311–320 of 1001 posts
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
If Vance somehow gets the reigns and/or 2028 it will be even worse because Vought will get even more power/control
* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.
> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.
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It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.
Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for providing your perspective. I really hope HN has a 'pre-vouch' button as I know your comment will be flagged in no time, even though it's quite articulated.
I believe it's a fairly common attitude. Thus far it doesn't seem to be down voted. I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
> I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?
I expected your comment is upvoted, as HN community generally does to 'you don't know what you're talking about' kind of comment, so no.
I looked at the greenland ice sheet website regularly and its defunded since last year: https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s I hope the USA goes down, fast... Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is…
Realest comment in this entire post
science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you could just as easily describe a scenario where the pendulum has swung left instead of right and a bunch of right-leaning research gets cut and people lose their jobs, we lose progress etc.
these days i'm pretty in favor of a system where funding is guaranteed and investigators are allowed absolute academic freedom. think something along the lines of each principle investigator gets $Xmillion to study their research topic in perpetuity without fear of reprisals or sudden funding cuts.
i naively think this would solve a LOT of the issues in academia currently, which already in the absence of the recent Trump shake-ups has devolved into a metric chasing, paper-mill, grant funding behemoth whose sole purpose is to churn out papers of dubious quality, game metrics, and bring in research funding to the university. the modern professor's job is not to advance our understanding of the natural world, but to generate positive KPIs and bring in as much revenue as possible to the university in the form of overhead costs (66% of all the federal funding we bring in at my institution goes directly to the school). it's a business, and that's not what basic science research is supposed to be in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the foolish maneuvers that China is making?
China is undergoing a 2008 style financial crisis due to real estate speculation and deflation due to very weak domestic spending. They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete wi…
My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support the…
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.