551–560 of 676 posts
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Fill what gap? That of state-controlled research? Early indoctrination? Mass supervision? Revisionism?
You were downvoted but yes, hoping a state-controlled, authoritarian, single party politically led, genocidal government will ”step up” to better less-political research is faith without reason and ignorant of history
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You didn’t read the article. There are two developmental pathways for sexual reproduction: - one produces small mobile gametes - one produces large immobile gametes There can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism in different species ends up on one pathway or the other, there can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism on either pathway develops, and there can be plenty of variation in how…
You didn’t read my linked article. And you are still trying to shoehorn an entire spectrum of biological expression which is a function of chromosomes, genes, hormones, fully or partially developed sex organs and secondary sexual characteristics, into two buckets - which are really just two “blessed” combinations of the above characteristics. The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one de…
Nope. Not what I said at all. Nothing I said in any way related to the idea that some combinations were “blessed”. Merely that there are two pathways. Individuals may travel those two pathways in numerous ways, but until someone discovers a third gamete, there are only two pathways.
> The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
Very true! No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries or behaviour changes, reality persists - males in dresses are still male, females in suits are still female.
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You don't think the rest of the world is doing funded research?
Interestingly, if the US stopped spending you’d need the top 17 remaining countries to double their spending to absorb the American science industry. Doubling is a tall order and seventeen is a large number. Most likely fewer scientists will find employment in government funded academia if this came to be.
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> went to the Supreme Court…racially segregated voting districts How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself? > the administrative state I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why. I understand your appeal to history, but what could be a better ap…
> How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself? In both cases, republicans were the ones that wanted to enforce the civil rights laws. Democrats were the ones who wanted to violate the civil rights laws by treating people differently based on race. In SFFA they wanted universities to be able to discriminate against applicants based on race, an…
30 years of jurisprudence since Thornburg v. Gingles disagrees with this framing. That unanimous decision found racial districts a necessarily race-conscious remedy to race-targeted harm: republican gerrymandering of cohesive black communities in the south. Which was the same harm at play in 2026 Louisiana.
If you think a race-conscious remedy is more racist than race-targeted harm, you must also believe that minority communities have no right for representation. If that’s the case, be plain about your beliefs. Either way please stop publicly mistaking cause for effect regarding this topic of “racially segregated voting districts”
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> humans are sexually dimorphic Wrong. https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...
I happen to subscribe to bimodal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLH-y2nLocw but I understand why the dimorphic viewpoint has utility.
There are exceptional individuals, in every population. Just like there is a non-zero chance that a baseball thrown at a wall will pass through a wall due to a quirk of quantum fluctuation (10^-10^32 chance or whatever), the utility of the differentiation point is a matter of perspective (including intent). Bimodal does not exclude these individuals, but does imply the spectrum has limits (which it does).
Arguing about what two people, of differing perspective, think won't change either's views without associating a utility that has not been considered.
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It's different because it explicitly prohibits deferring to peer reviewers and explicitly requires that grants must "advance the President's policy priorities". Previous restrictions were guiderails for or additional screens on top of the underlying merit-based review; now the merit-based review is secondary and the primary criterion is whether the President's minions like the proposal.
How did the merit-based review regularly let things like these through? (Picked by scrolling at random through a list of cancelled grants): $2.4 million for "Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) Girls in a Robotics Leadership Project" $1.2 million for "FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers" $700k for "CAREER: Advancing Equity in Middle S…
The first (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2116118) and third (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2144506) were approved as part of the NSF's Directorate of STEM Education, a still-ongoing initiative to ensure the US has a strong talent pipeline of upcoming scientists. It was and remains common for them to toss money at people with kids who otherwise might not be educated well in science; recent Trump-era grants include "Social Mobility through ARkansas Tech program" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527972) and "STEM Journeys - From College to Career" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527683). (I suspect we'll agree that the original examples are framed with strange racial overtones, which you could imagine legitimate political guardrails against even if the peer reviewers don't mind.)
The second (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2128991) is core social science research. Virtual meetings had recently become an extremely common phenomenon, and the investigators claim this led them to discovering (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2021.011...) the mechanism behind the then-novel phenomenon of Zoom fatigue.
More of the same at this point. If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled. The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they…
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> the bureaucrats that were making the decisions before were not Russ Vought was not elected either.
Correct, bur he is directly accountable to and acting under the direction of elected officials, most other bureaucrats in the civil service are not.
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I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US. It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks. And it is far more useful for me to be able to say and show that I have a high salary, for access to credit and resources, private investments that give me the best shot of escaping a permanen…
> I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US. If you're very young, single and childless, sort of. You can pick the lowest tier of health coverage from your employer which is often fully covered by the employer and have no other major costs. If you're young and single and healthy this can work out. Of course, if you have some kind of accident or medical emergency,…
European companies could offer higher salaries with a wholesale structural adjustment in their culture, and the US could offer healthcare higher education and child care in a wholesale structural adjustment
But right now the wrong things are different to really be compelling to tale advantage