simply keeping existing tax rates from expiring.

You need to slow down the deficit and increase growth.

And do you expect the Trump admin to do that?

Progressives "long marched through institutions". They got it. Mission Accomplished.

Now having sowed, they get to reap. This important societal institution is being bogged down in partisan culture waring, but now also from the other direction. Who could have forseen this.

I've been to grad school. In some meager way I contributed to this important endeavor and lived in it for a bit. It is valuable and we need it. At least some of it. Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.

Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.

Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.

"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.

  • -12

I'm on no crusade. I don't want scientific research defended. I don't know who you are arguing against with the "scientists vote Democrat" dialog, but it is not me.

I distrust much of published research due to naked bias and replication crisis. I believe American research universities and their intellectual product are much degraded and could be vastly better. This is valuable and important so it is in need of drastic intervention. I would much prefer the scalpel to the bone saw.

I would reverse the blame you are placing here. Like me you don't want scientific research defunded? Then make extra sure it isn't perverted into a staging ground for fringe progressive ideology. If so it is both untrustworthy and on the chopping block when anti-progressives have suitable will and political power.

Then make extra sure it isn't perverted into a staging ground for fringe progressive ideology

The entire point is that this impression you have is wrong. Why do you believe this? What experience do you have with actual math/science departments? What fringe progressive ideology have you seen them pushing?

Again, you don't have to take it from me---Alex Tabarrok should be much more credible.

Creationists are proof academia is biased against the right. The academy tolerates infinite papers on anti-scientific bullshit like grievance studies, but somehow one branch of theology is off limits, and it just so happens to be right coded?

The fact of the matter is, the right has already tried to get academics to stop being so partisan your way, and it didn't work. Some might even say it could never work because progressives won't let it and sabotaged every initiative to ensure it wouldn't. So now we have decided to cut the cancer out entirely, and yes a lot of good cells will die along the way and that is tragic. But it's also the bed they made. They could always learn to code.

Thank you for proving my original point. At this point, maybe it was correct for scientists to have been so left-leaning because they saw through that the right had this much hate for them.

  • -17

So 'the bed you made' was the response to nurses and members of the military who got the axe because they didn't get the covid vaccine. Learn to code was the response to coal miners who didn't want their mines shuttered and sent off shore.

Now is it fair to tar all academics with that brush? No of course not. But if that's how the beautiful, intelligent, charismatic, industrious elites behave, how else can you expect us dirty, stupid, fat, ugly and lazy proles to act?

When progressives assumed control of the zeitgeist I think they assumed they'd always stay in touch with the working class so they didn't need to work at it. As a result their respect for the working class atrophied, and through a blend of corruption and the seductive nature of power (and its accompanying feeling of righteousness) they have become woefully out of touch and almost fully captured by the unscrupulous. But in doing so they ceded the working class to Trump, who - whatever you might say about him - is at least able to feign respect for them.

People in the working class get so few wins that they naturally accept 'not letting the enemy win' as worth celebrating. The elites were supposed to stop this by behaving better, so the working class would have a better example to live up to. The elites stopped behaving better, as those examples demonstrate, so of course the working class does too. Extrapolating that into 'they hate science!' is how we got here in the first place.

Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage

Scientists and scientific progress shouldn't have played politics so hard. At this point it is nigh-impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff given the insane ideological bent of the universities, and the fact that they are leveraging their large amount of cultural and fiscal capital against one side of the political aisle.

"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.

This is a straw man of the right that currently exists. Fundamentalist Christianity has been gutted in the U.S. and definitely does not hold much power in the current right wing administration. Do you think Musk is a Creationist?

Do you think Musk is a Creationist?

No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.

Interesting! I genuinely didn’t know that. Huh.

I’ve come to realize this about this movement, yes.

Essentially, the US can’t be my home anymore if things go on like this for much longer.

The attitude that causes someone to shout at Zelenskyy, “why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”.. that’s what’s in charge and their ire extends to me.

The best historical analogy I know of is the cultural revolution in China where the intellectual class was persecuted.

They’re not that violent, of course, but I also don’t want to give them the chance to be.

  • -21

I understand that Trump and Vance may not be high on niceties. They are right that Europe is too stifling, too much limiting freedom of speech. I give them that.

And yet when Zelensky allowed himself to express freely, suddenly it was all outrage and he was quickly thrown out of the White House. We don't see that in Europe where people may be shocked about Trump and Vance and yet remain civilized. And for Zelensky it might even be just a problem of English as a second language which he hasn't mastered well.

So, I don't buy these excuses that it is just the US culture to be more open and direct that European have problem with the US leaders right now. I think that yesterday showed that they were liek petulant children and trying to enforce their pettiness on others. I don't know if it qualifies as cultural revolution but it is revengeful and classless act nevertheless.

  • -12

Read what I posted below + what Rubio said. Basically they had already talked about what the deal was and this was perfunctory. Then Zelensky tried to litigate his position (that they basically had agreed to shelve) in front of the media which rightly pissed off the WH.

This isn’t a free speech issue. Zelensky can say whatever he wants. But it isn’t correct to agree to forum X for Y purposes and explicitly not Z and then do Z.

Also, I think that Vance's critique about Europe lacking free speech is overrated. It is true that Europe has some issues. But the US has even bigger issues. During covid pandemic it was twitter and other social networks censured correct scientific information, apparently due to the pressure from the White House. Also, the US had very strict vaccine mandates that were completely unjustified. Even the UK managed to largely avoid them (with some exceptions).

The US probably has even stringer free speech restrictions that Europe but they frame them differently. I am not free speech absolutist and understand that sometimes free speech can be limited and the discussion is more about grey area what is and is not unacceptable. But the US is a leader in social networks and have much greater impact on limiting free speech than Europe, respectively it has more power to restrict and most probably it uses it more than Europe.

Also, I think that Vance's critique about Europe lacking free speech is overrated. It is true that Europe has some issues. But the US has even bigger issues. During covid pandemic it was twitter and other social networks censured correct scientific information, apparently due to the pressure from the White House.

The US has to have a diffuse and informal public-private alliance on censorship because the First Amendment blocks the most direct route for the government. As we can see now, those companies can adjust if circumstances change while laws are writ in ink.

It doesn't really say much about European virtue that they don't have as strong a version of this system given that a) they can just censor speech directly and b) they don't have the same density of indigenous social media sites.

I don’t know about bigger. The point is those censorship attempts were considered wrong and there is a strong political backlash on one side against them. Do we see that in Europe?

I don't understand you. It IS a free speech issue. Yes, if Trump considered it wrong, he could have refused to sign a deal. I am not saying that free speech should free one from consequences. That I can understand. But be so much against Zelensky speaking his mind that you have to thrown him out immediately? It seems to be overreaction and signal that free speech is for me and not for you!

This is silly—no one is stopping Zelensky from saying anything. But using the WH as his forum to say X when he was invited to say not X but sign a document isn’t a free speech issue.

We have gone through this many times. No one stopped Berenson to tell that covid vaccines don't stop infection. It is just that twitter was not the right forum for this. Yet, such limitation (orchestrated by the WH) is 100% of free speech issue.

The same happens here, except that happens in the WH. And even without all these legalistic details, this is simply a case when the WH doesn't want to hear something. Nothing else.

If you can’t tell the difference between Berenson on Twitter and negotiations between two countries at the WH, then I don’t know what to say.

People seem to misunderstand the suit comment. It's not like Zelenskyy cannot afford a suit. It's not a class commentary.

World leaders dress to send a message. Zelenskyy knows this, it's why he has been wearing his black outfit since the start of the invasion. The black outfit shows that he is a wartime president, fighting an existential threat to the last man.

Trump doesn't want the Ukraine to fight to the last man. He wants a peace. Suits are the clothing of negotiations and treaties.

The clothing is one of many things that caused yesterday to break down.

I'm going to be equally honest here and say please, do not move to the US. I've known you for years, and in all that time on reddit you were fine with the cultural revolution, sometimes actively prosecuting it yourself.

You have me mixed up with someone.

I’m a very infrequent commenter and I’m from the US.

