Meanwhile DOGE has cancelled more than $2 billion in federal research grants. The US is shooting itself in the foot when it should be competing at its best.
The administration is also pressing for a 55% budget cut to the National Science Foundation. The NSF is the primary funding agency for engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry and computer science, among many other fields. If there's any doubt about the seriousness of that situation, the director has resigned over it. When some worried that US world leadership in physical and life sciences may be surpassed in a generation, I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year.
>I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year
I mean China has been modernizing their academics for a long time. See "Double First-Class Construction" [0]. But it's worth remembering that they did a lot of damage during the Cultural Revolution.
China has a highly unique language for foreigners to acclimate to. While I salute the effort for and commitment to higher education, I’m not sure this will bring the boon they’re hoping for.
I would have suggested that they create a high-quality course for introducing westerners to their language instead. It’s the sort of thing that everyone takes for granted that it exists but often doesn’t (where is the Wheelock’s for Spanish these days?) Tonality, pictography, and a highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners, let alone all three at once.
There is a ton of easily available content for learning Chinese.
In terms of government-sponsored resources, the Chinese government has created the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) tests, and has written standard textbooks for them that are pretty decent. All sorts of third parties have written their own textbooks oriented towards the HSK tests as well.
> highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners
Analytic morphology is what makes spoken Chinese so easy to learn, in my opinion. There's almost none of the complexity found in Indo-European languages, like number, case, gender and tense. The main barriers to learning Chinese for Westerners are:
* It's not Indo-European, so the vocabulary is almost entirely new.
* Tonality, though this is about the same level of difficulty as memorizing noun genders in Indo-European languages.
* The writing system. Memorizing a few thousand relatively arbitrary characters is difficult.
AI has made real time translation very feasible, I don’t think Chinese will be much if a language barrier for foreign students and researchers in the near future. You can do it all in a local model with a moderately powerful mobile GPU. We are almost at the point where you put some ear buds in your ear and some glasses could handle reading…etc…
The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs. Visit India and you will understand what Mao's goals were.
(European countries killed off 1000 years of Christianity in a single generation at the same time Mao did his giant leap experiment).
> The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Most of the semi-religious customs that were killed off still live on in Malaysia - to the point where I was surprised at how un-chinese China was when I visited.
Indeed, now is the moment to step on the gas in biotech. The past 15 years have been nothing short of extraordinary in the field. We finally have the tools needed to effectively measure biology, manipulate biology, and increasingly predict biology. More recently, we have been able to turn more and more problems into computational problems.
With all of this coming together, we should be accelerating both public and private investment in biotechnology because we're getting closer and closer to transformative therapies. But...we're failing to rise to the occasion and meet the moment.
The entire class of "biologics" drugs only came about in the past 15 years thanks to advances in sequencing and biotech. They are the mainstays of treatment for dozens of serious dermatologic, rheumatologic, and GI diseases, not to mention they directly cured multiple cancers.
Not op, but I’m in the field and can give you some things to read about:
- CAR-T
- CRISPR
- PRIME editing
- Base editing
- Modified mRNA
- PD-1 inhibitors
- On the cusp of personalized cancer vaccines
- ADCs
- Structure correctors
- Targeted protein degraders
- siRNAs
These have all really hit their stride in the past 15 years. Guess where all of them initially came from? Random ass government-funded academic research. Sure, you can split hairs with me on the 15 years and NIH/NSF etc funding, but it’s basically true. We are killing the golden goose…
Delivery vectors for nucleic acid have really progressed too. Peptide design and screening (also high throughput tools in general) have developed and led to great advances in peptide conjugates, such as peptide radioligands.
Sorry, I am not involved with biotech. Genuinely curious.
Edit. My impression of bio tech is that upfront costs are high and timeline for commercialization is long, and the only real biotech firm that I am aware of is Theranos. So I am probably coming from a place of ignorance.
Fascinating, then, how the head of DOGE has deep financial interests in China. It’s really not out of bounds to suggest that his benefactors could’ve pulled some strings to kneecap the US.
No. No. That no longer applies, and I would argue never applies to a publicly funded entity like the federal government. When you're spending public dollars there is zero difference between incompetence and malice.
This administration has shown that it absolutely isn't incompetent. It's getting stuff done. Which means it's malice. Guaranteed. We're watching a self made disaster where few will profit, but will profit ENORMOUSLY.
Give me a freaking break. One side is carrying on the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and secular humanism, while the other is trying to drag us back to the dark ages of superstition and fear. It has nothing to do with political “left” and “right” anymore. It’s just sane vs. insane.
I'd honestly love to have a real discussion with people about this topic. HN comment sections, as imperfect as they may be, are afaik about the only place left on the internet where somewhat fact-based discussions of contentious topics happen.
