> 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.
U.S. science is in chaos
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about. Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine. Am…
Look at GDP growth in the US vs EU over the last 10 years or so if you want to talk about innovation. Europe has been stagnating economically and real productivity growth is critical to a modern economy. The large hadron collider does some impressive research, but it doesn't move the sort of innovation in practical machinery and infrastructure that powers a modern economy.
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/us-europe-comparative-productivi...
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about. Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine. Am…
As an European, yeah, we probably are doing really good with basic science, but what about innovation when it comes to productivity? Why there is no AI lab (apart from Mistral) in EU? Why there is no European model (and hasn't been probably ever) in the pareto fronteer? Or any other really innovative company in the last while (I believe Spotify was the last European unicorn that transformed the landscape in the marke…
Fragmentation isn't really there in science and development, fragmented financing (basically the main point I'll cede) is being worked on, and markets will always have to deal with European diversity; we're not all going to speak English tomorrow and eat the same, dress the same, etc.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#914Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much is this actually happening? It isn't. At least, not in the way being portrayed. The people going back to China were already from China , and the people returning to Europe are largely from there as well. The dirty little secret of US academic research is that it became almost entirely dependent on Chinese labor over the past 30 years, and that's reversing a little bit.
Exactly. The US is a leader in technology pretty much exclusively because of immigration. As that reverses, we can expect the US to fall behind, and fall further behind, over time.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#916Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#917Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing. Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral pa…
> This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up. You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA). Strong "cut off y…
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
well lot of ppl are always moving out of america but few actually do. thats obvious by now.
Emigration out of the US right now is at historic, record-breaking levels. Have any other uninformed comments you'd like to make?
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read. I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper. Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and w…
The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.
Reported failures to replicate are pretty similar in other fields, including in biomedicine. The replication crisis was just first highlighted in social psychology; lots of other fields just don't report these failures to replicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis). It's a bit like shooting the messenger.
It's funny reading through the comments in this thread because there are people claiming that sociology both (1) is so obvious that the effects replicate at such rates that the research is useless because everything is known a priori and (2) that nothing replicates at all.
Also, criticizing fields like social psychology and sociology for focusing on social phenomena seems a bit strange because that's what the fields are about. It's like criticizing biology for having too much of a bias toward living things.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, No, that is just your opinion.
I'm not the big Lebowski but this is the "opinion" of the majority of scientific societies in the US as well as watchdog organizations who have long followed science regulatory and spending action. It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump a…