I know you were up around Maine or NH at one point, right? I remember the leopardsatemyface post about the cod fisherman. But I thought you were from Canada originally or something, my bad.

“why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”

Probably because it was hinted in their last meeting that Zelensky should wear a suit next time he is meeting Trump. Being underdressed means you are the most powerful person in the room or you have no business being there. Zelensky decided he was the former.

You've looked at the past 10 years and stood by, and this is the moment that makes you say "this is just like the cultural revolution"?

A working class revolt against the educated class, yes

I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.

I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness, but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests

I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.

Suppose senior members of the Academy violated federal law by using taxpayer money to develop a novel pathogen, leaked that pathogen out into the world, caused a pandemic killing somewhere around seven million people and uncounted trillions in economic damage, conspired to cover this fact up, and then coordinated the largest, most widespread and most egregious violation of human rights in at least the last fifty years, based on fraudulent scientific claims that their colleagues refused to oppose them on. In this crazy hypothetical scenario, what would the impact of these events be on your cost/benefit analysis of what's currently happening?

A working class revolt against the educated class, yes

Ah, struggle sessions are tolerable, as long they're led by the aristocracy, I guess.

I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness

Well then, if you did nothing all these years because you never felt censored, why exactly should anyone that did, show you any sympathy now?

but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests

Finding a synonym for "diversity" and doing a search and replace seems like a pretty low cost to me, compared to witch hunts that went off during the last decade. Dodging those was a lot harder than CTRL+H.

Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.

Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.

The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.

  • -15

We already had the discussion on reddit about how your institution was using diversity statements to filter out 80% of applicants solely by the DEI office, before the actual hiring committee even got to see their resumes.

You can pretend to have been secretly against this now, but you can't pretend to be ignorant of it because we told you.

Could you be more specific here/give some kind of link? I don't recall this conversation (this forum being reddit was a while ago).

You happen to have a link to that conversation?

More comments

The diversity statements applied just as much to math as to gender studies.

The grants went to people who said the right things, which at the time were diversity.

You're wrong.

The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you.

As I have been told many times, if you welcome crazies into your ranks people will think you are crazy. I would have thought you would be upset that industry related crazies were given positions of power and influence in the first place, not that you now have to try to get rid of them.

As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?

Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments.

Is one of the fathers of DNA getting stripped of his awards not a struggle session, or is biology not a hard science? There was absolutely no affirmative action in maths departments, cross your heart and hope to die?

Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.

So all these people who totally were not in favor of DEI struggle session somehow couldn't be bothered to actually oppose it in any way, to the point where the only opposition were Obama-birther conspiracy theorists?

Was Sokal an Obama-birther conspiracy theorist, by the way?

The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.

I still want to know why I should be bothered by this, given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.

I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....

The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.

given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.

and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.

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In a perfect world I would a be an "I f*ing love science!" guy. I grew up watching Mr. Wizard and later Bill Nye, winning the science fair, and getting graduate degrees. I even get to do something that sometimes slightly resembles "research" in the corporate world doing data experiments at a big company. I do f'ing love science.

But I'm not convinced that government funded science can be anything but a patronage program with our present politics. What institutions put their neck on the line for Jay Bhattacharya during covid? What institutions pushed the government to back off from childhood covid vaccinations? What institutions stood strongly against strong-arming covid survivors into vaccinating.

This is a simple, but salient example. There is not a strong enough scientific apparatus to stand up against anti-scientific viewpoints from within the government. It's an entirely controlled program. I don't want to fund it anymore. Elon started Space X with $100M. I hope someone can peel off a few notes for you, but if they take it out of my pocket, we've got a problem.

I honestly don't think SpaceX even exists however without the NASA effect. Want proof? How well are non-American private orbital launch companies doing? Exactly, they are doing terrible, and are few in number. US government funded science set the stage for SpaceX to be successful. Saying "well look at SpaceX we don't need government funding" has it complete backwards.

I mean space launches are extremely expensive and thus probably not in the perview of any company without a billion dollars in capitalization. Angola’s GDP doesn’t actually support that kind of activity.

Going to the broader point, how much waste, fraud, and vanity projects are the taxpayers to fund in an agency to get one semi-interesting project spun off to the private sector? We had a shuttle program for 30 years. We did fuck-all with it. We studied zero gravity’s effects on some plants and animals, we took cool pictures of space. But when it’s all said and done, what the public got was a shuttle program that didn’t even improve the space suits, let alone the shuttle or the launch rockets. We bolted a shuttle that, other than heat shielding was basically a commercial airplane to an ICBM without a warhead. For 30 years. It took Musk maybe ten to create a system in which all parts were recycled for the next launch and capable of landing vertically. He redesigned the 1960s era space suits to meet the needs of people who would spend more than a few hours in them, and had all of this safe enough that celebrities were willing to pay for a ride. If we’d stuck with NASA and the shuttles, we’d still be going down the produce aisle to find new plants to test in zero gravity. I’m sure rutabagas in zero gravity behave very much like every other root vegetable in zero gravity, so I don’t want to spend ten thousand dollars to launch them into space to find out.

The space station that I always called a boondoggle ended up funding SpaceX, and it's made me reconsider a lot of beliefs about wasteful spending... Maybe there really is a positive multiplier to a lot of this stuff, if you commit to setting enough money on fire for long enough.

In my field, there's a bit of chaos going around, too, but the main cause of it predates the election. In my case, the U.S. Dept. of _____ Office of _____ Research has just decided to totally revamp the grant structure so that now the fundamental units that are being funded are large teams organized based on what sorts of problems they're investigating, but such teams do not now and have never before existed. This was the plan back in October, and we've not gotten word since then except declaring this plan to be official. I don't expect that the administration change has made things easier, but I can say that my case is not primarily caused by this.

That said.

Last month I noted that the facility I work at was planning to hide its DEI department under a paper-thin disguise. The week after the inauguration, though, they were told in no uncertain terms that that wouldn't be permitted, and (as far as I have seen) they caved. Much of the next weekly science meeting was dedicated to mourning their DEI efforts (and after hearing this - hearing how so-very-confused! they now are about what counts as 'DEI' - I certainly believe that a good deal of the chaos is due to malicious compliance. I cannot fail by now to recognize the tactic of wholly emptying out one's head when put on the defensive. ["'Woke?' What is this thing you call 'woke?'"])

And I'm glad I didn't attend that meeting in person, lest I have done something intemperate. I might have stood up and tried to say something like "I think it is wrong to discriminate based on race or gender. I do not think that we should be in the business of discriminating based on race or gender." (I'm sure I would have gotten tongue-tied - but probably would have gotten the point across ["he's an enemy"] enough to be retaliated against.)

Backing up a little, one of the main reasons I'm where I am at all - on the particular small team working at this big facility - is that this was one of the few job openings available in my field that did not require me to submit a Diversity Statement. (I don't know how my PI got away with it; I know the institution we're affiliated with requires it.) If I had had to do so, and actually tried to be honest about my beliefs (see the intemperate sentences above,) I know now and knew then that that would get me a failing grade.

Here's an example rubric - associated with a university I personally have had some connection to - showing what they're looking for in Diversity Statements, and more importantly, what they're not looking for. You get the lowest scores for saying things like you intend to "[treat] all students the same regardless of background." '90s colorblindness is being explicitly filtered against. That's not enough, you see. If you want to be a scientist, you must have the heart of an activist - the spirit of a revolutionary! You must be sure to fit in exactly with the political monoculture.

Now, the purpose of all of this is clearly to advance the ideology by closing all available doors to anyone who doesn't submit to it. But the problem with ensuring that [general you] you're all a bunch of revolutionaries is that sometimes revolutions lose. The problem with ensuring that every one among you is dedicated to Overthrowing The System is that you might be the system already. The problem with welding yourself to something as indispensable as Science is that, perhaps, science might be done great damage in extricating you (to say nothing of the damage done inserting yourself.)

Perhaps my career will be derailed by this. Perhaps my entire field will get torpedoed. But at this level of corruption - frankly mind-boggling when I step back to take it in - I can't say academia wouldn't have it coming.

Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine.

One of its flaws is political activism that shatters any semblance of neutrality or objectivity. See here for an earlier discussion of a scientific institution taking on a political cause (Nature endorsing Biden).

Your spokespeople and champions are anti-Trump, and you get tarred with the same brush.

Good luck A) fixing the reputation of science-in-general (preferably by fixing the actual problems instead of by spreading effective propaganda), or B) distancing your field from science-in-general (as Computer Science has already done). I don't see a third option.

(Nature endorsing Biden).

Nature is owned by Springer Nature, a private for-profit publisher. Nature having a political stance does not differ from, say, The Economist.

If you already believed that, then you're ahead of the curve.

I don't think that "The field of science is anti-Trump" is nearly as accepted as "The field of journalism is anti-Trump", so it bears repeating.

I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.

There's a strong anti-academia sentiment even among highly educated tech professionals. We have youtube to serve the needs of undergraduate education. And as for research, they assume that 99% of it is bullshit, and the 1% of it that isn't bullshit can be carried out under the auspices of private corporations.

I've always been a staunch defender of academia, so I'm sympathetic to your position. But after enduring decades of the total ideological capture of the academy by the left, I can't say that I'm disappointed or surprised that the right is pushing back and taking action.

Tangential: the 'total ideological capture of the academy' by the left is in significant part a product of right-wing anti-intellectualism. If you're going to adopt the position that anything but business, finance, and engineering are parasitic and quite possibly degenerate, it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you b) smart conservatives avoid academia* in favor of business, finance, and engineering and new academics overwhelmingly lean left c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.

*(This is also why American conservatism is intellectually bankrupt and relies on Catholics, a small number of converts, and borrowing critiques from woke-critical centrists for basically all of their intellectual firepower)

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This might be a story you could have told my grandpa or something in the 60s. The academy has been so left-captured and exclusionary of right of center thought for my entire life that being "anti-intellectual" is just not wanting to heap billions of dollars of state funding on communists, terrorists, and sympathizers thereof.

It isn't like there aren't academic fields outside of science that haven't appealed to conservatives. History is an example. But Universities have long limited history departments, and conservative takes meant you didn't get tenure or even considered for tenure track.

The right has plenty of intellectuals; they have simply been systematically excluded from academia, so they publish their work in blogs instead of journals and get funded by subscriptions instead of taxes.

it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you

Why would anyone think that's surprising? I suppose a few people might believe that professional ethics and impartiality beats human nature and relationships, but I can't see that being a very common view.

I think it's bad that those supposedly-neutral institutions have taken up partisanship.

c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values...

You think it's thoughts that the conservatives are opposed to? What happened to "parasitic and quite possibly degenerate" from earlier in the paragraph?

...and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.

Where are the bulldozers? As far as I can tell, American conservative goals stop at tightening the public purse strings. If private donors want to fund it they can go right ahead.

I think it's bad that those supposedly-neutral institutions have taken up partisanship.

I agree. I think it would have been better for everyone if scientists had steeled themselves against the slings and arrows of the resentfully ignorant. Alas, the scientists are only human, and after decades of being told "you're an enemy", they took it to heart.

You think it's thoughts that the conservatives are opposed to?

You know what? Yes, actually.

Again and again, the American right has proven itself to be distrustful of thoughtfulness. Many are quite proud of not being effete intellectuals who think too much. The business gentry that comprises a large share of the conservative elite resent academics and think education is solely for training new workers, nationalists can't stand critical examination of cherished patriotic myths, and religious conservatives have concluded that science is an existential threat. A large part of why they're liable to view academia as parasitic is that it doesn't sit well with their cult of action.

(This is also why they've largely been reduced to begging liberals to make conservative art for them - it's not some fundamental inability of the conservative mind to produce art, but that modern American conservatism holds artists in contempt).

This would be a lot more credible if it weren't for feminist vulcanology.

That is to say, there is very good evidence that quite a few fields are in fact entirely fraudulent. Nothing about right-wing anti-intellectualism created or could create or sustain these fields. This makes it far more likely that the right wing is merely correct about the total ideological capture of the academy, than for the capture to have been caused by the withdrawal of the right wing.

Unsurprisingly, when you completely abdicate a domain to your ideological opponents, it becomes dominated by your ideological opponents. Things like "Feminist vulcanology" exists because American conservatives decided the only way they were interested in engaging with intellectualism was by standing outside and throwing rocks.

  • -19

No, feminist vulcanology exists either because those with leftist ideology in science put their ideology over their scientific integrity, or because those without integrity were more powerful within science than those with it. It should not require right-wing intellectuals to keep ideology out of science; if the left-wing intellectuals have integrity, they would do it.

I decided to google feminist vulcanology, and tbh everything I see looks like incredibly pedestrian efforts to encourage women to study vulcanology. This may be triggering to misogynists, but this does not look like some anthropologist rambling about other ways of knowing. If this is what's corrupting science, then I withdraw my previous statement and chalk this up as another instance of American right-wingers demanding slavish submission to their beliefs. Acquiescing to that would be pretty much the opposite of integrity.

If conservatives want to contest ideas, they should throw their hat into the ring, not demand liberals think conservative thoughts on their behalf.

  • -10

The specific issue was actually feminist glaciology, but you are being deliberately obtuse by pretending to not know what he means.

"I cannot fail by now to recognize the tactic of wholly emptying out one's head when put on the defensive" really stuck with me because of how often you see it.
"I don't remember, I've never seen that, I don't know what you could possibly be talking about, why do you keep causing Culture War by bringing up examples?"

I in fact did not know that, because I don't keep a comprehensive list of petty far-right bugbears in my head.

Whenever I see people going off about ridiculousness in academia, I am unavoidably reminded of Twitter Smell Lady, who was held up as an example of silly research only to be repeatedly vindicated. The core problem here is that most of the would-be critics of academia are fundamentally incurious, which is why about half the time their cherry-picked examples turn out to be totally reasonable and only sound "dumb" either because the reader lacks the education to understand what they're talking about or has an ideological blindspot.

"I cannot fail by now to recognize the tactic of wholly emptying out one's head when put on the defensive" really stuck with me because of how often you see it.

Quite.

  • -12
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I've been saying it since we were on reddit - the left's primary argument tactic is pretending to be retarded.

It probably was glaciology I was thinking of, but similar volcano-related things are around too, e.g.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2023.1172867/full

Children first: women’s perspectives on evacuation at Fuego volcano and implications for disaster risk reduction

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I am one of those people against the treatment Matt Taylor was given in 2014, and even so, I don't think "reduce obnoxious wokeishness in science" is worth a lazily-indiscriminate defunding campaign.

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Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.

The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.

No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.

Not to mention how many people currently claiming they were "just keeping their heads down" were actually enthusiastic collaborators back in Current Year. I don't think any more funding should be given out until a Truth & Greatness process identifies the most guilty parties.

The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.

Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.

I don't want to throw them in a gulag. But the system that did it has to go away. You get that right? It's not punishment per se. I understand that they don't like it or it negatively affects them. But the institutions have to be destroyed. I don't want these guys in jail or anything. But they'll need to find someone who's not the American tax payer to fund their work. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will be wildly successful in business. If they're not, they will be wildly successful in food service.

But the institutions have to be destroyed.

Why? Academic science got on fine for generations before woke capture. It's not an inherent consequence of the founding principles. You don't have to hack the arm off to cure an ingrowing nail.

The political process will naturally take any government expenditure and turn it into a patronage program. How are you going to do politics unless you take from your enemies and give to your friends? Since I don't think this thing can remain apolitical, the options are to destroy it or to make it a place to park political allies. Leave it alone isn't a choice.

they will be wildly successful in food service.

No, they won't: that whole "illegal immigrants are harder workers than Americans" thing cuts both ways. Those jobs aren't there for them to take and the various small industrial concerns they could normally do office work for were shipped off to foreign countries 20-30 years ago.

Policies have consequences.

The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities.

