5 ms·

MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science

101 points by devonnull 5mo ago

rolph 5mo ago
not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms. private interests have greater actual holdings than gov. "they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.
jruohonen 5mo ago
From the liked NBER study: "Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher." https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50 https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50
- zb3 5mo ago
  The more Chinese publications, the bigger share of their citation rates, right?
- 3eb7988a1663 5mo ago
  Surely English fluency is somewhat relevant.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  Interesting. I wonder if within my lifetime it is possible that Chinese will become the main language one has to learn to be on top of things, with English becoming more niche. These shifts happen slowly I presume. There was a point where a lot of people learned French as a lingua franca, and it transitioned to English over decades.
  - w0de0 5mo ago
    Unlikely. Adaptability of the language to new concepts as well as ease of adoption for second language learners matters. English - indeed every other candidate global language (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) - excel Chinese in these respects. I’d wager that even we’re American hegemony to go the way of the UK, English will persist. It may become more Indian or Singlish, but this demonstrates its strength.
    - w0de0 5mo ago
      were*
andretti1977 5mo ago
… “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto…
MrGilbert 5mo ago
I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.
- bestouff 5mo ago
  I'm not even sure the Nazi regime was that much anti-science.
  - karmakurtisaani 5mo ago
    A lot of great scientists left Europe because of them tho.
    - burnt-resistor 5mo ago
      True. And they forced some scientists to work for them to build terror and WMDs. This regime doesn't even want technological supremacy in many other domains like drones and counter-drones except maybe hypersonic missiles and unworkable pocket battleships.
  - rexpop 5mo ago
    The fascist "suicidal state" fundamentally rejects reason, rationality, and civil progress.
  - jfengel 5mo ago
    They kinda were. Both relativity and quantum mechanics were dubbed "Jewish science", which made it a lot harder for them to progress in those fields.
- PigeonHolePncpl 5mo ago
  Economically? No idea. Global trust? I'd give it 20-40 years.
rootusrootus 5mo ago
As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.
jmclnx 5mo ago
China is increasing funding, US is cutting funding so this will only help China.
gverrilla 5mo ago
Absolutely deleting progress.
wileydragonfly 5mo ago
NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.
nis0s 5mo ago
I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  better to have some overfunded labs who are able to receive more PhD candidates, than underfunded labs who have to cut their graduate programs besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"
- xphos 5mo ago
  I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime. I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.
readthenotes1 5mo ago
How is this affecting the replicability crisis?
- xtiansimon 5mo ago
  All around, black days for Science.
jaybrendansmith 5mo ago
Again, I don't understand why this post is flagged. Don't hackers care about science? Isn't this newsworthy?
- carefree-bob 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ratrace 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
    It's an article about partisan flamethrowering America greatest bestest institutions and people. It's just inconvenient for people desperate to maintain their constructed hyperreality. Sleepers, you need to wake up.
  - jmusall 5mo ago
    How is it partisan political flamebait? While the title and opening paragraph might be exaggerated and not exactly neutral (which is even admitted right after), the rest of the article contains what looks to me like well-researched facts.
- jmye 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- apothegm 5mo ago
  I have some theories about that,but they sound a bit paranoid if not tinfoil hattish.
- eudamoniac 5mo ago
  I didn't flag it, but I almost did. I am typically not in the habit of reading any articles that start with this kind of eye rolling invective, with every verb tortured through a sentiment thesaurus: MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science - When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science...Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved...Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt...This new assault on U.S. science... "War" "ignorance" "terrible news" "killing" "strangling" "screeching" "assault". I just don't read shit like this. Report the facts and stop trying so clumsily to tell me how to feel about them.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
throwworhtthrow 5mo ago
The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.
- xphos 5mo ago
  I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.
spwa4 5mo ago
WOW. EU paper authorship is also back to 1980 levels. But still. I mean, I get that this is still better than the US, but wtf. I wish Krugman had included that total papers has gone up spectacularly, and would not hide the absolute numbers. Plus I don't like that he's not being very clear on the distinction of social vs "hard" (positivist) sciences. But wtf.

