Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation
time.com221 points by jbegley 14 hours ago
221 points by jbegley 14 hours ago
As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely.
The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.
Things are quite bleak right now...
You are entirely correct. The massive investment in science (and the culture of valuing scientific knowledge) that started with the cold war is coming to an end. It turns out that destruction is far easier to do than creation.
I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)
But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.
This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.
It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning while also expecting republican administrations and voters to continue funding them. I've seen this best expressed here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-beatings-will-conti...
It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
> I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning
Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them.
Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint diversity" among police offices? After all, why should liberal politicians fund non-liberal institutions?
The government should not discriminate based on political orientation. Government services, including government-funded universities, should serve all Americans.
> It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.
>Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.
If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.
There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023.
Said as a liberal.
Litmus test: Say something incendiary in a liberal direction at a university and observe reaction (i.e. "there is no such thing as biological gender"). Say something incendiary in a conservative direction and observe reaction (i.e. "life begins at conception and abortion is murder").
There absolutely was a double-standard.
That said, even if liberals created consequences for conservative speech, they by and large allowed it. (While picketing and, in later years, shouting it down)
In contrast to the current group of populist-conservatives who are anti-free speech and want to erase liberal ideas from existence.
> There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023.
The fact that there are a large number of liberals at universities does not make it a monoculture. There is no conspiracy to keep non-liberals out. Your anecdote shows nothing.
The affiliations of employees and students (if liberal) isn't what creates a monoculture -- it's the double standard and resulting self-censorship.
Too few liberals in academia were willing to say "I disagree with what you say, but support your right to say it" when it was inconvenient.
Which isn't in any way to justify the excessive clusterfuck of a reprise by populist conservatives these days. Two wrongs do not make a right, and what's being done today is much worse than the liberal bent of early 21st century US universities.
How is "scientific dominance" defined? Dollars per Papers per minute?
The qualitative definition, that of practically every major technological breakthrough of the last half century having emerged from America, even if it was later capitalised on by others, more than suffices.
As disrespectful as it is wrong and overly generalized.
> As disrespectful as it is wrong and overly generalized
How? Since the fall of the USSR, what major technology took a lab-to-living-room path where the “lab” bit wasn’t American?
Lots of things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventi...
Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible.
On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.
I’m talking about paradigm-shifting conventions. Microprocessors. LLMs. The Internet. Lithium-ion batteries. Our institutions reliably did the basic research to bias us (and the USSR) towards discovering their underlying phenomena and then maturing that into technology. Today, the only real player in that space is China.
> paradigm-shifting conventions
- Basic oxygen steelmaking
- Float glass
- Orbital satellites
- High speed railways
- Public key cryptography
- Orbital space stations
- DNA/RNA/sequencing
- Self-driving car
- Cellular phone service
- CD-ROM
- Direct satellite television
- Laptop
- (Also some other stuff after 1985...)
From his comment I think he just means the attractiveness of moving to the US to do research. US science is probably majority completed by foreign born scientists
You didn't say what's wrong with ending up in industry, but mention it like it's bad?
Not doing basic research, and your research is entirely driven by short-term profit motives rather than long term benefit of humanity.
Bell Labs is a counterexample that ran for decades, and pharma companies have internal research labs, I know Motorola and Apple have, too.
In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.
Here is an incomplete list of things that it's impossible to research in industry:
1. Astronomy.
2. Physics.
3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.
4. Biology aside from medicine.
5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.
6. Theoretical computer science.
7. Mathematics.
I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about astronomers? They've been a part of our culture and the prestige of civilization for thousands of years.
"Bell Laboratories has been the recipient of 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, with notable laureates including John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and Arthur Ashkin. Other notable achievements include the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and the development of optical tweezers."
Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS.
Biology - there is a ton of research in agriculture too - e.g. Monsanto and GMO seeds.
The discovery of the CMB was accidental. Bell Labs didn't fund it intentionally.
> how can people not know about astronomers?
Light pollution. Lots of people now live in places where the stars are hard to spot.
And now we also all have infinite distraction cuboids, many who can still see them if they look, won't look.
And if you don't know what's out there — or mistakenly categorise all of space as scifi — then why would you be curious about it? Why even ask who might research it?
Apple definitely had an internal group doing mathematics research, which i know first hand. But yes there are, to your point, topics in science probably only done in academia etc, but, to my point, several are seriously funded in industry.
I couldn't say more without knowing the details, but industrial labs don't usually research mathematics, so much as ways to apply mathematics to their industry. These are called "mathematics research departments," because they hire mathematicians.
Things aren't impossible to research in industry. Managers with an R&D budget can fund whatever research they want, and it's easy to find examples of companies doing research in most of the fields you name. The fields where it's not are because you've defined them in a circular fashion e.g. "chemistry aside from industrial chemistry" is not an argument for "there are things you can't do in industry", and space research is primarily driven by the private sector now but I guess you are defining astronomy to only include study of things too far away to matter to anyone except astronomers.
> Astronomy.
What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?
> Physics.
Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?
> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.
What benefits do you expect to see?
> Biology aside from medicine.
Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.
Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
> Theoretical computer science.
Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.
> Mathematics.
Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.
There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.
Each of these has a long answer, so I'll pick this one:
>[Chemistry]? Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
Everything around us is made up of "molecules," assemblages of parts called atoms. Since it's not possible to manipulate the molecules directly in sufficient numbers (one pound of plastic is made of 2000000000000000000000 individual molecules), we have to assemble molecules en masse by subjecting them to processes that cause each step to happen to all of them at once. How does that work?
Let's say you have a molecule. Its structure will have exposed parts, and some bonds will be weaker than others. If you want to replace a part with another part (one step in the assembly of the final product), you might go about it by letting another molecule come along that has a greater affinity to bond with the location of the part you want to replace, and also has a tendency to be in turn itself replaced with the part you want to add. How can you know which molecule to use for this? You could run a computer simulation, apply a rule of thumb, or look it up in a book. In order to write the simulations, deduce the correct rules of thumb and write the books, scientists need to try a lot of combinations of molecules to see what parts swap with what other parts when they're mixed, and then think very hard about what's happening and why it is happening. This practice is known as, "chemistry."
Once a lot of the rules for a certain molecule are mapped out, engineers with an application in mind can go to the library and ask, "what sequence of steps will take me from available molecules to a molecule I can sell in a way that succeeds very often?" This is called, "industrial chemistry." If there was no library and no knowledge in it, industrial chemistry would be impossible. That is the relationship between science and engineering.
Basically none of modern optics would exist without astronomy (well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics). Most of statistics and efficient cameras originate in astronomy/astrophysics (mostly because you have to count all the photons and you are never getting a second relevant measurement point)
There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Results are often spun out into companies, but there is no institution that can fund experiments that require timelines of multiple decades (even things like fusion power is nearly completely government funds)
And those are the only two parts where I actually have some competence. So yeah.. I wouldn't buy
> well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics
Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.
> There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded.
Yes, and? Is this an argument that they cannot be funded in other ways, or an argument that the parts of physics that cannot be funded in any other way ought to be publicly funded? There's just this blanket assumption that this is true but it simply doesn't follow.