Why should I believe they didn't believe it? The gatekeepers of the hard sciences were all too ready to expel Tim Hunt (and of course James Watson) from their ranks for violation of that "shit". They were happy to put Alessandro Strumia on the shit-list for opposing it. (and not hard science, but they censured Peter Boghossian for "unauthorized human experimentation" for submitting bogus articles to a woke journal). All public polls say they're strongly aligned with the left on this.

Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side.

All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin. No one is even being blacklisted.

Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed?

Perhaps not "tooth and nail", but I fought my battles and took my hits. I certainly never endorsed woke views.

I'm in a hard science academic department. I would guess, in our department, it's about 50-50 those who are supportive vs those who (silently) disagree. We've had DEI speakers at our main weekly seminar (normally for colleagues at other universities who were invited to present their research) and those speakers were praised as "wonderful" by some of our faculty. Our administration requires all applicants for faculty positions to submit diversity statements--plans for how they will promote DEI should they be hired--and these are used in evaluating candidates. One of the members of a recent search committee was a virtual political commissar for DEI. In our last faculty search all males were explicitly excluded (their applications were discarded automatically), on (strongly implied) orders from the upper administration. There are many more such anecdotes. STEM faculty are (statistically) less gung-ho for woke/DEI ideology than humanities or social sciences, but there is considerable support even there.

All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin.

If that were all that it was, we would be in a good place. I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that. Maybe some small set of gatekeepers at some set of institutions would be unhappy, but kinda who cares? But yeah, that's not all that it is.

I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that

No, they wouldn't. Because the majority of them are not even Kolmogrovs, collaborating but not really believing. Most of them are believers. When they were told to add diversity and inclusion to proposals, yes sir. When Trump I appeared #resistance.

But yeah, that's not all that it is.

The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.

Most of them [hard sciencers] are believers.

I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.

The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.

That's still not all that it is.

I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.

Computer science is mathematics, but its practical applications are very close to the theory, and that has saved it from some of the more embarrassing effects of political capture; there's only so far you can push BS, if it doesn't cash out in working code it won't be respected. That doesn't stop a lot of computer scientists from being true believers and inventing (I don't say corrupting, because that would imply there was a time they were legitimate) whole subfields like "AI safety" which are political.

As for hard science, not only have we seen hard scientists discipline their own for opposing the left, even when the right was titularly in charge, we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief. No "thank goodness, President Trump is taking away these bullshit diversity requirements which have been weighing on us". We haven't even seen grumbling of the sort "Oh shit, now the new boss is in town and we're going to have to rewrite the proposals to butter him up instead of the other guy". Instead it's "Oh, no, science will end because we're going to lose internship programs for women and non-white-and-Asian males!" And of course there's all those polls of academia showing an extreme left bias, and other polls saying they wouldn't hire conservatives, and that sort of thing.

That doesn't stop a lot of computer scientists from being true believers and inventing (I don't say corrupting, because that would imply there was a time they were legitimate) whole subfields like "AI safety" which are political.

From what I remember of the early 2000s, the AI safety movement didn't come from academia at all. Am I misremembering?

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Computer science is mathematics, but its practical applications are very close to the theory, and that has saved it from some of the more embarrassing effects of political capture

I disagree with this - CS is very captured. The close connection between theory and practice might have kept the practice of the discipline close to reality, but the culture has been completely taken over, probably because by its nature, it is so much more "online" than other disciplines. I would speculate that it is probably the most LGBT-friendly discipline on account of its feed-in cohort being primarily online weirdos, support for transgenderism going back to when the graybeards were young, etc. I'd metaphorically bet on it having the highest raw numbers of trans people too (see e.g., the Rust community survey.) The industrial side has also been taken over - see all the codes of conduct, the big tech companies at the forefront of DEI pushes, etc.

This is a discipline that has the ability to cross-cut everything ("software is eating the world") and possibly even invent superintelligence. If you do not share its values, the fact that it is so thoroughly converged is not a happy one.

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Computer science is mathematics

Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.

we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief.

I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.

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Relevant thread.

Already bookmarked. Hah.

Threadreader link for those without Twitter.

Sometimes my prefrontal cortex doesn’t make the best decisions, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to sabotage it out of revenge.

Essentially you’re arguing that this is for revenge and implicitly acknowledging that it will be bad for the United States even so.

It's not about revenge. It's that activists have systematically taken over the academy and have been trading on its prestige to implement their goals. The result is that it's not at all clear from the outside who is there to just do actual science, and who is an activist doing activism with scientific trappings. Worse, the academy has become completely untrustworthy, so we can't ask the people who would know; they'd just run cover for each other. So, with a heavy heart, we voted for someone to take a flamethrower to the system and we'll see what green shoots come out of the ashes.

I mean, the rational solution to “it’s not clear who is doing actual science” is taking some time to figure it out, and then making changes. I think that’s what a lot of people expected?

The first time Trump was elected was a vote for flamethrowers. Arguably that’s not what happened: there was a lot of noise but he governed somewhat traditionally. The second was a vote against inflation, with the expectation of more of the first (for most voters). I think people are surprised that Trump showed up to work with a double XL flamethrower rather than more of the same as previously.

I mean, the rational solution to “it’s not clear who is doing actual science” is taking some time to figure it out, and then making changes.

Only if time has no cost - a common blind spot of rational solutions.

If I am driving a car and a car appears to be unexpectedly pulling out in front of me, I should react immediately, even if I am unsure at this moment if they will actually hit me or not.

Doing things slow means people can org size more effectively to fight back and try to run out clock. When the offense is time barred and the defense isn’t, then delay is winning strategy for the defense. And couching the strategy as “be deliberate” is effectively siding with the defense.

I think people forget that being president is a difficult job, so it takes some time to learn how to actually do things in office. There's no training program, and the executive branch has a huge number of federal workers who have to be trained or hired. Not to mention just forming connections with people. Most two-term presidents accomplish a lot more in their second term than in their first.

No, the rational thing to do is exactly what DOGE appears to be doing. Axe anything and everything associated with DEI, and then let people resubmit thier grant proposals under the new paradigm.

Those with scientific merit will get reapproved and those whithout merit will get to spend even more time complaining about "right-wing anti-intellectualism" than they already do.

Those with scientific merit will get reapproved and those whithout merit will get to spend even more time complaining about "right-wing anti-intellectualism" than they already do.

That sounds like a concrete prediction. Care to make it concrete enough to bet on?

the rational solution to “it’s not clear who is doing actual science” is taking some time to figure it out, and then making changes

And let yourself get lost on a maze of bureaucracy so nothing changes.

Reason is a tool, it's not the right tool for this job. Not anymore.

20 years ago, the scalpel was the right tool, nowadays it's gonna have to be the hacksaw.

There comes a point when a house is so pockmarked with termites and water damage that the only sensible solution is the wrecking ball.

Are there some sections still good and salvageable? Yes. Could you theoretically save sections of the house? Yes but the time and effort needed makes the opportunity cost too high.

Or to put it in more bloody terms it’s like Iwo Jima; eventually you just learn to throw grenades in every cave and light fires at every entrance. Sometimes there’s enemies there and sometimes not. There may or may not be scant civilians clinging to life in the caves.

The rational conclusion is to not care, and go forward in a workmanlike manner and get it done, and quickly. Delays only serve to weaken you.

And let yourself get lost on a maze of bureaucracy so nothing changes.

Why? The suggestion isn't "have normal grant reform instead of DOGE". Anyone with sense agrees that wouldn't work. The hope was that DOGE would exercise reason, while remaining the same independent group made up of the same free-spirited people. Are you saying that Musk & Co couldn't figure out a rough guess of which programs are good and bad on their own? How would that descend into a maze of bureaucracy?

Other times, your foot gets infected, and if you don't cut off everything from the knee down, your entire body shuts down. And other times, some cells in your breast starts reproducing uncontrollably, and if you don't cut off most of the breast, again, your entire body shuts down. The pain and loss of those healthy cells - a majority of the cells that were cut off were probably healthy! - are real and shouldn't be downplayed. But sometimes it's the least worst option.

I'd say that infections that spread toxicity through the rest of the body or a cancerous growth that grows uncontrollably in a way that crowds out and kills the healthy cells are better metaphors for this situation in academia than a prefrontal cortex sometimes not making the best decisions.

