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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   33670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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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?

My point is we have an alternative to your military research ie SV

More comments

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.

Second of all, how can you tell the difference between a well-meaning non-profit advocacy group and the "bad" kind of lobbying?

That's one of the inherently awful things about them?

And just because you can't eliminate bias doesn't mean you have to allow it.

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