For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude.
> What benefits do you expect to see?
This is exactly the problem: you're describing a for-profit mindset, and it's exactly why research in the private sector floundering.
If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it. You don't know if it brings value because you haven't researched it yet. That's what breaking new ground is all about.
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Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.
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Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a great deal of it in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?
Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.
> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.
> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).
Bell labs was funded from the profits of a legal monopoly, and the money spent on it was used to justify the continuance of that monopoly. You do see some private basic research these days as with Google in robotics or Microsoft in quantum computers but its fairly rare and small compared to government funded research.
And pharma companies do a lot of research but it's almost entirely applied, taking the basic processes discovered by NIH funded research and figuring out how to turn them into feasible drugs. You need both halves there to sustain our current progress.
> it's almost entirely applied, [...] you need both halves there to sustain our current progress
why do we need to subsidize "half" of these pharma companies' research? if they can't get it for free then they'll have to find a way to do it themselves at a profit
Pretty good article on Bell Labs recently, but also I think it indicates how it's not likely to exist in the US again.
Industry research is generally R&D (applied science, engineering research), not basic research (basic science). Not to disparage either; both are needed, but they are quite different and a person may be suited to one but not the other. It can be hard for someone looking for work to determine where an organization's focus is, as an outsider.
Bell Labs was a monopoly granted by the US government where they were literally compelled by Congress to invest in research.
I also don't buy the notion that industry is better for science, maybe if you want to research ways to damage humans and the environment sure but most people don't want these things.
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Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding. I have yet to see any real evidence of fraud from the DOGE reports, just contracts and projects that don't align with the current administration's world view and priorities.
Yes, scientists are human and there are certainly instances of scientific misconduct that take time to root out. In the grand scheme of things, funding for science generates many times its value in economic output.
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It is what we used to call FUD. Like parent says, it never gets near a prosecutor, even a prosecutor "on their side" in a state with a judiciary "on their side" because we still have the semblance of rule of law in this country. DOGE makes a claim, and it sticks permanently into Trump-supporter minds, never mind that they quietly walk it back a few weeks later or it never makes it to the DOJ.
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2024/06/28
DOGE got ahold of Obama's time machine?
What people expect is a connection between the claims of fraud and the massive cuts, funding pauses (which effectively destroy some research, wasting any money already spent), and disruptive reorganizations. The claim is that DOGE is uncovering so very much fraud all over the place, that you practically can't enter a government office without tripping over fraud. Where's all this fraud, justifying such extreme measures? They say they found it! Where are the indictments? Where are the investigations? There should be lots of them.
... unless they're lying.
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[EDIT: The way I wrote this was mean, and why be mean? Rephrasing to be less mean: I reviewed the thread and found your claim to be inaccurate]
Yeah, that's enough of this for one day.
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The root post of this thread was concerned with the effects of, "The Trump admins cuts", as is TFA.
I think I see what you mean, however: that your original post in this thread could be read as setting that aside and treating of just the sub-topic of whether there's any fraud in science (of course there's some).
However, the post I responded to (not your post, to be clear) mentioned DOGE by name: "I have yet to see any real evidence of fraud from the DOGE reports" (to be fair to that poster, I think they read your "why do think so much fraud has been uncovered lately?" as being about that, given the context of the thread, and as the most prominent claims of fraud in general and, specifically, in government funding of science lately have been from DOGE and friends, though evidently that's not what you meant). Between that, TFA, and the root of the thread, I hope you can see why I bristled a bit at being accused of being "the only person talking about DOGE in this thread", given that I was responding to a post that mentioned them by name, and that it's, more-or-less, also the topic of TFA and the root post of this thread.
I do empathize with your being exhausted with the topic of Trump/DOGE, but would suggest that this is maybe not a good thread to expect to avoid it in, given the topic of the linked article.
> Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding.
Are you serious? Just go look at the recent Alzheimer's research scandal. It's the tip of the iceberg.
The fraud perpetrated by an individual which misled the field as whole is not the same as 'fraud in government funding'.
Again, scientists are human and will do things for personal gain. There are mechanisms being implemented in science funding that are meant to try and curb this behavior. NIH intramural research now require the use of electronic lab notebooks, which greatly reduce the ability to doctor data post-experiment. There is also a push for scientific preregistration, which helps to prevent p-hacking and hypothesis modification.
But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.
> Again, scientists are human and will do things for personal gain.
Which was my original point.
> But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.
Who said this?
> Why do think so much fraud has been uncovered lately?
> Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding.
> Are you serious? Just go look at the recent Alzheimer's research scandal. It's the tip of the iceberg.
> But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.
> Who said this?
That was how I interpreted you bringing up the Alzheimer's scandal. When you say "why do you think so much fraud has been uncovered recently?" and mention the Alzheimer's scandal, I feel you portray it as an overwhelming or systematic issue with government funded research.
The process of getting funding for science from a government agency is tedious and painful. There are many eyes that review each grant application. It takes months/years, there are usually reviews to make sure that research is on track and aligns with the original proposal... So when you say that the Alzheimer's scandal is the tip of the iceberg, it implies systematic and widespread fraud in science funding rather than individual instances of fraud and misconduct.
You're not wrong, however, who would have funded lasers? What about CRISPR funding? Most scientists are focused on status, however, many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.
The original laser was built by the research arm of Hughes Aircraft, so I'm not sure I see the issue there. Even if Hughes was partly funded by defense, I don't really classify defense under the same category as other types of pure research funding because there's typically an actual purpose, which fits the "short-term profit" rather than "long-term benefit of humanity".
Re: CRISPR, wasn't that discovered at least 3 different times on completely independent lines of research? That suggests to me that it's sufficiently "obvious" it would have eventually cropped up in many other areas.
> many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.
Yes. I took no position about this in this specific thread, but I will just say that "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future.
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.
Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.
> so much fraud has been uncovered lately
which fraud? please elaborate
Stuff like this, the Alzheimer's fraud, the superconductor fraud, etc.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud...
Industry researchers are less likely to release their findings to the public, because their bosses choose that way. They are also doing research, but the outcomes of the research are fundamentally different.
Do you work in industry? I do and the notion that all or most science will be coming from MBA driven decision making makes me want to throw up. Industry does the wrong thing for a higher return on a regular basis. That's not what I want driving science.
I worked for a decade at a major research university, and then couple decades in places devoid of MBA types, in the most obvious case because Steve Jobs wasn't into that, nor was the part of Motorola Labs or Sun etc where i was.
I hate to be a contrarian right now, and it’s hard to disagree that an entire generation of science progress will be severely slowed because of this incompetence.
However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering. The entire western world is under populist pressure right now, not just here. So even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country, it’s not a guarantee they will find stability there either.
Have you ever applied for a grant? Do you understand how science in the USA is funded? How it is unique?
Will the rest of the world absorb the scientists in the US? Probably not, that is honestly their mistake and missed opportunity, but all the same probably not. Fine, so you're right? Scientists just stick it out? No.