You took professionalism ethics in your education, did you not? About how professionals get social trust and deference due to not only their specialized skills, but the self-regulation they entail amongst themselves to meet minimum standards of competence and ethics to be deserving of that trust, and holding those who fail to account?

What you are seeing is the consequence of a failure to maintain professionalism, and professional accountability, across multiple professions. And part of that is a result of people just keeping their head down when people try to hijack the profession for non-professional purposes. Social trust has been lost, and deference is being revoked.

Dismissing it as revenge would be part of the problem that lost the public trust. You are not entitled public trust- no one is.

To be honest I’ve never seen examples of unprofessionalism or activism in any of my sojourns in the academic world, particularly not among STEM.

I’m sure you can find examples of scientists behaving badly, and maybe a bad apple does spoil the lot, but I’ve truly only ever seen cases where instances of fudging data gets you excommunicated from your career, and several examples of wishy washy politicized (or just romanticized) science leading to pushback and loss of reputation.

It could be that I’m blind to it. But that’s my experience.

There’s several things going on here IMO. One, it’s hard to see all of an institution when you’re inside it, you only interact with and see your local closest nodes.

But also, it’s really hard for people outside to have an accurate grasp of it as well. A lot of the information that flows to the public sphere itself flows through biased mediums. You could easily paint a whole system as Chinese robbers based on an example or two.

So, I acknowledge there could be a lot of highly politicized scientists in some epidemic of science that I’m not really perceiving. But I’m also suspicious of these takes that STEM science is so deeply political at present.

There’s a big mismatch between my experience and what you’re implying, there’s probably a reality inbetween our two positions but I’m almost certain that the extreme view that many here take towards science is not it.

I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had

  • the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions

  • several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)

  • undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them

  • profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends

  • pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.

...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.

The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).

Essentially you’re arguing that this is for revenge

I did not read it this way.

Read it moreso as "just because you're a healthy cell in a gangrened limb doesn't mean the correct decision isn't to amputate if necessary".

Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.

Someone did a look into science grants being cancelled on the ssc sub and their conclusion was that DOGE or whoever basically just ctrl+f'd "diverse", "underrepresented", and "minority" and axed all matches. This would correspond with why REUs are being shuttered.

Utter speculates that fiscal constraints aren’t the only reason NSF has pulled back on its support for the REU program. “I think NSF was worried about not having enough money, for sure,” Utter says. “But attracting more students into STEM careers from groups underrepresented in science is also a big part of what the REU program is trying to do. And that would have made it a target” for President Donald Trump’s executive order last month banning government funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

If the NSF is funding programs for undergraduates with terms which effectively range from "favors women over men and non-Asian minorities over whites and Asians" to "no white or Asian men need apply", those programs are discriminatory, illegal under a plain reading of the law and (in the case of race) Constitution, and absolutely should be canceled. It is not some sort of error caused by too-wide searching; it is an intended and correct result.

From the NSF:

REU projects offer an opportunity to tap the nation's diverse student talent pool and broaden participation in science and engineering. NSF is particularly interested in increasing the numbers of women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities in research. REU projects are strongly encouraged to involve students who are members of these groups. (Underrepresented minorities are Blacks and African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders.) When designing recruitment plans, REU projects also are encouraged to consider students who are veterans of the U.S. Armed Services and first-generation college students.

There's a more recent version of that that's less specific about who is being excluded, but still clear enough:

NSF Newer version

REU projects offer an opportunity to increase the participation of the full spectrum of the nation's diverse talent in STEM. Several million additional people — specifically, individuals from groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields — are needed for the U.S. science and engineering workforce to reflect the demographics of the U.S. population. (See the reports Vision 2030 [https://nsf.gov/nsb/publications/vision2030.pdf], The STEM Labor Force of Today [https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20212/], and Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities [https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/].) Reaching these "missing millions" is central to the nation's economic competitiveness and is a priority for NSF.

The question that seems to be being presented by people complaining about DOGE and related efforts is, "so you are saying we have been operating illegally all this time?" And the correct answer is a resounding yes. Between USAID being a joint terrorist funding operation and DNC money laundering operation and most grants going to places (not to mention federal agencies themselves) openly discriminating against white men, basically nothing the government did for the last 20 years was legal at all

that DOGE or whoever basically just ctrl+f'd "diverse", "underrepresented", and "minority" and axed all matches.

This feels particularly pernicious because, at least to me, it seems the vibe under the previous administration (and possibly it's predecessors) strongly encouraged sneaking in these terms for effectively opposite reasons to prevent summary rejection by federal funding agencies. There are probably a bunch of projects that, in saner times, would be mostly apolitical, but are going to get sacrificed in this tribal tug-of-war. I guess the folks sneaking diversity statements into particle accelerator funding proposals aren't completely blameless, but I do feel a bit bad for those just going along with the zeitgeist.

The greengrocer gets what he deserves for hanging that "workers of the world" poster.

Collaboration isn't a risk free choice. Even if it looks less costly than alternatives at the time.

The greengrocer gets what he deserves for hanging that "workers of the world" poster.

Does the entire town deserves to not have accessible groceries? The problem with cutting science altogether isn't that it's mean to the poor widdle scientists, for God's sake. It's that it harms the country.

So does wasting taxpayer money on promoting absurd ideological causes. Sometimes you need to cut healthy flesh to get at the tumor.

Then perhaps the poor widdle scientists should have thought of that before they tied doing science to helping woke political causes. I see no reason to be held hostage to that.

Conversely I find it more difficult to fault a sincere "true believer" for acting on their belief, than to excoriate the academic those who hollowed out thier professional principles for the sake of going along with the zeitgeist, for thier moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom for existing funding dollars. Increasing the NSF budget allows the (highly relative) “luxury” of being principled. Clearly, the goals of reforming science and saving money are getting insanely conflated here. I argue that it’s better to do one or the other but not both at once, or you get exactly the current shitshow

Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom

It's not "irony", it's "justice".

The idea that principles (be they scientific or moral) are a relative luxury to be discarded or forgone with the moment they become politically inconvenient is cretinous rat-bastard thinking that should be punished.

These people chose to be political operatives first and academics second. Now they get to reap the rewards of that choice.

I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.

In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.

And i disagree that it doesn't.

Each and every one of these people wanted to be seen aligning themselves with the DEI crowd. DOGE is merely respecting thier wishes by placing them in the set of "people aligned with the DEI crowd" and treating them accordingly.

If you believe in forgiveness, allow them to resubmit thier proposal without the DEI language, and have thier work considered on its merits.

I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative".

Then you are mistaken. Submitting a grant proposal to the effect of "I am going to use this grant to do science and also further the interests of the Democratic party" makes you a political operative. If you actually use some of the grant funds to do that (as I suspect has often been done, since scientists don't want to be caught committing fraud), even more so.

In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness

Forgiveness can only follow acknowledgement of error. I have seen none of that.

Submitting a grant proposal to the effect of "I am going to use this grant to do science and also further the interests of the Democratic party" makes you a political operative

I think you should reconsider your definition of "political operative".

The commerce department published a list of what the $2B in defunded "woke" grants was here. Grabbing a random one in the $1-2M range, we get this one which was funded for $1.6M.

The Neurobiology of Hypoxia Tolerance in the Naked Mole-Rat

This project will contribute to understanding tolerance of hypoxia (low oxygen levels) within the nervous system by studying the African naked mole-rat. This mammal lives in crowded, oxygen-starved burrows, and has evolved the ability to survive extended periods of oxygen deprivation without triggering brain cell death.

This project will test new target genes that may protect brain cells from cell death resulting from exposure to hypoxia, with potential applications in designing new treatments for humans that experience oxygen deprivation during traumatic events like a stroke or heart attack. By studying the genome of the naked mole-rat, the investigators previously discovered changes in the genes of this species that likely reduce cell death from oxygen deprivation.

