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WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

scientificamerican.com

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Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#521

Post by phs318u »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #453
gwerbin wrote: post #168

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…

[flagged]

> humans are sexually dimorphic

Wrong.

https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#522

Post by stouset »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #276
stouset wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Trump himself would simply refuse to step down, and have the might of the U.S. military brass behind him. If you can’t tell, I am not hopeful.

What are the "U.S. military brass" going to do? A fuckup or two like ICE had and the whole narrative quickly turns to shit and the people push back.

People’s opinions only matter so far as they have to care about elections. Not having to worry about those sorts of nuisances is entirely the plan and they are frighteningly near succeeding at it.

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#523

Post by convolvatron »

bsdetector wrote: post #435
Untagged0060 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first item on the list is 44M for quantum materials. Can you please explain why cancelling it is in the national interest of the US? Other than the fact that Harvard didn't admit Daddy's favorite boy?

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=1231319&a... Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books. If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.

that doesn't imply anything at all, just that some grants weren't cancelled for political reasons

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#524

Post by phs318u »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #491
SubiculumCode wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete ignorance on your part, both about the degree of sexual dimorphism, and your apparent, assumed position that gender diverse identities do not have biological origins. There is insufficient data to make firm conclusions, but I will note that brain differences are observed.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3

The sex requirements for procreation are orthogonal to the spectrum of sex variation observed.

https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#525

Post by guax »

softwaredoug wrote: post #471

To steel man this move You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago. Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants - some might say theology - of the field. It’s basically a cartel for keeping a field of study alive, regardless…

> Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants

Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.

So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#526

Post by Jtsummers »

idiotsecant wrote: post #87
rayiner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wow, it's not often that you get to see someone unironically defend cronyism and nepotism as a goal to be reached rather than a cancer to be eradicated. I guess it really does take all strokes.

rayiner has previously written that he thinks all non-property owners in the US to be disenfranchised.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305

> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Really, nothing he writes is surprising.

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#527

Post by calvinmorrison »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #501
calvinmorrison wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and those taxes are distributed by our government... which is political. simple as.

so it's political ... so what?

So why should any function of government be free from politics? The point of our system is so we can give feedback and adjust the system

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#528

Post by lmeyerov »

xtiansimon wrote: post #343
lmeyerov wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless russian-troll-style argument: - With no workers working, no worker fraud problem, sure. If you cut core scientific processes, politicize science, and destablize paycheck predictability enough to chase everyone good out of science, then yes any small amount of waste is also caught in the cuts. - This seems to increase what you call bad "fun": Increases abuse of tax funding being corruptly given to projects adv…

> "Useless russian-troll-style argument" Surprise! I'm just a middle-age American reading HN with his coffee trying to wrap my head around the topic. I don't think this remark helps anyone understand your argument. Doth protest too much. I'm wondering if you're focused on the "approved" science, and missing the idea this corruption is riding on the back of even a "small amount of waste", and an overall rejection of s…

R1 work generally doesn't have a replication crisis, and generally incrementalism is the bigger issue there, which is in turn tied to penny pinching

The bigger issue is failure to significantly increase r&d funding, vs last decade+ shrinkages and Trump-era eating of the young, and focuses like you now propose suggest a continuation of such economy-inhibiting thinking. Also, note how your post was goalpost moving. This in turn is classic trolling with asymmetric effort, so I don't see your response in good faith.

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#529

Post by rayiner »

jaredklewis wrote: post #496
rayiner wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power. Not at all. My comment was that America’s good run began a century before the 20th century practice of administration through independent experts. Thus, such administration cannot be a necessary condition for America’s “good run” as OP suggested.

That's fair, but I think your original comment could be much more clearly written. "There was a spoils system in the late 1800s. It sure would be great if we could go back to that time." Technically these can be interpreted as unrelated statements (as apparently the statements are in your original comment), but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the…

> but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system

Except I explicitly referred to “[r]olling the government back,” specifically “the modern administrative state.” The two systems being compared are the old system where the executive branch was politically accountable (but suffered from patronage jobs), and the new system presided over by experts (but who are insulated from political signals).

My point is that the old system, with its shortcomings, empirically produced good results, as good as the new system, with its shortcomings. That’s not an argument that the spoils system was great in isolation. But it’s possible that political appointees aren’t as incompetent as you assume. Or credentialed experts aren’t as competent as you assume. Or that the gains from more administrative competence are outweighed by the loss of responsiveness to political signals.

Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

#530

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #480
TimorousBestie wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insinuating that the administrative state is racist by genetic fallacy while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow is hypocritical enough for me to disregard his opinion.

The administrative state wasn’t merely created by the same progressives that gave us eugenics. It has its roots in the same dim view of the common man and how much agency they should be given. Woodrow Wilson and other progressives were deeply skeptical of democracy. He wrote about the how the “unphilosophical bulk of mankind” didn’t know what was good for them. And his solution to that was to have the government run…

[deleted]
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