The best scientists will definitely leave. Those are the very ones we always wanted to attract. They could have always left, but didn't because the US was the best place for them. Now they leave. Everyone else will try and leave or leave for industry. Even if you only lose 20% of your scientist to other countries and sectors where they are no longer doing productive scientific work, that is a massive blow to progress.
Worst case scenario is China wakes up from its xenophobia and uses this opportunity to replay the US science strategy. Suddenly 20-50% of US scientists can leave for China.
> However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering
So, cutting off real funding is now considered "fearmongering"?
Sure, scientists wont move and decades of research goes down the drain and/or will never exist. Science progress will slow down but lets be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
> even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country
the problem is not students moving and studying elsewhere, it's PIs accepting a position to run a lab at an institution in another country that will fund their research; and many will definitely accept that given the prospects in the US for the next ?? years.
Seconded. Everyone is just fighting for survival at this point and it will have decades of consequences.
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SARSv1 was very similar to COVID-19 (which was originally called SARSv2).
Under Obama, a team of US scientists working internationally (including in China) detected SARSv1 early enough to stop it from becoming a pandemic. That team had blocked other pandemics over the years.
Trump fired that team early in his first term, preventing the US from running the early response to COVID in China.
Here is a list of current epidemics the US is either intentionally not responding to, or where the response stopped working since Trump got in office:
- Measles
- Avian Flu
- Tuberculosis
- Screw worm
At least one of those is going to hit the US hard in the short term, and Trump’s intentional sabotage of our public health infrastructure will be to blame.
Scientists have gone on record with admissions they deliberately lied in order to manipulate the public. Example:
"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent," Fauci said. "Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85."
That's happened several times. Include the subpoenaed documents where scientists admit doing so when they thought they weren't being observed, and it goes up into the dozens of times. If you include all the occasions when they "optimistically" made things up whilst stating them as unarguable scientific fact as lies, it gets into the hundreds of times minimum.
It's amazing how backwards the conversation is on HN around COVID. The fact that scientists lied during COVID is an unarguable fact, this belief isn't to do with people not "understanding the basics of science". Scientists did it, they did it to control people, they have sometimes admitted doing it directly and unambiguously, and they certainly did it many more times without being caught.
The fact that scientists lied during COVID is an unarguable fact,
If only you were so concerned about the people who insisted (without evidence) that 'it's just a cold' and those who made opposition to reasonable public health measures into their full time job.
Why did you deliberately leave out the whole quote?
"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."
Some emphasis: "We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."
So, let me get this straight. Your argument that Fauci "lied" is that he increased numbers for herd immunity beyond what he had said in the past. Yet you neglect to mention that he admits these numbers are sciences best guess and as the situation evolved it appeared the number would have to be higher. Moreover, a higher percentage is naturally going to benefit more people, if you buy into the premise that vaccines are very low risk and very high impact, so if you have a reason to believe that the number may be higher calling it a "lie" to shift the percentage higher is ridiculous.
Listen, I get that this sentence you simply don't agree with: "vaccines are very low risk and very high impact." Yes, that is part of the problem, you are brainwashed and anti-intellectual. I don't even know why I'm engaging with you! Partly because I was surprised at your quote, and then angry to learn you lied about it.
It's embarrassing to me, frankly. It's tiring to see that people like you exist.
The rest of the quote makes no difference. He originally presented these numbers as based on science. Later, he admitted he actually made them up based on opinion poll results. Not science and not even "science best guesses", but numbers chosen to always be a bit higher than what most people said they felt comfortable with in order to create social pressure. It was pure social engineering, with no connection to science.
Well that's not true at all, in his own words the science says the number is between 70-90%. And he said somewhere between those numbers. So it's based in science. It's not made up, that's not what made up means.
I'm genuinely curious as I'm starting to believe HN as a whole entertains anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Do you believe any of these statements?
1. Vaccines cause autism
2. Vaccines are not safe and effective (or that this statement belies the realities)
3. Herd immunity is not more important than individual choice
I watched 15 years of Alzheimer's research shut down by NSF and NIH because they refused to touch anything but Amyloid beta. the idea that they are bastions of open mindedness, ethics, or efficiency seems laughable to me.
The important point here is that science corrected itself. It saw a lack of progress from a direction of inquiry and using its established mechanisms rerouted that inquiry.
To expect that every effort will succeed and be perfect is just naive. What matters is that the system has a mechanism to self-evaluate its results and change the consensus. Which it did. Which means it works. We means we shouldn't burn it down.
I agree that part of science is making mistakes.
I was reacting to the idea that the NIH and NSF academic ethics requirements are that critical self correction mechanism, or they that these institutions were responsible for pushing back and overturning the Aβ hypothesis. In reality, it is the opposite. Grant funding is gate held by review panels staffed by leading researchers in the field, and therefore bias towards the current dogma. I don't know if there is a better way, but it's inherently tied to the status quo.
Edit: to be clear on my biases, I spent about 10 years trying to get funding for non Aβ research, and continually shut down by Grant review panels staffed by prominent supporters and authors on the hypothesis.
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The parent commenter is not speaking about science as a whole, they are speaking about US dominance in science.
You state that "hiccup won't stop or even slow down science in the US. All it will do is take government out of the equation." I disagree and I would suspect most scientists reading that statement would also disagree. I too have seen many bright people turning away from the US because of this. I am personally certain that these policies will significantly slow down science in the US.
After all, when David Hilbert was asked in 1934 "How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?", he replied “There is no mathematics in Göttingen, anymore”.
Germany could have invented the atomic bomb and decimated the world if it wasn't for the Nazi stupidity.
That they didn't is not only because of German antipathy to origin of some of the ideas. Despite official condemnation, the Germans remained interested in the technology. One of the lesser-known allied successes in the war was a series of commando actions on a Norwegian power plant which was the largest producer of heavy water in the world at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
You are aware that scientists have to eat and pay rent, right? A lack of funding in the US will draw scientists to places that do have funding. You're confusing "science in the US now" with "all science globally."
Science will do fine. The US enjoyed the benefits of hosting most of the scientific progress. Americans are worried that we won’t be at the forefront anymore.
It is an evergreen sentiment at this point—maybe a multi-polar world will be better. But I’m an American, I want the US to be winning.
The advancement of Science as a whole will suffer because its largest funder is massively reducing funding. A multi-polar world where the same amount of resources goes into science could be great, but it is not the case that other nations are rushing in to fill the funding gap.
And obviously, there are entire experiments that are (quite literally in some cases) dying right now due to sudden cutoff of funds. It could be years before those get back on track.
It sounds to me like you might not understand the highly interconnected pipeline of scientific research. Additionally, this is much more than just a "funding cut".
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01146-4 https://archive.is/TOvAo
That's because the gloom and doom isn't about science itself. It's about funding no longer being taken from taxpayers and transferred to groups and organizations that are supported by those spreading the doom and gloom.
There are people in my life alive literally because of government funded research. It's about the science. It's about the scientists themselves and their livelihoods. It's about the people their research helps.
>All it will do is take government out of the equation.
The middle-class professional scientist is an invention of post-war governments to create an engine of progress.
