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