The goal of the current project is to test each of those genes for its potential role in brain cell protection. The project will support two graduate students each year, who will help mentor a number of undergraduate student researchers recruited from existing programs targeting students from groups underrepresented in science. Information on the naked mole-rat will be shared via outreach to a local zoo and area high schools.

This project will investigate molecular, cellular, and physiological mechanisms in the brain that underly hypoxia tolerance and will contribute to understanding evolutionary adaptations to environmental challenges in general. The naked mole-rat will be developed as a model system for studying the molecular and genetic basis of hypoxia tolerance in the mammalian brain.

As far as I can tell, this grant was defunded because they said "We will hire two grad students. Those two grad students will teach undergraduate classes. Our university has some already-existing programs to recruit undergrads from underrepresented groups, and so maybe the classes the grad students teach will contain members of underrepresented groups."

That... does not sound like something a political operative would say. That sounds like a PI who wanted to do useful research and was told "you have to say how the program will help minorities" and so grudgingly included a line like "the program will help everyone, and minorities are a part of everyone".

Forgiveness can only follow acknowledgement of error. I have seen none of that.

What error would you like that researcher to acknowledge? Be concrete.

More comments

We're not going to do unlimited gay race science funding. I'm sorry. Just pour so much money into the program that everything is funded is not the a realistic vision of the future. Forget practically reasonable, it's not politically reasonable. This will always devolve into patron-client politics.

Did you misplace your comment? That's not what we're talking about at all and actively misrepresents everything I said with culture war buzz words. My claim is that in an over-competitive environment, attempts to "game the system" naturally rise. That's not indicative of a moral failing on behalf of the candidates (scientists) exactly, it's just a natural thing that happens in competitive environments with poorly set guardrails. It would be mistaken to take attempts to game the funding system at face value, no questions asked. While obviously moral virtue is higher when 'doing the right thing' in more difficult environments, I think we should be careful about how we ascribe moral fault to actors in a broken system. Surely scientists deserve some blame for juicing their proposals with DEI language, but to hang all the blame at their feet is bananas.

Roughly speaking, 1 in 4 NSF grants get funded, which means 3 essentially get denied. Scale-wise, I would say even an increase in the funding rate to something like 40% would have had a disproportionately large effect in decreasing attempts to pander to the left. Also, I think that probably over half of those grants are likely worth funding, no "gay race science funding" required.

Maybe I misunderstood your position. I thought you were saying the mismatch between the number of scientists requesting funding and the amount of funds available put the scientists in a position where they vulnerable to pressures to conform to the current zeitgeist and unable to be principled. And thus, the way to "save science" is to ensure that the funding is less competitive. That there are is more funding being chased by fewer projects. Thus they can be principled.

I am interpreting that to mean that science cannot be apolitical unless all (or the vast majority) of science is funded. If those are the terms, I would rather not fund it.

Yup, one proposal was for a telescope in Chile, and it had a throwaway sentence about how it could help get more Hispanic students interested. As if telescopes are built in Chile for outreach and not because it has a crazy dry high desert.

I actually think that’s sort of legit.

My colleague is Peruvian. He founded a whole system of training botanists in Peru to fill large gaps in Amazon forest research.

(In Peru, with Peruvian money, before you get mad at me. But initially because he was funded from Oxford and he does still compete for international grants).

A lot of countries around the world have very little support for science. People who want to do it, well, you go to the US or the UK for that kind of thing.

But scientific infrastructure which gets planted in these places can help train up local talent.

I’ve seen it in many countries. Panama has the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute which trained a lot of very skilled Panamanian and other latin country researchers, as well as those who do stuff like maintain museums and collections and so on.

You ever want to see someone profoundly skilled at what they do, go for a trek with a 60 year old botanist who works and lives around tropical forests and can identify thousands of trees from minute differences. Skill level is off the chart for that discipline.

And well, I’m biased, but I have the wishy washy belief that spreading the art and practice of scientific research around the world is a very legitimate benefit for humanity.

Maybe if there’s a nuclear holocaust some Chileans will keep the scientific flame alive, who knows.

And what that one sentence said was "I, the proposer of this project, hereby abandon any claim of being a neutral scientific fact finder, and align myself, and pledge fealty to, the political goals of the Democratic party. " Once you've abandoned your neutrality that way you can't legitimately complain of being treated as a political enemy.

Alternatively, as @jeroboam said in a follow-up to one of my prior comments, there were probably boomercons who just read it in BusinessWeek and actually believed that there was some untapped source of talent that was falling through some magical cracks or something. Over time, more and more people have wizened up, realizing that the magical gainz predicted simply have not occurred. It does take a little time for that realization to cascade (related?). Like, yes, congratulations to you, The_Nybbler, for realizing it earlier (as did I), but it's pretty insane to think that even the most milquetoast versions, at all time points in the cascade, were fealty pledges.

When the scimitar is to one's throat, the sincerity of the Shahada should be downweighted accordingly.

Forced oaths have value to the forcer; that's why they exist. They shouldn't, but they do. They especially have value when the person being forced has the quality of integrity; they will often prefer to follow the oath rather than surreptitiously subvert it. Thus such an oath should be downweighted, but not ignored entirely.

Which is to say that a Christian or a Jew is wise not to trust those who converted to Islam under the penalty of the sword, not without good reason to believe the conversion was false. They certainly should not trust the falseness of the conversion if the converted insist on performing salah even once their Islamic masters have been vanquished, and object to the removal of "PBUH" and "Inshallah" from their work documents.

On the other hand, as Antioch found out, the sword bearer would be wise not to trust his new converts too far either…

Keanu Reeves character, "Speed", trying to be edgy: "Shoot the hostage. ... Go for the good wound and he can't get to the plane with her."

The_Nybbler, actually understanding edgy: "Shoot the hostage. Once they've obeyed the terrorist they can't legitimately complain of being treated as an enemy."

From "The Rules of Engagement are the problem" by John T. Reed:

Blackhawk Down

In Somalia, bad guys who had the U.S. Army Rangers pinned down in the Blackhawk Down incident would hold a woman or child against their chest as they crossed the street to prevent the squeamish Americans from firing at them. The Somalis would blast away at the American with their guns as they thus crossed the street. Apparently, it worked. I would have told my men to shoot the SOBs through the civilians.

Would that cause the civilians to have a bad day? Sure. But it would be a great thing for the remaining civilians because the fighters would immediately stop using that tactic as soon as the Americans started killing the fighters by shooting them through the human shields.

Like ransom

It’s like ransom. Paying ransom is generally illegal because it encourages continuation of the kidnapping business. If the various governments would enforce their laws against paying ransom to the extent that ransoms stopped being paid at all, the kidnapping business would cease to exist for lack of incentive. Everyone who pays a ransom to get their loved one back is culpable for subsequent kidnappings of other people’s loved ones.

Paying ransom is a classic case of beggar thy neighbor--that is, a policy that benefits the person engaging in it, but which only can do so at the expense of other similarly-situated people. It is a classic example of taking care of number one and to hell with everyone else.

The U.S. and allied soldiers who refrain from shooting where civilian human shields are benefiting themselves by enabling themselves to claim they are great humanitarians who held their fire. But they do that at the expense of the rest of the American and allied military who will be in continued danger from the bad guys in question. Indeed, the bullet that kills the humanitarian soldier who held his fire, or his best friend, may be fired by the bad guy he let escape with his decision not to shoot where he knew or suspected bad guys were--because of the presence of civilians.

Similarly, refraining from shooting at an enemy soldier because he uses innocent (or maybe not) civilians as shields rewards and thereby encourages the use of human shields. It is immoral to encourage the use of innocent civilians as shields. Furthermore, refusing to refrain from shooting at those who use civilians as shields will immediately end the practice which will lead to fewer civilian and military casualties on all sides and an earlier victory in the war. Paradoxical thought it may seem, ignoring the possibility of civilian casualties by shooting at the enemy regardless of the presence of civilians will save civilian lives in the long run.

because the fighters would immediately stop using that tactic as soon as the Americans started killing the fighters by shooting them through the human shields

...

refraining from shooting at an enemy soldier because he uses innocent (or maybe not) civilians as shields rewards and thereby encourages the use of human shields

The absolute key question here is to what extent the applied effects change behavior. It is good that you have found an example where shooting particular hostages (those directly attached to an enemy fighter as a shield) provides game theoretic incentives to change behavior and get to a better outcome. Certainly, there are other situations where shooting hostages randomly is not likely to have a similar effect. So, the question we have to answer is what methods actually affect the game theory such that they are likely to affect change and accomplish our goals. I comment on that here.

