And how the Trump admin is ruining it in very little time.
How the U.S. became a science superpower
81–90 of 529 posts
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government ef…
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How much more straightforwards do you need it to be? How about this?
> “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
> “We want to put them in trauma.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
That's the current director of the Office of Management and Budget.
For the love of god dude, the White House posted a ICE deportation ASMR video. The House GOP posted this shit: https://x.com/HouseForeignGOP/status/1906008542382879094
You don't have to be paying that much attention to get the vibe that a lot of these guys do, in fact, enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Trump and Vance enjoy humiliating Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and insulting the entire country of Canada, threatening to annex them etc. They enjoy making heads of companies and nations come to them and beg (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1086367432957...)
Noticing these things isn't an "emotional crutch", it's understanding the actual reality of the situation.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#83“Indirect costs” were accepted on the theory that this would be used to create job security for professors who did useful work but were not able to secure direct funding.
Spoiler alert: That job security doesn’t exist anymore. A professor who isn’t winning grants, even if tenured, is functionally dead. Research doesn’t matter except as PR and teaching definitely doesn’t matter; the ability to raise grants is the singular determinant of an academic’s career.
Consequently, most academics despise university overhead because it reduces the number of grants to go around and they get nothing for it.
That does not, of course, mean they support Trump or Musk. Most do not.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over. I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the secon…
The problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to tax billionaires. We just passed even more tax cuts for rich people and are scheduled to add more to the debt. Just tax rich people, it's not complicated.
The economic projections I’ve seen have shown taxing the rich will increase tax revenue by around 1.5% of GDP. We’re slated to borrow 7.3%. That math doesn’t work. To be fair, the republican math with cuts (assuming no tax cuts) also doesn’t work. Neither side is serious about this issue.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#85There are a couple fundamental flaws here: One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain. Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people. While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding…
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet here we are with Arm cores everywhere you look! :-D
Fair point! That's a great technical success; I didn't realize Arm was British. If the main failure of British companies is that they don't have U.S. company market caps, it seems more off base to blame this on government science funding policy instead of something else. In almost every part of the economy, U.S. companies are going to be larger.
My understanding is that the British "Arm" is just a patent holder now. I don't think they actually make anything. Companies outside the UK are the ones that actually make the chips licensed from the Arm designs.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweden was not bombed.
But they were aligned with the nazis until close to the very end. It was easier to remember back then, but people have mostly forgotten nowadays.
Indeed, although Sweden was officially neutral, they most notoriously permitted German trains to roll through their country to Norway with soldiers and materials both during and after its invasion.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#88Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view: > Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world. > The U.S. built a decent…
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over. I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the secon…
The way they math is presented is off. The US is deficit spending this year, yet you present the interest payment as something separate from the military. Obviously that interest is partially from the military spending the US makes this year that it has not paid for, military payments from last year it has not paid for etc. The billions sent to Israel, the Ukraine and the hundreds of military bases the US has spanning the globe are not cheap.
Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.
If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#89Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view: > Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world. > The U.S. built a decent…
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk sc…
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower
#90Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view: > Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world. > The U.S. built a decent…
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over. I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the secon…
Where does government subsidized loans to banks (eg Fed, Fannie, Freddie) sit in your list? The government is a monetary sovereign - it cannot run out of dollars to use. The actual constraint is that creating too much new money creates too much price inflation. But for the past decades most monetary inflation has been flowing into the financial sector and bidding up the asset bubbles, with the "fiscal responsibility" political narrative merely being a dishonest cover to keep that gravy train flowing.