Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.
My job depends on NIH continuing to function, but it is not immediately clear that this particular decision follows other worrying trends discussed here previously. Removing K-awards for clinical trials (but not regular, cheaper study formats) might simply be a recognition that clinical trials are too expensive for the K-format and conducting underpowered clinical trials does not help anyone much.
Please, for your own sake and that of your ideals, don't fall into a Disney adult mentality of "these are bad guys who are clearly against Truth and Good^tm!" just because righteousness feels good. This falls under underestimating your enemy and never serves the people embracing said feeling.
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? I can understand (not saying I approve) targeted opposition to specific scientific claims to favor commercial interests (climate change denial to favor oil & gas, etc), but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run and directly hurt industries like pharma/etc?
A body of independent subject matter experts who command public respect is anathema to authoritarian governments. It's why authoritarian takeovers frequently start by targeting major universities.
It's recognizing thats science is not the only valid form of knowledge vs pushing fringe theories that claim to be science but don't follow the expected standards.
The definition of pseudoscience is something that a) claims to use the scientific method and b) is not actually doing it properly. The "other ways of knowing" you talk about don't meet the first condition, but the right wing "alternative facts" do. Saying climate change is fake is a testable claim that contradicts mainstream science. Saying it's caused by spiritual corruption is not because anything supernatural is out of scope by definition.
Science limits itself to the predictable, testable, natural, objective (if you believe in that) parts of the universe because otherwise it would be useless. If the answer to any question can be "because God wanted it that way" then all theories end there. That doesn't mean science denying the existence of God, just indifferent to it and all other spiritual beliefs. A theory that depends on a religion being false would also not count as scientific.
"Other ways of knowing" is an expression used for indigenous knowledge with elements of both science and spiritual views. Nobody is saying that it's fully science or should be treated as such, just that we should respect it and treat it as equal. I don't see how that could be equivalent to anti vax conspiracies.
> wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
Punishing apparent ideological enemies is a long standing mechanism for fascists and dictators - and scientists in the US qualify. It's an attempt to make people fear standing against them.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
>Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism
And to understand this thought is to go into the other twilight zone where "vaccine" is a single thing with a single composition with only a single set of properties and effects on the organism.
I know this isn't HN type of a topic or a comment, but looking at US from outside, the theme looks to be explicitly destroying US hegemony and meritocracy...
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
Doesn't really matter. It works and keep this tall column of guys out. So probably not just workers. They don't like that. Call them narcs or psychos or autistic but I don't think the boring machine is catching too many of those guys.
... who are unfortunately backed by a large part of the US population who have elected them on exactly that promise, for various reasons. From fear of vaccines to having various other nations freeride on US research.
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
The issue, I think, is a large number of people don't realize the NIH or NIS exists or know what they do.
I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.
> The Great Cause diverts all the money to itself.
Be very specific about exactly what you mean here, with links to reputable sources. You're making extraordinarily strong accusations; vagueness does not suffice to convince.
Dignity is the fundamental problem that they're bemoaning. When scientists and other intellectual positions are funded beyond scraps and subsistence wages, they use some of the breathing room to start to asking questions about societal power structures. When they're afforded political voices, they start applying their critiques to how their own institutions are run - rather than keeping their heads down as "efficient" worker bees for the business vectoralists. And critiques/conclusions where they've gone cloyingly overboard then serve as convenient straw men that demonstrate how "out of touch" they are from "the real world".
I'm surrounded by scientists, in my family, at my day job, and in my community, as I live in the shadow of a major research university. Support for the current administration in recent elections has fallen somewhere between slim and none. In fact I can't think of another identifiable group of people who have been more unanimous in their opposition.
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding? I’m not asking out of anger I genuinely don’t get it. Culture war issues like, idk, people becoming more brown by default in America, or a trans teenager participating in a game, they’re… they don’t seem as important as ensuring well funded science??
> Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding?
The list is long. First and foremost, it's never a good idea to forget that wherever there's intelligence there's always also stupidity. Then it's generally good advice not to confuse intelligence for wisdom. And between this and very long lists of cognitive biases, there's always the good old "Fuck ya, got mine!" Rule of Acquisition to remember. Et cetera.
current administration is guided by the looniest of the loons Claremont Institute, who truly believe that any dollar not spent on border defense or offensive military capability is wasted.
> Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding?
Because a high IQ and a science degree does not mean that those people make good political decisions. A lot of political decision making is driven by ideology and identity.
A lot of high IQ people may have strong mathematical and problem solving skills, but are morons in absolutely every other aspect of life.
There are many reasons. Many high IQ people don’t want to lose their jobs and favor stricter immigration policies. They would probably vote for Democrats if Democrats weren’t so lax on immigration.
And, many of my friends who were doing PHD they used to follow dems, but are now supporting republicans after they got citizenship....