It mildly bugs me that game theory 101 isn't a common senior year topic.

Far too many arguments miss the game-theoretical aspects of decisions which nominally have a particular effect in the short term, but which have a very different effect once other actors shift their strategies in response.

"I was just following orders"

The former Commisar a few weeks after the election.

...but didn't General de Gaulle say that all of France was part of the Resistance?

Is the hostage supposed to be pointing a gun at you in this analogy? People can be compelled into causing harm, but that doesn't negate the fact that they are, as a matter of fact, causing harm. Stopping them can be justified on those grounds alone.

Or are you going to argue that the scientists were just following orders?

The hostage doesn't have a gun, but by not resisting, the hostage is enabling a criminal with a gun to get away.

By not resisting, the scientists are (checks notes) noticing that scientific studies done in a Hispanic country might help more Hispanics want to become scientists.

The hostage still isn't coming off as the better of the two here.

Are these scientists the front-line Wehrmacht, or just civilians throwing a quick heil before going about their business? The German public needn't be prosecuted, just shown that the Nazis aren't in charge anymore.

They aren't being prosecuted; they are simply being told that their jobs manufacturing Hugo Boss uniforms and swastika flags for the government are done, and that they will have to find some other form of employment in the private sector. That seems like a reasonable consequence and a proportional punishment.

You can certainly argue about the severity of their actions (including arguing that it's so trivial no punishment is warranted), but they did take those actions and do bear moral responsibility for them.

I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.

Your entire post hinges on your audience trusting this to be true. I have no reason to believe any bureaucrat in the proximity of the chopping block has any better reason to decry DOGE's mission than "saving my own skin".

I’ve semi doxxed myself on this platform by saying what I work on before, so I don’t really mind doing it again.

I work on developing models that estimate the water content of vegetation from satellite imagery. This has direct relevance for fire risk forecasting, and I use it to study where droughts affect forests most.

You can judge for yourself the usefulness of this, but also, I think the thinking generally reflects a wrong perspective about where benefit in science comes from.

Some systems are weak link chains, and others are strong link chains. The quality of a weak link system depends on the strength of the weakest link, and the strongest is somewhat irrelevant. An example of this is food safety inspection. One key mistake and the mission is a failure.

However, science is more of a strong link system. There can be a lot of low quality papers, sure. But really the benefit we gain from science arises from top quality research that gets done. You can have 100 people doing low impact research, but if you get out of that investment even one big breakthrough, it can be very worth it.

The problem here is that science is sort of a blind search as well, we don’t know where big breakthroughs might exist. Who would have been crazy enough to say that studying Gila monster venom would lead to one of the most important drug class discoveries in the 21st century. You might say, ah ozempic type drugs, who cares, I’m not fat. But maybe the next unexpected discovery reverses Alzheimer’s, who knows. Maybe you are destined to get Alzheimer’s, at that point, would have been nice to have some strange new drug class that combats it.

Saying, “hey, random PhD student, I don’t think your work is that important in the end and thus I’m fine with weakening science in the United States across the board”.. it’s certainly a position one may take, but I’d say it is not at all a smart one regarding human or national advancement.

You might say, ah ozempic type drugs, who cares, I’m not fat. But maybe the next unexpected discovery reverses Alzheimer’s, who knows. Maybe you are destined to get Alzheimer’s, at that point, would have been nice to have some strange new drug class that combats it.

Well, I just did a presentation on a massive study using EMR data from over a million patients in the States. It found that Ozempic reduced the incidence of Alzheimer's by about 50%.

Not quite a reversal (though studies are ongoing on people with prior diagnoses who then start semaglutide), but I just found this very funny.

I am in the business of starting forest fires so this is of some interest to me.

Please buy my product

I think that work sounds really cool. I hope a private company wants to continue it and you get hired.

But I mean come on "you have to give me and my friends money or your country will fail" is obviously not a compelling argument. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.

There are totally things which don’t make dollars but make sense. Nobody benefits personally from running fair courts, or from building roads.

Nobody benefits personally from running fair courts, or from building roads.

Do you mean that people do benefit personally from having fair courts and roads? The key question to if something should be state funded is not "is it beneficial," to be funded by tax dollars something should be a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Generaly the courts are supposed to be designed this way. Roads on the other-had depend on the type of road. Roads can be excludable, see toll roads. Probably most interstate and express roads should be paid by user fees that full capture the externalities of those roads. So some set of roads are both beneficial and monetizable. They can "make doallars."

Knowledge as derived from fundamental research can be non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but some not-insubstantial fraction of useful knowledge is excludable.

This can be done in two ways. First, you can patent some knowledge. Much of the development of GLP-1 agonists from Gila monster venom was funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, etc. If the drug companies are going to be granted a monopoly on the beneficial results of this type of research they ought to pay for all of this class of research. It makes no sense for the tax payer to pay for the research and then grant a pharmaceutical company the exclusive rights to capture all the benefits of the research.

Second, you can keep knowledge as a trade secret. If @Jesweez research actually has "...direct relevance for fire risk forecasting..." then the actuarial teams at the insurance companies should be willing to pay him for it. If it's not something that can actually be incorporated into a risk model then it does not actually have "direct relevance," it has some sort of hypothetical indirect potential relevance. Alternatively, if it can actually give you an edge understanding where drought is affecting most, you should be able to sell it to a hedge fund trading agricultural futures. Or an industry consortium or publication in the vein of the some sort of new Old Farmer's Almanac.

There is probably some small set of research that is useful, novel, can't be patented, and can't be sold as a proprietary model. It is a vanishingly small fraction of total federal research funding though.

...The whole point of government is that there are some public goods that only indirectly make money, or otherwise increase quality of life in a cost-efficient way due to pooled resources?

Forest fire forecasting and management is almost definitionally something the government should be funding itself - the government owns a lot of fire-risk land, massive forest fires affect broad swaths of society, and the net effect can be monetary (even massively so) but is so indirect that private commercial interests might not have good reason or incentive to fully fund it.

"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.

"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.

This is pretty much the same argument made against things like trying to reform USPS. Yes, it loses money, but guess what? Life itself is inherently a money-losing enterprise. I think of Bostrom's phrase "a Disneyland with no children," and I feel like the spending-reform types are unconsciously drawn to trying to instantiate it.

I mean, it’s the truth. Basic science is a fundamental engine of progress. Just look at the past century of innovation.

Funding basic science is not something companies typically do. It’s too indirect. They’re not going to foot the bill to study what chemicals are in a desert dwelling lizard’s mouth.

I’d argue the same whether I was a scientist or not.

You're just dealing with a catastrophic loss of trust, driven by I think mostly Covid and woke ideological excess. That puts this stuff in the same category as public restrooms and park benches: it sure was nice when we lived in a society where we could have these things without them being abused and ruined for everyone.

I mean, it’s the truth. Basic science is a fundamental engine of progress. Just look at the past century of innovation.

Funding basic science is not something companies typically do.

What is the number one invention of that century of progress? The transistor certainly is a candidate. The FET was invented at Magnavox (and later realized at Bell Labs) and the bipolar junction transistor (and several others) at Bell Labs.

Bell Labs existed in a weird corporate/government liminal space because it was funded by the profits of AT&T's government-granted monopoly on telecommunication through the Reagan administration. I'm not sure it's the right example of corporate research.

Yeah, and said monopoly was eventually broken (sort-of?) by the government itself. Maybe Nybbler could have used the example of the RCA labs (who did do a bunch of interesting fundamental science), but then again, the Labs division were often at loggerheads with management in the back half of the 20th Century, and this infighting led to RCA's demise.

Saying, “hey, random PhD student, I don’t think your work is that important in the end and thus I’m fine with weakening science in the United States across the board”.. it’s certainly a position one may take, but I’d say it is not at all a smart one regarding human or national advancement.

