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U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

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Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#101

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Hikikomori wrote: post #49
runako wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Much of US policy toward science is backlash to Covid vaccinations. Being anti-Science is a way of preventing Science from inflicting itself on the populace again in the future. 2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.

It's been there so much longer, even Carl Sagan talked about it, and its inherently tied to religion.

We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected.

And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#102

Post by JumpCrisscross »

BeetleB wrote: post #2

This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that: > Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned. They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.

> They're just randomly flagging

What is the purported legal authority they’re acting under? Some of the housekeeping in the next years will involve pulling those statutes.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#103

Post by bo1024 »

kittikitti wrote: post #15

I knew that most research had ties to government funding but it was only recently that I realized the scale of it. Along with the pullback of any government funding remotely resembling DEI, policies like the one described in the article wouldn't decimate research from my previous understanding. In terms of influence, it's now clear to me that the government controls anywhere between 75 to 99% of academic research. I…

Your current understanding also seems a bit warped. The US government provides the source of a lot of research funding but historically exerts little "control". Generally grant applications are evaluated by panels of researchers who don't work for the federal government.

Also, this government funding supports fundamental innovations that private companies wouldn't fund because it's too general and too far from monetizable. But after those breakthroughs happen funded by public research, private industry benefits enormously. This includes most health and medical advances and the science underlying most technological advances. So government funding doesn't conflict with the work being necessary or important, on the contrary, it is possibly more important long-term.

Disclaimer? The government funds some of my research.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#104

Post by cucumber3732842 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #79
pdonis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way. There is another option , which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and…

Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect.

Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.

[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#105

Post by brookst »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #86
nielsbot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current path is replacing bureaucratic power with unchecked executive power which is the opposite of what you want. Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.

>Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want. Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules. What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.

Are you saying Congress should be domain experts every area they allocate funds to? From maritime safety to preschool nutrition, congress should be expert enough in everything to specify all important details, and then the agencies (staffed by actual domain experts in each area) are mere accountants to execute the policies?

I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#106

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bodiekane wrote: post #66
nickff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also very foreseeable for an administrative state, and this slippery slope has been predicted for over a century. Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt, and as the extent of their power grew, it was inevitable that the political leadership would exploit the power (as has already happened many times before). It seems like nobody (at least on the liberal end of the spec…

Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"? I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?

> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?

Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#107

Post by RealityVoid »

Frost1x wrote: post #95
daveguy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumpty's loyalty is with whoever will give him the most money and power as a person. Always has been.

Maybe money but clearly not power. The American voting population gave him more power than pretty much anyone in many senses of the word “power,” yet he’s clearly not loyal to the American voting population. So I think money or wealth is the bigger weight here.

Or he's just... ya'know... stupid.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#108

Post by platinumrad »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #100
yongjik wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the argument. Imagine flipping positions. You're saying that if an American researcher goes to China, gets employed by a Chinese university, and do research funded by China which is then commercialized by Chinese companies, the researcher is actually aiding America in expense of China.

The missing piece is an ethnic and political identity which gives allegiance to the US in that “tables turned” analogy.

Fine, imagine that the researcher is a black American then.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#109

Post by lovich »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #86
nielsbot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current path is replacing bureaucratic power with unchecked executive power which is the opposite of what you want. Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.

>Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want. Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules. What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.

[flagged]

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#110

Post by 317070 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #92
317070 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it matters, but that is at least not true for nazi-style fascism. In there, they had a very strong rule of law for most people. But, there was a dual, a parallel system where there was no law at all, it operated outside of the legal system. You could win a trial and be exhonorated, only to be taken away by the gestapo at the door of the courtroom. It was important for the nazis to keep businesses running,…

If you can be whisked off to a separate system where you don't have legal rights, you by definition don't have rule of law. Literally the singular, most core principle of the concept is that all persons are equal under the law, whether they are royalty or Jewish. "Strong rule of law for most people" is an inherently contradictory phrase.

If you want to read more: the concept is called "the dual state" [1] after the eponymous book [0]

I agree that the phrase is somewhat contradictory, but it is the best way to describe what was going on. As long as you were within the confines of the normative state, you experienced a rule of law. But as soon as you stepped into the prerogative state, anything could happen. So a "rule of law", except that it didn't apply to everybody, but only to most people. And importantly, the existence of the prerogative state is mostly hidden when you're in the normative state (so unlike a king, which everybody knew was outside of the law)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)

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