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U.S. science is in chaos

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#141

Post by foxglacier »

gignico wrote: post #55
IsTom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.

Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.

Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#142

Post by jordanb »

defrost wrote: post #73
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic. Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) peo…

In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrut…

Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church.

The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years.

That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US.

If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#143

Post by KolibriFly »

embedding-shape wrote: post #4

> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead. If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience li…

And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#144

Post by mothballed »

gignico wrote: post #55
IsTom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.

Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.

So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.

Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#146

Post by croes »

vrganj wrote: post #22
tokai wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that man is a foreign actor.

Whatever happened to stripping criminal immigrants of their US citizenship and putting them in a torture cell in El Salvador? Not a policy I'd usually support, but I think a certain South African has really done enough damage to justify it.

Musk can afford the Trump Gold Card

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#147

Post by neogodless »

Havoc wrote: post #8

Administration remains undefeated - in its ability to score own goals

You have to remember that many of us are worried about the effects on everyone but the people pulling the levers are only worried about effects on themselves, and (at least in the short term) they are absolutely benefiting (e.g. enriching) themselves, regardless of how much damage it does to everyone else.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#148

Post by SiempreViernes »

defrost wrote: post #73
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic. Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) peo…

In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrut…

As a leading exporter of coal Australia isn't really a good example of a serious climate actor.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#149

Post by thinkthatover »

timr wrote: post #112
rjsw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data. Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.

> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up. Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem. Do not: perform another observational study to s…

I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.

Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#150

Post by timr »

djeastm wrote: post #132
timr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here. As someone who spent far too much of my life pursuing that goal, I have an unpopular opinion: US science needs some cuts. The first project (the s…

Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done? Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?

> Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done?

Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.

> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?

I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.

I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.

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