Pre-war science was a gentleman's hobby, funded by the bored rich. Corporations largely do not perform any basic science and simply reap ideas sown by academics and bring those ideas to market. Without government funding of basic science the engine of progress stops. No new discoveries or new scientists, at least not in the US.
> Corporations largely do not perform any basic science and simply reap ideas sown by academics and bring those ideas to market. Without government funding of basic science the engine of progress stops. No new discoveries or new scientists, at least not in the US.
Does Google Brain and their paper that birthed all these LLMs fit this description?
Standing on the shoulders of giants, the growth LLMs is built on a foundation of government funded academic training and research without which it would not have been possible. Also, I didn't say there is no corporate basic research. Things like Bell Labs and googleX have existed but they are the exception and not the rule and are dependent on a company being highly lucrative and culturally open to basic research. Certainly not reliable as a primary source of funding and almost completely lacking in training.
Even something like the latest explosion in LLMs is applied science and profit motivated.
please refer to a chart of scientific progress that encompasses both those years and the post WWII expansion of the US science state
In your "long-term" world view, apparently the lives of scientists in the here and now doesn't matter
> realize that you will most likely end up in industry. > Things are quite bleak right now...
you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable … ?
The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?
> why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?
Because if it isn't profitable then it needs to be subsidized to continue. Given the replication crisis I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this.
All hail the mighty dollar.
Some of us believe that there are things that are good for society that are worth the money. Medicaid doesn't make a profit. I'm glad people don't die in abject poverty quite as often as they used to.
> I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this
Why don't people prioritize increasing their income? Like, they could look at wealth inequality and consider that if they owned some of the wealth around them then they could instead generate income from it, which might obviate their desire for lower taxes because they're able to pay their bills with a surplus of savings. What's the purpose of destroying science funding when the problem is a lack of personal wealth?
> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". The callous and lack of empathy is seriously astounding.
> The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society.
There are infinitely many things that are marginally good for society and finitely many resources to accomplish them. Spending on irreplicable research has an opportunity cost that most taxpayers wouldn’t choose. Framing it as empathy to forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic.
Another way to look at this is that a country that only spends research money on profitable ventures is going to lose to a country that spends exploratory research money. I, for one, willingly give my cash. You don't get breakthroughs by being timid with this.
Didn't the space race help usher in consumer technology such as CAT scanners, GPS, digital imaging, etc.?
How do you know those scientists and engineers would have contributed less to society had they been employed based on supply and demand instead of central planning?
Short-term versus long-term gains. Businesses have the short term covered, but they're rarely going in on high-risk/low-reward (monetarily) research.
So supply and demand can get stuck at these local maxima. Central planning can think longer term. Maybe it doesn't pay off, but sometimes it does. And when it does, it can shake us free of that maximum.
This works, and is why Bell Labs and its peers existed. For reasons I don't fully understand, they stopped doing this, largely. Maybe because it's difficult to quantify those long-term gains.
Finally, those scientists get to choose where they are employed. So if the private sector wants them to do this work, they can hire them.
Using an inaccurate phrase like “central planning” calls your motives into question. That’s designed to conjure up scary images of Cold War-era Russia or China, but it’s really not how things work in a democracy where democratically-elected representatives allocate money based on their constituents’ interests, and hire experts in their fields to disburse those funds to private researchers based on the recommendations of other private experts, and the resulting research is often greatly profitable for private companies competing in the market (nobody bought Air Force microchips or had to license CRISPR from the president’s nephew).
One thing all of the major advances which shaped the 20th century have in common is that they required huge upfront spending which even large companies couldn’t afford. Smart people will contribute to society in various ways but creating those opportunities allows that to happen more frequently and on a larger scale.
> but it’s really not how things work in a democracy
The US is very purposefully not a democracy.
> Using an inaccurate phrase like “central planning” calls your motives into question.
My motives are transparently not to have the money I earn taken from me to subsidize theoretical science research.
If it results in megacorps 'forcing' papers that misrepresent the truth for their own gains, yeah that's pretty bleak. Think weed killers, sugar, etc.
this is a major misperception of what private research output is actually like
Yes, and no. It's no secret that corporations will purposefully play ignorant when a profitable product has safety concerns.
J&J kept their asbestos baby powder out of the public eye for 50 years. 3M knew about forever chemicals in their adhesives for decades. Bayer knew their drug had been infected with HIV and they sold it anyway.
That's not to say all private research is untrustworthy. But, we should be skeptical.
I do, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding, I would. Science research has a high overall economic multiplier and frankly I'm sick of how one political tendency in the US has chosen to clothe itself in ignorance for political gain. It's contemptible.
Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere along the way.
> Why does research have to be profitable?
Because it's the only way to get a job in industry.
I find it repugnant that theoretical scientists feel entitled to some of my income.
> the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science
Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?
Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research justifies itself in the free market.
If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut.
I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?
Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.
Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...
You are posting in a thread about the NSF. The very least you could do is be informed about what the NSF actually does and has funded before asking questions.
great example of a reverse gish gallop right here, select one point to argue in a response and attempt to discredit someone based on that
brandolini's law in full effect
> Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science?
This is a fair question.
For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.
If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.
I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.
> other than funneling billions to arms industry?
As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
it's not dominance, it's scientific achievement in general that benefits US citizens as well as the rest of the world
whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research
(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
What an amazing comment.
If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID.
Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...
You're on the internet. Do you think Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg built that?
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?"
... and to pharma (similar money flow to arms), banks (bailouts), big tech (tax breaks)...
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Can you give me an example of a prominent American liberal who said the US was winning too many Olympic medals?
Good read; too long to sway public opinion though.
The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS.
Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
> too long to sway public opinion
Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure.
To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism.
The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America.
This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it.
[0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
> The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus.
I think it's worth remembering where that came from. Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, the American industrial establishment was quite happy to work with the Soviet Union, both in selling equipment and lending technical expertise to help the Soviet Union set up their own production (for instance, Ford helped them set up GAZ). The ideological incompatibility of the Soviet Union and western capitalism wasn't seen as so much of a problem, it was mutually profitable to be civil and do business with each other.
Genuine concern with the Soviet Union grew during the war when it became difficult to ignore the belligerent nature of the Soviet Union, towards their neighbors and their own people.
To be clear, I'm not saying it was completely unwarranted. I'm saying that America's elites had to work behind the scenes in order to do it, because America itself had already been taken over by a successful populist movement headed by FDR.
> Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, the American industrial establishment was quite happy...
And immediately before that, they (Americans, British, French, Japanese (!)) had invaded Russia to provide support to tsarist and proto-fascist elements that were running around committing pogroms, killing anybody not immediately prostrating themselves to their "saviors", and trying to crush the revolution.
> The keenest Interventionists were equally appalled, regarding the offer of talks [with the Soviet government] as tantamount to diplomatic recognition. From Vladivostok, General Knox sent a 'really fuming' telegram - the proposal put 'brave men...fighting for civilisation' on a par with 'the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks' - and in Archangel, American consul DeWitt Poole threatened to resign. Happening to be in Paris, Chruchill burst in on Lloyd George while he was shaving, and thundered that if one were going to recognize the regime, 'one might as well legalise sodomy.' Churchill and Foch both also privately assured White contacts that even if they rejected talks, military aid would keep flowing. The Prinkipo proposal thus died at birth.