Lots of voters didn't believe Trump would do the things he campaigned on. "I'll defund research" can be interpreted as "probably that other research, the stuff I don't like or think is useless" by some.
Many is a misnomer for “some.” The current administration won by a plurality, 49%, not even a majority. This was 32% of possible voters. Of people with a PhD, approximately 30% voted for Trump. Of Trump voters 1% had a PhD.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
30% doesn't seem anywhere near as low as it should be though... I'd say that qualifies as "so many".
That said I question both your and grandparents choice to look at only people who chose to vote. 68% of people who could have voted against this did not - either actively supporting it with a vote or deciding that they didn't give a fuck if it happened by not voting. Every potential voter either knew or ought to have known the result of this election result...
I’d wager 30% have a profound mental illness and could be convinced of literally anything. Not even a typical super majority vote requires that many people because 30% is the rough threshold of typical insanity prevalence.
They should be incentivizing researchers who have histories of publishing research that has been independently replicated. Way too much fraud going on that’s seeping into the real world.
Why would you bring up fraud in the midst of science research in the US being burned to the ground?
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
There are too may bad scientists, and I don't want to fund them. When the sciences became status-oriented, group-think and profit-seeking became the norm.
This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.
If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo
Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.
Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?
Who has time to talk about billions in emoluments and pumping+dumping the American Economy to insider trade war news when we are subject to such calamitous fraud as a wet-behind-the-ears PhD getting overly enthusiastic in their grant proposal?
Why is it decreasing when the economy is growing? That's the real question. Maybe it's something to do with austerity and wealth concentration in the hands of rich investors?
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
Why should the fruits of our labor be taken to pay for some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training and certainly wouldn’t need average people to pay for it.
I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.
Why? Oh researchers aren't real people? They are some elite group or something? Not people that work their assess off? Not people like me who went from growing up in a rural impoverished neighborhood of dirt and chicken-coops to become a scientists as a first generation college student, much less a professor?
Why? Because we can make more in the private industry, but choose not to. That is why the K exists. Our pay is much less than we can get elsewhere, but we choose to stay for our mission. We leave when forced to by economics. The whole nation loses when basic and clinical science falters. Every major advance, the very fact that we are writing messages back and forth, comes down to basic science that we layed the ground work for, but hey, fuck us, right? We aren't real people. Just elite fucks stealing from real people, I guess. Huh.
The fruits of your labor.
You, along with everyone else, use the fruits of *OUR* labor. Every fucking time you go to the doctor, get an MRI, fuel up your truck, plug in your computer, connect to wifi, use drugs to keep your dick hard, you are demonstrating that scientists helped build this country and this world, every bit as much as the guys digging ditches, building bridges, and picking fruit and cotton (all three of which my grandparents did in spades).
"some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training"... --your ignorance is startling. The people getting these k awards are the best of the best. You cannot get a R01 grant as a post-doc. You cannot even apply. The K is there to find the best post-docs, and give them funding that they can use as a post-doc, and carry over into their first real position. Moreover, that it is "job training" is just an intentional misnomer that has suppressed our wages for decades. Decades ago, a post-doc was the exception, not the rule. It was for scientists who could not find a position yet, or needed a few more months. The expectation was that an undergraduate (4 years) then a 6-7 years of graduate school was usually enough "training". But the desire for cheap labor and the successful production of trained scientists, and consistently lower than inflation growth in research funding created a situation where many of the best scientists were still spending 4-6 years in a post-doc position...a supposed training position, and one that still payed like it.
For example, a relation of mine finished his undergraduate, last year, and is already earning more than I am after 6 years of graduate school, 6 years as a postdoc, and two years as a professor at a top-notch research institution. From an economic decision, I was a stupid fuck. I like what I do, love it in fact, but the system abused me for it. Some fucking elite. Not a real person.
You are free to have the dumb as fuck position that we should not publicly fund science. You are also free to be ignorant as fuck about the real condition of working scientists, but I am also free as fuck to tell you that you are wrong.
I don't even blame you. Scientists are the favorite target of those who want to manipulate others through propaganda. If you respect scientists, not implicitly trust, but believe that most are serious and relatively trustworthy to tell you the truth as far as they can honestly discern, then propagandists can be ignored. So we get attacked and abused. Knock us down so that their talking heads can be the only arbiter of truth.
Finally, I agree, wholeheartedly that there is a lot of poverty and homelessness. I grew up in it. being it. But scientists are the wrong target for your ire. Funding research is a huge return on investment [1]. We can make improvements in how it is conducted, sure, but we shouldn't be the target of your ire. We create jobs. We create wealth. And then others make money off the fruit of our labor. Gobs of it. And we are actually trying to solve problems like homelessness to find interventions for drug abuse and mental health.
So what ever. I get your pain, but reject what you say with every particle of my being.