Ok, so then we fund infinity studies for infinity progress. But that doesn't sound realistic, so we need to draw a line somewhere. The current administration has decided to draw the line closer to you than the old one did. I would sympathize more if I viewed science the way I did 10 years ago, an apolitical search for truth but it turns out science that upsets the boss or the donors gets tossed into the dumpster. And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.

Certainly the country is welcome to decide the amount of funding that should go toward science.

I do believe that the uncertainty and removal of opportunities will potentially have generational effects on the ability of the US to do science, which I think is a shame.

We’re currently a scientific powerhouse of a nation. I do see these moves as deciding to cede that status.

I obviously disagree with the sentiment being shared in this thread as I believe that scientific powerhouses are rare in history would prefer not to see this one undone or ceded.

My assumption is that, eventually, after demolishing the house full of termites, something will be built to replace it. This assumption may be very mistaken.

And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.

But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.

As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?

I've seen estimates of Academia as high as 20-to-1 on left-right splits, which is to say less than 5% right. Saying they'll vote 'more' blue is reaching levels of statistical impossibility- you can't have a 10% swing if less than 10% of the voter base is up for grabs.

Yeah, the institutions left themselves vulnerable to this by backing one side so heavily.

I also noticed that there is new proposed legislation which increases the tax on the investment income of private university endowments from about 1% to 21%.

This is common sense stuff that should have happened long ago, but couldn't because powerful institutions had friends on both sides of the aisle. But now that they put themselves "in play" so to speak they lost their political cover.

There's no reason for the US to continue to subsidize Harvard's $50 billion endowment.

I like the endowment tax. But what's the actual game plan here, if there even is one? Fire or force out half the academics and researchers, and then maybe 20 years later the ones who replace them will magically be 50-50 red and blue? Even if you think that this will absolutely happen, that leaves a giant 20-year chasm of scientific slowdown. If some of the "burn it down" people here actually do have some kind of proposal, I'm all ears, but I haven't seen one yet. If such a proposal doesn't exist, this is just a Chinese Cultural Revolution 2.0 and could well lead to an intellectual Great Famine.

We're already in the intellectual Great Famine. We've got billions of dollars pouring in to researchers who are producing authoritative nonsense; not just not-knowledge but in many cases anti-knowledge, false information accepted as true. In genetics, the US even maintains datasets which it does not allow researchers access to unless they promise not to use it for certain conclusions. That's a recipe for intellectual famine right there.

Good news: We've cleansed the hated outgroup nearly completely from the institutions!

Bad news: The hated outgroup is now shelling the institutions from the outside!

He's not a bureaucrat. He's a PhD student.

Do you have anything more interesting to say when the wording "any bureaucrat" is changed to "anyone"?

Do you? Why call him a bureaucrat if that turns out to be neither true nor relevant to your argument? Surely you did know that he's not a bureaucrat given that it's in the second sentence of his post? I am trying to gauge how carefully you actually read the post we are discussing.

I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly your objection to this post is. I also know postdoc cancer researchers whose funding is imperiled by doge cuts. Do you think that:

  1. I (and OP) are lying, funds are safu

  2. The people I know (and OP) are not actually researching stuff that's useful (based on what? Who are the cancer experts in DOGE advising on what research is useful to fund?)

  3. Something else?

My objection is obviously that he has skin in the game and as such should not be trusted for analysis of said game.

I am heavily sympathetic to your concern, but research, especially military-related research (which is 40% of federal basic research), is not an area where we have much of an alternate mechanism, for reasons I outlined here. It's not like business, where a dispassionate economist can sit back and confidently believe that the market will appropriately determine winners/losers with showers of cash/bankruptcy, depending on whether they ultimately provide value to the market, in this case comforted by the fact that they are putting their own skin in the game.

Instead, we have a situation where your military is very very rarely 'tested' (in fact, ideally it is very rare). You very rarely get actual feedback. When you do, you do not have access to the counterfactual of what would have happened if you had invested differently. Yet, you almost certainly have to invest in this in the modern world. Your adversaries are investing, and from what I've read, the adversaries of the US are investing very specifically to counter existing US systems (and near-term planned systems they they've learned about via espionage). If you simply stop and they do not, it is highly likely that they will counter your systems, push further to develop overmatch systems, and proceed to be able to conquer you and yours.

As such, your problem is to determine how to invest. This is a wicked problem. As I said in the linked comment:

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?

Those experts will have skin in the game. The general who thinks airplanes will change the nature of warfare? Probably part of whatever cluster of folks who became the Army Air Force. They were probably personally invested in aircraft. If their ideas were embraced, they were likely to be the people leading those efforts, in charge of said investments. If their ideas were not embraced, they were likely to be sidelined, a bit player in comparison to whoever else's theory of military progression was embraced. Those other people, with other beliefs, telling you that airplanes are just toys? Yeah, they have skin in the game, too. They think that there's some other thing (probably in their portfolio) that is going to be dominant in the next fight. Who do you believe? How do you invest? Do you just cut them all off because they have skin in the game? As discussed, that's probably not going to lead to better results, and you probably couldn't measure it with respect to the counterfactual even if it did.

It is fundamentally a wicked hard problem, especially because the nature of warfare is anti-inductive (as soon as you find and exploit something that seems to work, your adversaries notice and respond accordingly). Trudging along and trying to just make the best decisions for your research investments at each point in time, knowing that everyone who is trying to convince you of their vision of the future probably has skin in the game, is probably the best you can do. At least, I don't really see a better way to proceed. I also don't think the right response to realizing that there doesn't seem to be any good options other than trudging is to just give up and quit, either. I think that probably leads to China just countering all US systems and dominating militarily.

Isn’t SV getting pretty heavy into military and doing a great job eg Palantir

I believe so. I don't see what the relevance of that really is, though? Is your point that now we should be more suspicious of what they're saying, because they have skin in the military funding game?

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So you don't believe that any useful research is imperiled by funding cuts?

If you do believe this, then there's really nothing objectionable in OP's post, because it's entirely possible that he was doing such research.

If you don't, what evidence would change your mind?

What this amounts to is “no one should be allowed to argue in their own defense” which is of course a ridiculous and fanatical restriction to put on someone sharing their own perspective of a rapidly developing situation.

There is a distinction between:

"you should be allowed to argue in your own defense, with everyone aware that the outcome personally affects you"
and
"you should be allowed to be a supposedly-neutral third party in your own defense"

The correct response to bias is not to throw it out - everyone has bias - it is to properly weight the biased evidence and seek other sources to come to a holistic conclusion. It’s bizarre to ignore biased data because underneath the bias there is also the other axis: direct experience. Just as bias is bad, experience is good, and they often co-occur. Tossing everything with a hint of bias also means tossing a lot of experience.

It’s kind of like the lobbyist problem. A lobbyist still has subject matter expertise. You can still meet with a lobbyist. Lobbyists can represent good causes. You just have to also include more effort in seeking out non lobbyist opinions to combine into a conclusion. Unfortunately outlawing lobbyists doesn’t work because there’s no bright line for what counts.

I'll respond by saying it's unsurprising that one who argues on behalf of science targeted by DOGE is also in the corner of lobbyists.

LOL, not my most tactful argument but this forum is about "light not heat" so I'm willing to be less persuasive if it means I'm more intellectually honest.

One of these days I do want to do a top-level post about lobbyists. Maybe this isn't the right spot, but it simply isn't obvious to me that there's anything inherently evil or awful about a collection of lobbyists and special interest groups duking it out on a variety of issues and competing for lawmaker attention. I mean, first of all, what's the alternative? Second of all, how can you tell the difference between a well-meaning non-profit advocacy group and the "bad" kind of lobbying? And finally, it seems objectively true that for better or worse, there are numerous areas where good legislation literally cannot be created by a well-meaning, completely fair, and intelligent individual with a little extra time. At some point you do need people with specific industry/subject matter knowledge, and there's a limited pool of people with those qualifications. And absolutely zero of them are going to be completely impartial.

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