---
> It is true that the worst violence happened off-stage, in small towns away from the bases where British personnel spent most of their time. But this was not always so, and there was more than enough opportunity to find out what was happening from Jewish relief organisations, or from survivors who had fled to the cities. Typical of the way the British preferred to turn a blind eye was embedded journalist Hodgson, who tied himself in knots criticising the Volunteer Army's obsessive antisemitism ('a fierce and unreasoning hatred'), while simultaneously denying that it had committed any pogroms. He dismissed a Jewish committee's protest to British command at Constantinople as an 'effusion', and on a tour of newly captured towns claimed not to have found 'a sign or whisper of outrage'. On the contrary, he possessed 'the strongest evidence' that Denikin's orders against pogroms were being 'conscientiously observed', and 'every effort' being made, 'with great success, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed.' As for past pogroms, the were 'grossly exaggerated', and had mostly been 'fanned into existence by the nervous panicking of the Jews themselves.'
---
> For the civilian population,. perhaps harshest of the winter's brutalities was the burning of front-line villages. Both sides did it, but rattled, out-of-their-depth Allied troops - ready to see a collaborator in every uncommunicative local - especially so. In early January a false alarm panicked American units into completely destroying the Vaga village of Kitsa, and Scheu describes putting part of disputed Tulgas to the torch:
>> We throw a cordon of troops around the village to prevent interference, notify natives, and set fire to village at 9 p.m. It ignites rapidly, lighting up surrounding country. Have difficulty with natives; we gave them 3 hours notice to pack and vacate. 'Twas a sad sight.
> The next day the cottages were still smoking, 'a big black smudge upon the snow.'
from Reid - A Nasty Little War
You want to know what I think? I have begun to believe that McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” and the House Committee, while purporting to be “anti-communist” were inwardly concerned about Eastern Bloc Jews gaining the upper hand domestically.
Now some Jews were Communist sympathizers and some weren’t. But there were just so many who flooded in from staunchly Eastern-Bloc, Soviet-dominated areas that they were sure to gain powerful footholds in Western society.
McCarthy and the House couldn’t afford to be perceived as “anti-Semitic” so they chose to couch everything in patriotic anti-Commie terms. But in hindsight, look at how miniscule the influence has been here from Soviet Communism, compared to ideologies of Eastern-Bloc Jews [many who are quite secular and Americanized].
The US has (almost by design?) a system the favors tyranny of the minority. I'd argue the opposite: that the majority of voters are not well represented. Our two party system with capped Congress member count (which is reflected in the executive branch) and useless Senate only serve a minority of (monied) interests in the country.
> the majority of voters are not well represented
The majority are well represented. They’re just idiots. This isn’t a criticism of Americans; it’s why direct democracy fails in a predictable, partisan way in any society. (If you really think about it, you’re probably something of an idiot a good amount of the time. And you, like me, probably hold stupid views with low conviction because it was never worth it to do the research.)
They're working on it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-prog...
Here's an article from a European perspective: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-lo...
500 million euro's to attract scientists?
I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1].
Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years.
That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7...
[2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
I respect your opinion, to me it does sound like a lot, and it's also on top of many existing programs and a few other new things included in this announcement.
> The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030. [...] The plan, originally proposed by the French government, also proposes creating long-term “super grants” for outstanding researchers, to provide them with financial stability; these would last for seven years. The program also plans to double the amount of financial support available this year for those who decide to move to the European Union.
You can get a sense of everything they have available here: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/....
Ah, thanks for showing me more context about it. I considered the 500 million too much into isolation
1000 scientists is a lot. The entire Microsoft research department is about 1000 scientists, and they are a productive bunch
Here’s the thing: scientists follow roughly a double power law in breakthrough and skills. What if that 1250 is 50 top tier and 1200 of their chosen lab mates?
> Good read; too long to sway public opinion though.
Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse:
Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels."
Donald: "I'm going to save coal."
Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets"
Donald: "No taxes on tips."
This is something that most people engaged in internet discourse could learn as well. It's often not productive to write a long response to a pithy sound-byte argument.
Not only is that losing the engagement economy, but onlookers to the thread are far more likely to read and latch onto the smaller soundbites. Longer replies also give critics more gristle to latch onto - you may think a long post covers all its bases, but you're really just giving people more avenues of rebuttable.
Better to be succinct, and if important context is left out, respond to it as concerns are raised.
Honestly, yes. To sway public opinion, you have to meet your audience where they get their information. I know that my mother gets most of her news from TikTok unfortunately. Reaching out to the public through as many avenues as possible is absolutely necessary at this point.
Not just the Nazis. The Russians had Lysenkoism.
It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
IMHO America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards.
Honestly way more with just being the one super power standing after the war. We were basically untouched, even accounting for dead and wounded we only lost ~1 million people and practically zero manufacturing infrastructure so we came out of the war roaring and flush with cash. That catapulted the US to where it has been for the whole of the time since but a lot of people seem to have believed we were owed that or earned it through some special property of the US and the come down from it is not going well socially.
This feels revisionist to me. It was not accidental. The US had the booming wartime economy, AND it had a State department that went at solidifying global influence. Essentially the "greatest generation" locked in America's situation, and doubled down on cultural and economic dominance.
The combination of state, industry and WMF-type loans extended American power globally. It was a very very good time to be American. This is the core of the "Great Again" part of the slogan. Boomers remember this America and want the growth, wealth and dominance back.
Maybe not "accidental", but it's lucky for the US that the Nazi regime came to power in central Europe instead of Northern Mexico or Canada.
Or even inside the US itself.
It definitely feels like the US could have swung the other way, we were deeeep into eugenics over here long before the war and there was plenty of explicit support for the american Nazi party.
My point is that dominance flows from the fact that every other major world power of the age got massively bombed and the US didn't. Just look at the graph of pre-War GDPs and note how far you have to scroll down before you see a country that didn't have intense fighting and bombing within their borders. [0] Much of what happened post war that set the US up would not have been possible if the US was bombed out like Germany or the UK and needed to rebuild it's entire economy like Germany, the UK, Russia, France, China and Japan who made up the rest of the upper crust of the GDP pie in the pre-War economy.
> This feels revisionist to me.
Reexamining past narratives/theories based on new data or ways of viewing things is the core of science. It's particularly important in softer social sciences where so much of the effects can only be viewed in the long term.
> Boomers remember this America and want the growth, wealth and dominance back
My point is you can't go back to there, at least not without another massive war and this time the chances the US gets by unscathed is practically zero.
Not to mention shattering the alliances that put the US in that position isn't the way to get back there either. Even if we tried countries are going to be a lot more wary of trusting the US for critical things like military protection which was a major part of the deal for the US's position, we extend a military umbrella across your country and we get good access to your markets.
