741–750 of 1001 posts
Last year, the mood in my field, that has been relatively isolated from many of these impacts, was still very "these are uncomfortable times, but it's still possible to pull through". Recently, you can cut the tension in a room with a knife whenever matters relating to government decision making come up. Some coworkers are leaving science, promising phds and postdocs leaving to other countries, many of the more estab…
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I'm surviving on consulting income for a wide variety of clients right now in this space, and let me tell you it's brutal and extremely difficult to get entry to this space for people that don't have a wide network and lots of industry experience. Academic experience typically doesn't count. In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational…
"Academic experience typically doesn't count." Why not?
Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.
> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue. Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
The scientists need to market their research to exploit the biases of the administration. Sad that it's come to this.
Some thoughts: 1. US Spending on R&D has gone up from $50B -> $1T annually, and from $3B -> $115B on purchasing power terms 2. The labs rely on government grants, which are hard to get and typically awarded 'equally' or 'by gatekeepers' 3. There is and have been massive scandals that question academic integrity - reproducibility, fake data. The scientific community has done almost nothing to change its mechanisms. 4. It's not clear to me what we've 'got' societally from these studies as a whole 5. The administrative burden to even do science has gotten too far out of hand 6. You can't 'fire' researchers
Research and science is a fundamentally 'good' thing; we should encourage it.
We may need to shake up the way that it's done. Yes science + R&D is long term focused, but it doesn't mean it can't be reformed.
That the article centers on hand-wringing over 'my government grant is gone!' instead of 'you're cutting this critical research that will save lives' without any discussion of 'science' needing to reform unfortunately highlights the core of the problem.
This will get downvoted to oblivion, but it's not obvious to me this shakeup is a bad thing. Some thoughts: 1. US Spending on R&D has gone up from $50B -> $1T annually, and from $3B -> $115B on purchasing power terms 2. The labs rely on government grants, which are hard to get and typically awarded 'equally' or 'by gatekeepers' 3. There is and have been massive scandals that question academic integrity - reproducibil…
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No it did not, and even if there was a correction needed, this most certainly is not that correction.
President of stanford was fired over fraudulent research if that's not rampant then what is?
If a CEO commits a crime does that mean the entire industry must ne shut down?
What sort of reasoning is this?
the vc & tech bros while rich, felt envious of the power & respect the academics had. they backed the anti-science candidate, then got involved in useless schemes such as 'government efficiency' which didn't result in any efficiency.
so blaming this on the current admin, isn't enough. some of the people to blame live in SF
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What's a better way, that's not the Chinese way? What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
They were all playing around in a new field that had just opened up.
Research effectiveness is downstream of what's available to be found in the idea mines.
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And the real partisan question is ”should the US fund studying the black holes”, not the actual science question
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")?
Creationists.
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…
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly