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U.S. science is in chaos

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#441

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gs17 wrote: post #326
drnick1 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire 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.

Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?

It's actually kind of a hard problem.

There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?

Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?

This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#442

Post by apical_dendrite »

iAMkenough wrote: post #346
helterskelter wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they thought it was a DEI thing.

If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.

This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.

> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.

> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#443

Post by LadyCailin »

wins32767 wrote: post #398
twothreeone wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?

That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't t…

I’m not convinced academia purged itself, at least not in any way that they should be ashamed of. Reality has a liberal bias, and my extremely conservative uncle at one point mentioned how he didn’t want his kids to go to college, because college turns kids atheist. Actually, learning things opens your mind, and so the standard conservative positions come off looking pretty stupid after critical examination, so conservativism (i.e. dogmatism) and learning are inherently at odds. Falsifying or omitting things just to suit the feelings of conservatives is wrong, even if the alternative is to “purge them” from academia by making their stupidity unwelcome.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#444

Post by amanaplanacanal »

pstuart wrote: post #345
Tangurena2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back to the 1930s. People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.

Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?

Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#445

Post by gs17 »

paytonjjones wrote: post #432
gs17 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?

I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise. As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!

I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#446

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

mold_aid wrote: post #237
brorfred wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"? Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of d…

I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity. USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment c…

[dead]

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#447

Post by wredcoll »

throwawaypath wrote: post #406
wredcoll wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure: https://mbs.edu/news/why-diverse-teams-are-more-profitable

That was debunked: https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters...

Oh hey, a good faith argument. I thought about going and googling for more studies supporting my position, but I'm not sure if that actually has much of a point?

Maybe I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.

Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.

Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.

Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#448

Post by nkrisc »

dang wrote: post #290
nkrisc wrote: post #21

[flagged]

Please don't do this* here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568492 . * by "this" I mean posting ideological clichés and internet tropes - This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.

There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.

So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.

There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#449

Post by wins32767 »

wins32767 wrote: post #398
twothreeone wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?

That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't t…

Like this from the article:

> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”

If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.

My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#450

Post by text0404 »

drak0n1c wrote: post #352
dwa3592 wrote: post #307

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.

There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.

A lot of people in academia are mission driven - they don't care about the money, they care about the application of their work to benefit humanity and don't want to exist as a cog in a private corporation's profits. I think this mentality of "scientists just want to get paid a lot of money" is contributing to the anti-science views that are so pervasive in America these days. Some people are motivated by more than just profit.
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