91–100 of 336 posts
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.
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 n…
you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
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 n…
> 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?
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...
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A clusterfuck describes chaos and disorganization. This is just a deliberate attack, it is being executed well. It is just malicious.
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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?
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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…
Why is being a Biden appointee grounds to assume she isn't acting in the best interests of Science?
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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 Moth…
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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).
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A clusterfuck describes chaos and disorganization. This is just a deliberate attack, it is being executed well. It is just malicious.
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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 e…
We were, it’s just that this special property was owning our own private continent.
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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.
Depends which public your trying to sway.
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 t…
> 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 po…
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.