Trump et al fundamentally misunderstand why we were in the position we were and their actions push us further away rather than bringing us back to it.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
We were, it’s just that this special property was owning our own private continent.
True I meant more in the political/economic sphere. Being isolated geographically from both WW1 and WW2 was a major boon to the US economy, we got the economic benefit of the wars without the damage (beyond lives lost of course).
And as time has gone on that geography is less and less effective as a shield.
Australia tried that, too, but their continent is really problematic.
They were also only quasi independent at the time of the wars too so they had less flexibility to decide on their policy.
> America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards
Bit of A, bit of B, with B encompassing the Nazis and the British.
Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists".
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
* Ernest Lawrence
* Luis Walter Alvarez
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> Is America enough of a "melting pot" that we can withstand that sort of outsized foreign influence within our borders?
Depends.
If your idea of America consists of just the pre-colonial native groups, Navajo etc., then America was already gone a century and a half ago.
But the America of 1925 had exactly the same arguments about Italians, and of 1845 about the Irish, in that the local born were complaining a lot and didn't trust the newcomers.
The melting pot has been melting for a long time now; you're a big endless stew of a country. (Except for the "real" natives, if there is such a thing).
You talk about this like it's an accident almost. It was a considered Federal policy to brain drain as hard as possible.
Anecdotally, I too worry about the influx of the dirty Irish into our borders, stealing good jobs and spreading their Irish culture. Oh, sorry, I forgot it's not 1940. In my opinion, America has a strong, strong culture -- brain drained scientist's kids in general look pretty integrated to me, at least the ones I know.
> These are markedly distinct career paths from the ones taken by homegrown Jews,
Actually "Oppenheimer" the movie also supplies examples of two very different New York Jewish backgrounds:
J Robert Oppenheimer, from an affluent, non-religious family - with an Upper West side apartment and a summer vacation home on Long Island. His father came to the USA as a teenager, and prospered in business.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, from an orthodox, Yiddish-speaking family living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side. He was born shortly before the family came to the USA.
>Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country.
I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions.
'I'm stealing from you for your own good'!
Hmm.
Oh it's clearly a kleptocracy at the top, don't get me wrong. You can have both.
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
There are no free countries wealthy enough to do that. European salaries in the academia are laughable even by American academic standards, including supposedly rich countries like Germany and Netherlands. Switzerland is too small, and cut her scientific funding recently as well. UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc are authoritarian petrostates.
One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
> One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
Not really. Even if they'd shower American scientists in money, who will guarantee they won't be taken hostage in a political conflict? It has happened in the past [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism.
The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.
You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.
The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!".
Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.
That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
This is not a knee jerk mention of Nazis, it is a well known fact that after world war II the US changed strategy to invest in research and pull the best talent from around the world. That was in part motivated by German scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.
is it knee-jerk if certain highly influential people have direct ties to the Nazi party?
You might want to read about why the Musk's moved from Canada to South Africa, and also the orgins and links of some of the ideologies that family continues to associate with.
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
Given support to extemist far right parties, given nazi salutes ... the knee jerk "ref to nazi is inappropriate" thing is not convincing anymore.
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm.
Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU.
A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage.
This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline?
Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo.
Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
Somebody should really tell the world about the artificial sun scientists cooked up last time we asked them to focus all their attention at war stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg
Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
Counterpoint, please consider watching Professor Dave discuss the issues with Sabine's talking points.
While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field.
>Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field
"The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).
I would absolutely never take the opinion of someone who makes a career dunking on people, no matter how much they deserve it, at face value.
I think there may be a language issue here; to use her own words as best as I can remember them, excusing her bluntness under "perhaps I'm just German" — a messy kichen here in Germany would be described with the word "Chaos", and a mistake that a Brit would call "dropping the ball" would be described as "eine totale Shitshow".
This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/
But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
I got to the point where he says the email she made a video about is probably her own making and stopped. It is a >1.5h response to a 10-minute video, and at minute 7 (of 1.5h) he proceeds to basically call her a liar in a fundamental way without having any strong evidence for it. Mind you the first 7 minutes were spent claiming she put forall quantifiers where she just implied strong prevalence and telling how much better the guy is for the society than her. From these things I would say you'd waste your time watching this unless you want to practice fishing for fallacies. The 3 I mentioned so far are: the leaky bucket fallacy (weak evidence for liar claim), straw man (arbitrary adding forall), and ad hominem (attack character instead of presenting argument).
Yes, lighting the house on fire may have not been the best plan, but in all fairness the it was a mess and something had to be done.
The Republicans are not fixing anything that's broken with scientific funding. They are purposely making the problems worse.
What is your basis for believing that this is the needed reform or that it will fix what is broken?
the tl;dr:
> The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.
> Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.
> Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.
I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that.
This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen
one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?
take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers
Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0
(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
"This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber"
Superb, take a bow!
Related:
NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
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Evidently the president appointed one of his personal attorneys to be the new librarian of Congress. The library turned him away because Congress hasn't approved him. It seems it's becoming more of a clusterfuck just about every day.
It's not a clusterfuck. The librarian of congress move was a deliberate hostile attempt attempt by the executive to take control over the legislative branch. Just like AFL vs John Roberts is a hostile attempt to take over the judicial.
It's an concerted attempted authoritarian takeover through bureaucratic methods. When they exhaust this, you'll see them frustrated and declare states of emergencies. The founders wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, people like this have always existed.
"It's not a clustefuck" ... proceeds to describe a clusterfuck ...
What was your intention here?
A clusterfuck us usually no real plan, and everyone deciding on their own, causing chaos.
No, what we are seeing is a coup. The USA has exhausted in causing coups in other parts of the world. Now, we are in a coup caused by the USA government.
The executive branch is captured. The courts are captured. Most of Congress is captured. Those left over whinge about 'illegal' and basically send out more emails for more donations. And throw in a few stump speeches.
>the exec, the courts, and a majority of congress
I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree. I mean sure, we are well outside the strict scope of Constitution, but that ship left generations ago.
> I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree.
The courts have been captured and politicized heavily. Clearance Thomas should be expelled for emoluments. Kavanaugh also for lying on the stand.
Congress has a bare majority for republicans. So getting impeachments for actual crimes by republicans is a non-starter.
POTUS and executive branch can run roughshod, and order all sorts of illegal actions. Congress won't impeach. And they can pardon anybody underneath them. Musk is a perfect example - no clearance, yet somehow 'legally' is destroying sections of government that was investigating him. And given a complete pass. Its also how ICE can kidnap and traffick people, all the while flaunting disobeidance from a federal judge.
This is a coup by the oligarchy against the people. And aside violent uprisings (of which I do not condone), there's not much at all we can do.
>The courts have been captured and politicized heavily
This isn't a real thing. They're not captured, people are just on them that you don't like and they're ruling against your values.
>Congress has a bare majority for republicans
So the majority is governing?
So, emoluments violations, bribery, and perjury should be legal?
I wasn't calling out party political disputes. I was calling out taking massive bribes, violating the emoluments clause, and perjury.
Your politics are showing. I prefer rule of law, not of kakistocrat.
There is no arguing with these people they don't have objectivity or critical thinking.they will just take this as a personal attack and dig in more. The only thing left is to prepare for the violent insurrection (which you don't condone) and maybe pray for the pendulum to swing the other way and we can have a parallel to McCarthyism purging the unamerican magats from our midst.
Where have you been for the past 25 years?? These are par for the course in our governing class. This isn't whataboutism, this is extensive behavior that we've seen for at least a generation now (e.g. expensive speeches to Wall St, congressional insider trading, revolving door of regulators/industry)
> Where have you been for the past 25 years?
This is a very myopic view.
In the past 3 months, we've seen curtailing of civil liberties (bypassing due process), open bribery (memecoin pay-to-play, Qatari airplane), illegal interference with independent agencies (firing head of CFPB), executive overreach ("emergency" tariffs), violations of free speech (punishing law firms for their clients), etc. None of this is precedented at this scale.
What you are doing is exactly what aboutism, by claiming that minor transgressions in the past excuse blatant authoritarianism.
The Clinton Foundation somehow wasn't open bribery? That was the most powerful political family in America for a generation. You think people paid him&her for speeches because they're talented orators?
Pelosi insider trading is a minor transgression? She was the most powerful congressman for years. You think she didn't do anything to earn those stock tips?
Wow, it's like you didn't even read/understand my comment.
Yes, those are problems. Congressional stock trading should be illegal, although it isn't at the moment. The Clinton Foundation was noticeably founded after Bill Clinton was president; lots of presidents get money for speeches, but typically after they hold elected office.
What you are missing is the scale and openness of the current corruption. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, received a pearl necklace valued at $425 from Bangladeshi Prime Minister and was not allowed to keep it; now, Trump is getting a $400 million plane from the Qataris and apparently is allowed to keep it. Does that seem the same to you?
> This isn't a real thing. They're not captured, people are just on them that you don't like and they're ruling against your values.
They're not ruling against "my values", they're actually illegally. The people who are supposed to stop them aren't, and are thus captured.
The new wave of authoritarianism uses the bureaucracy and state machine against itself. They've learnt from the past, there's no Night of the Long Knives, or the burning of the Reichstag, that's too overt.
Look at Orbán, Erdogan, and similar new authoritarians, the coup is a slow grinding of every facet of democracy: grind the press, grind the judiciary, throw a new law into the mix made up by your cronies in the parliament/Congress, keep grinding at the foundations of democracy over decades and you get a shell of institutions that used to be the foundation of a democratic state being re-purposed to push the agenda of the dictator.
The veneer of institutions is the point, it's to make you have exactly this reaction:
> I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree.
Because you are expecting an overt coup, not a slow moving covert one.
> They've learnt from the past, there's no Night of the Long Knives, or the burning of the Reichstag, that's too overt.
They did actually try it, though, and all the prior involved got pardons from the president. Totally agree with you overall point, just wanted to point this out.
This book is a great (albeit drily written/translated) analysis of how an authoritarian state operated in practice on the day-to-day level, in contrast to the spectacular political turning points you mention. It documents the dull but important methodology of fiscal management, financial engineering, how the nazies restructured the existing bureaucracy to suit their own ends, and the legal and technical means they used to expropriate wealth from political enemies, out-groups, and eventually the subjects in annexed or conquered territories.
It's not an enjoyable read in either subject matter or style, but provides invaluable insights into the mechanics of authoritarian rule behind the iconic renditions of oppression in snappy uniforms.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805087260/hitlersbenefici...
It won't be a coup if they abide by the results of the 2026 election. Last time an election didn't go their way, they did not abide by the results.
It's a coup now because they are seizing power that has not been granted to them.
Firing the head of the CBFP, installing a non-approved Librarian of Congress, bypassing agency regulations such as IRS privacy laws, etc. That's all illegal. It's a coup by the President against the rest of the government.
What are you saying? It's all a big nothing burger until 2026? And then maybe it's still nothing?
Nope. That's not at all what I'm saying.
It's just not officially a coup until they refuse to cede power. We know they are very capable of it (already tried it once). In the meantime they are sowing chaos and destroying institutions.
A clusterfuck generally implies a mishandled situation. The author is saying that there was intention behind the actions and that this outcome was the goal.
Ah, _to me_ a clusterfuck is just a complex of terrible circumstances, it can be caused intentionally.
Thanks for the clarification.
A clusterfuck describes chaos and disorganization. This is just a deliberate attack, it is being executed well. It is just malicious.
People will prefer calling it both malicious and disorganized. Well executed sounds too positive.
Calling it well-executed is pragmatic. There's no reason to avoid positive-sounding things if they're true, especially not because it's positive.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
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Chevron was never a partisan “Democratic” trick, it was a 1984 Supreme Court precedent that applied to every administration for forty years. It simply said that when a statute is ambiguous, courts should accept a reasonable agency reading unless Congress says otherwise (Congress always had the power). That is ordinary separation‑of‑powers.
When the Court overturned Chevron, it did not “return law‑making to Congress” as some claim, it didn't give Congress any more power than it already had. It instead shifted final interpretive power from expert agencies to federal judges. Congress still writes broad statutes and still relies on agencies to fill in technical details only now those rules are more vulnerable to litigation and inherently more fragile.
Comparing that process to Elon Musk’s influence misses the mark. Agencies are public, transparent, and (at least theoretically) answerable to elected branches; Musk is a private supplier whose market dominance lets him set terms with little democratic oversight. One is statutory delegation, the other is private leverage with clear and obvious conflicts of interest.
Treating them as equivalent flattens important distinctions and obscures the real accountability gaps in each scenario.
That is a factually inaccurate description of the role of federal agencies under Chevron deference. Chevron deference was a legal doctrine that required courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, not a mechanism that allowed career civil servants to unilaterally create criminal laws. Federal agencies could only issue regulations within the authority explicitly delegated by Congress, and these regulations were subject to judicial review, public notice-and-comment periods, and Congressional oversight.
>"effectively gutting the least efficient parts of the government (my take, at least from 50,000 view)"
Based on what? See, I think of myself as a highly informed, curious person that is a voracious reader and yet I absolutely know I have zero basis to make such a determination. So what data do you have that I don't?
Efficiency is at an all time high now. We can see one air traffic controller handling a workload that would have required ten or more.
You don't describe this like a person that possesses any domain expertise in the subject.
It wasn't a mechanism called the Chevron deference, it was law, as determined by the Supreme Court in "Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council".
The deference was on the part of the courts deferring to executive regulators when there was ambiguity, since the regulators were experts in a given field and the courts were generally legal experts. Not Congress.
That was overturned in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
"non-elected, life-long positioned government employees" so, you mean, federal employees. Nothing about it is "life-long", you made that up. They could quit, change jobs, or be fired.
And "criminals" is false. It applied to civil statutes, not criminal ones. It goes on.
Ahh yes, how ironic that Democrats are complaining about a billionaire with myriad conflicts of interest interfering in government funding... Very comparable to unelected bureaucrats implementing regulations that on average were meant to try and protect the general public.