101 points by devonnull 5mo ago

rolph 5mo ago

not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms. private interests have greater actual holdings than gov. "they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.

jruohonen 5mo ago

From the liked NBER study: "Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher." https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50 https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50

zb3 5mo ago
The more Chinese publications, the bigger share of their citation rates, right?
3eb7988a1663 5mo ago
Surely English fluency is somewhat relevant.
surgical_fire 5mo ago
Interesting. I wonder if within my lifetime it is possible that Chinese will become the main language one has to learn to be on top of things, with English becoming more niche. These shifts happen slowly I presume. There was a point where a lot of people learned French as a lingua franca, and it transitioned to English over decades.
- w0de0 5mo ago
  Unlikely. Adaptability of the language to new concepts as well as ease of adoption for second language learners matters. English - indeed every other candidate global language (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) - excel Chinese in these respects. I’d wager that even we’re American hegemony to go the way of the UK, English will persist. It may become more Indian or Singlish, but this demonstrates its strength.
  - w0de0 5mo ago
    were*

andretti1977 5mo ago

… “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto…

MrGilbert 5mo ago

I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.

bestouff 5mo ago
I'm not even sure the Nazi regime was that much anti-science.
- karmakurtisaani 5mo ago
  A lot of great scientists left Europe because of them tho.
  - burnt-resistor 5mo ago
    True. And they forced some scientists to work for them to build terror and WMDs. This regime doesn't even want technological supremacy in many other domains like drones and counter-drones except maybe hypersonic missiles and unworkable pocket battleships.
- rexpop 5mo ago
  The fascist "suicidal state" fundamentally rejects reason, rationality, and civil progress.
- jfengel 5mo ago
  They kinda were. Both relativity and quantum mechanics were dubbed "Jewish science", which made it a lot harder for them to progress in those fields.
PigeonHolePncpl 5mo ago
Economically? No idea. Global trust? I'd give it 20-40 years.

rootusrootus 5mo ago

As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.

jmclnx 5mo ago

China is increasing funding, US is cutting funding so this will only help China.

gverrilla 5mo ago

Absolutely deleting progress.

wileydragonfly 5mo ago

NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.

nis0s 5mo ago

I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.

insane_dreamer 5mo ago
better to have some overfunded labs who are able to receive more PhD candidates, than underfunded labs who have to cut their graduate programs besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"
xphos 5mo ago
I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime. I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.

readthenotes1 5mo ago

How is this affecting the replicability crisis?

xtiansimon 5mo ago
All around, black days for Science.

jaybrendansmith 5mo ago

Again, I don't understand why this post is flagged. Don't hackers care about science? Isn't this newsworthy?

carefree-bob 5mo ago
[flagged]
- ratrace 5mo ago
  [dead]
- jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
  It's an article about partisan flamethrowering America greatest bestest institutions and people. It's just inconvenient for people desperate to maintain their constructed hyperreality. Sleepers, you need to wake up.
- jmusall 5mo ago
  How is it partisan political flamebait? While the title and opening paragraph might be exaggerated and not exactly neutral (which is even admitted right after), the rest of the article contains what looks to me like well-researched facts.
jmye 5mo ago
[flagged]
apothegm 5mo ago
I have some theories about that,but they sound a bit paranoid if not tinfoil hattish.
eudamoniac 5mo ago
I didn't flag it, but I almost did. I am typically not in the habit of reading any articles that start with this kind of eye rolling invective, with every verb tortured through a sentiment thesaurus: MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science - When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science...Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved...Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt...This new assault on U.S. science... "War" "ignorance" "terrible news" "killing" "strangling" "screeching" "assault". I just don't read shit like this. Report the facts and stop trying so clumsily to tell me how to feel about them.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

throwworhtthrow 5mo ago

The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.

xphos 5mo ago
I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.

spwa4 5mo ago

WOW. EU paper authorship is also back to 1980 levels. But still. I mean, I get that this is still better than the US, but wtf. I wish Krugman had included that total papers has gone up spectacularly, and would not hide the absolute numbers. Plus I don't like that he's not being very clear on the distinction of social vs "hard" (positivist) sciences. But wtf.