Republicans vs Democrats is indeed the wrong way to look at it. Both parties are beholden to the billionaire/corporate class. Democrats helped pave the way for Trump. Mass surveillance, extrajudicial killing of US citizens, militarization of law enforcement, expansion of executive powers, the list goes on.
I’m curious to what degree the narrative will once again be recuperated by the Democrats to obscure the class origins of these policies - the expansion of power of the corporate-government machine. The Dems have been successfully playing ping pong with the Republicans for many years without addressing our society’s structural failures because they don’t want to upset their monied masters.
The court decided in 1984 that judges should defer to federal agencies in interpreting ambiguous parts of statutes.
thanks for the pointer. I looked up AFL vs John Roberts, and the lawsuit seems straightforward and has a reasonable basis.
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/04/america-first-legal-fou...
"The suit was prompted by the refusal of the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office to respond to AFLF's FOIA requests for copies of communication with the offices of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, two legislators who have worked overtime to stir up ethical allegations against sitting Supreme Court justices. The Judicial Conference and Administrative Office rebuffed the requests on the grounds that each are exempt from FOIA."
"The basis for AFLF's suit is that the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office are not part of the judiciary, but are instead executive branch agencies subject to FOIA. According to AFLF, neither entity is a "court," and insofar as each has other responsibilities, including the promulgation of rules governing federal courts and responding to Congressional inquiries, each is an "agency" under FOIA."
Someone with a hacker mindset and domain knowledge might want to understand the subtext of the case, which is more important.
I don't think I'll convince you otherwise, but those interested can read this counterpoint to the Reason link with more background and detail: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-ally-steph...
Not that different than the author of this article. Is she a neutral scientist acting in the best interest of science? No, she is a Biden political appointee:
Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Is she even a highly qualified? She has a Ph.D., but in what?
Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology
She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.
Being appointed by a former president makes her unqualified to comment on the subject how?
If you want to disagree with her commentary, do so on its merits. Dismissing her arguments because of who is making them is ad hominem fallacy.
You're using a person's associations as an excuse to avoid engaging with their ideas.
That's the exact argument that I was responding to! The parent post's claim that the current President's lawyer is unqualified, because? Surely you looked into the arguments, and judge them without bias, and didn't jump to a conclusion based on his associations.
They are both political appointees, you like one and don't like the other is just political bias.
> They are both political appointees, you like one and don't like the other is just political bias.
No: one was appointed legally, the other was illegally installed in an unconstitutional power grab. That's all that matters.
> The parent post's claim that the current President's lawyer is unqualified, because?
Because so far every appointee by Trump has been, objectively, less qualified than the people they replace?
There's no bias in that, it's just looking at credentials. We have people in public health who have never worked in healthcare. We have people leading the DOD where their only battle thus far has been alcoholism. We have a surgeon general who can't even practice medicine. I mean... what pattern are we noticing here?
Are we just supposed to play stupid forever, in pursuit of some "fairness"? We're not blind, we're not deaf, we can understand what's going on.
Oh no, not a Ph.D. from NYU and a science policy leadership role under a president—how scandalous! Imagine thinking someone who specializes in the intersection of science, society, and governance might be... qualified to advise on science and society. Her research literally focuses on how science and technology shape—and are shaped by—social forces. But sure, let’s pretend like policy isn't supposed to involve people who understand, you know, people.
Ph.D. in American studies - that you cut that out is... notable.
There are no scientific qualifications in her education.
Oh please—spare us the performative gatekeeping. “No scientific qualifications”? She led the Office of Science and Technology Policy and served on the National Science Board. Her expertise is in how science operates within society, which is exactly what her job required. You think only lab coats get to weigh in on national science policy? That’s not how interdisciplinary governance works—unless you’re allergic to the idea of social context in science, which, frankly, explains a lot.
> she is a Biden political appointee
The obvious difference is stated in the post you are replying to: "Congress hasn't approved him."
> She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.
The NSF funds humanities/social science grants, so it needs experts in those areas. Note that she is deputy director for science and society. This funds work associated with history, sociology, etc.: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/sts-science-techno....
Why is being a Biden appointee grounds to assume she isn't acting in the best interests of Science?
Never said she wasn't acting in the best interest, just that she is a political appointee with no science education, and very little in her resume to suggest she is qualified.
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Yikes, we ban accounts that post like this for what ought to be obvious reasons. Please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974234), and the problem goes back quite a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39122658. Moreover, we've warned you several times before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366673 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35920165 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24381956 (Sept 2020)
I really don't want to ban someone who's been here for 13 years but this is not acceptable. If you'd please review the guidelines and fix it, we'd be grateful.
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8 years ago. And also, much better than the stuff that goes viral on twitter today, like Kanye's latest Nazi song, along with defenses of people singing along to it.
I’m not sure why this is being voted down. The NSF did actively pursue DEI and the US government is obligated not to fund organizations that discriminate based on race.
The NSF only had “DEI” requirements (really just requiring grants to have a section on vague Broadening Participation guarantees) due to Congress-mandated laws.
Have you ever heard the phrase "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" ? The DEI groupthink definitely needed to be reformed, but we didn't need to destroy our world-leading scientific research institutions to do it. Furthermore, given the overwhelming fascist groupthink now being pushed in place of DEI, it's not even clear that we've succeeded in reducing the magnitude of required political correctness.
DEI is not illegal racial discrimination. It's literally the solution to centuries of racial discrimination.
Discriminating job candidates by race, regardless of the intention, is racial discrimination.
Scientists commit to politics. Election happens. Election has consequences. Shocker. To be fair conservatives warned about this for decades but nobody listened.
The only possible response to this propaganda piece are nodding along religiously or revulsion and disgust at the sheer intellectual dishonesty of it.
This kind of superficial performative nonsense is a big part of why the replication crisis is as bad as it is. And few scientists are willing to speak of that. I’d love to hear from the scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person. But I doubt I ever will.
If "elections has consequences" is an unlimited argument then we are doomed.
"Well, they elected him so off to the gallows with you with a smile on your face, it's what the people want" is not an acceptable world.
scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person
Please provide some examples of how you think this person destroyed anyone's career.
It's pretty depressing watching comments here that say anything other than "this is the worst thing ever" or "this is fascism" get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
Any social media site that delegates moderation responsibilities to its users will eventually run into these sorts of problems.
At a certain scale, you're almost guaranteed to get moderation via populism simply because the friction for using these tools in bad faith is far too low and there never seems to be enough of a punishment for misuse.
Shockingly, I've found Hacker News to be far worse about how it promotes echo chamber behavior than most subreddits, despite how much tougher it is to obtain access to these tools. On the other hand, it's far less of a problem on Tildes, and I suspect that's in large part due to there simply not being a explicit downvote button. However, the fact that "Noisy" and "Spam" tags haven't been abused might simply due to its smaller scale.
To be clear, I actually agree with the people downvoting you, despite not doing so myself. But if you find that distasteful, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Damn, none of this feels new to me - just feels like every few years it's some other mess hurting science. You ever think this stuff ever really gets fixed or we just keep going in circles forever?