The flagged comment is pretty inscrutable but I think I can explain the overall sentiment a bit better: half the country is under the impression that much of the science spending in this country is wasteful or even pernicious. They hear stories about studies of "racist highways" and "periods in transgender men," or the CDC claiming racism and gun control are diseases it should control, and think "why am I paying for this?". Combine this with the perception that the science establishment really shat the bed in their response to covid--lying about its origins, lying about the efficacy of masks, lying about the efficacy of the vaccine, lying about two more weeks, pushing ineffective and harmful lockdowns, etc--and half the country is ready to burn the whole thing down.
I, personally, know that science in general is a great good and should be funded. But the craziness, corruption, and dishonesty have to be excised or people are not going to support it.
To your comment in particular, the people supportive of these cuts don't think they're dragging us back to the dark ages. They think they're excising a tumor.
I’m not telling people stories about “racist highways” or “periods in transgender men.” I’m sure you’re not either. Maybe the problem here is whoever is telling those stories.
But in all seriousness, the time to have discussions about this was last year. The time for discussion has passed at this point. The damage is locked in now, as is the blowback that will result when people realize what was done.
I don't think most here would disagree about the perceptions that each side has. The problem is that is imperfect a lens to reality they are, it sure seems like the one side has embraced much of the fundamentals of QAnon even if most haven't realized it.
I'm happy to have this discussion, but I think you're making a false equivalence between the two sides. The examples you provided of liberal scientific overreach are either false or exaggerated. On the other side, you have an anti-vaxxer running the Department of Health and a president who suggested ingesting bleach to treat covid.
To respond to your examples specifically:
* Racist highways: I don't know what this is about.
* Periods in transgender men: This is a small, nuanced issue, not something worth destroying civilization over.
* Racism is a disease: Again, not familiar with this.
* Gun violence is a disease: It is the leading cause of death among children in this country, so treating it as an epidemic makes some sense. Should the CDC just pretend it's not happening?
* Lying about the origins of covid: Not sure who lied about this. The actual origin may never be known, but it most likely evolved from a disease that affected animals in Asia. There is no evidence that it was developed deliberately by China as a bioweapon.
* Lying about the efficacy of masks: Again, not sure what lie you're referring to. Masking was a rational response to an unknown virus. Since covid is a highly contagious respiratory disease, too much masking is certainly better than not enough masking.
* Lying about the efficacy of the vaccine: Again, not sure what lie you're referring to. The covid vaccines saved many thousands of lives.
* Pushing ineffective and harmful lockdowns: This was another rational response to an unknown virus. Lockdowns saved lives, even though they caused huge disruptions.
Your claim that the scientific community overreacted to covid is particularly unjustified and concerning to me. People like Anthony Fauci should be celebrated as heroes, not vilified.
>Lockdowns saved lives, even though they caused huge disruptions.
The problem with this argument and op's is that they're starting from different baselines. This next sentence is not meant to be as judgy as it sounds I'm afraid.
But your context is that lives are worth more than economic problems. The counterpoint that exists is that other people's lives aren't a valuable as my livelihood and income.
This is why rational debate breaks down so very quickly. We don't even have the same starting point anymore, let alone view of the facts at hand.
I think one can make a rational argument that the cost of the lockdowns was not worth the lives saved. I probably wouldn't agree with that argument, but I'd certainly hear it out, especially with regard to the impact on children's education.
The problem is that the current administration isn't interested in (or perhaps capable of) making rational arguments at all.
I just want to point out that America could have blunted the impact the lockdowns had on children, the government just chose to do nothing. It wasn’t a requirement of the lockdowns, it was a choice.
> * Lying about the efficacy of masks: Again, not sure what lie you're referring to. Masking was a rational response to an unknown virus. Since covid is a highly contagious respiratory disease, too much masking is certainly better than not enough masking.
During the first few months of the pandemic the CDC, as well as various media commentators, stated that masks were not an effective measure. The advice was based on decades-old studies that established the "air-borne" vs "not air-borne" dichotomy, according to which COVID was not air-borne and thus masks were unnecessary. But the advice was also motivated by a desire to prevent a run on masks, which were in short supply and already being rationed in healthcare settings. Saying they lied is a stretch, but they were quite intransigent about it even as evidence piled up supporting masking efficacy. This history eventually became one kernel truth justifying a lot of anti-CDC, anti-institutional medicine rhetoric. Though that rhetoric existed before the incorporation of this history into their narrative, and of course the broader movement was always against masking, anyhow, so it's kind of inconsistent logically, but consistency isn't that important when it comes to politics.
I'll tell you what: I'll admit that one side has put too much emphasis on the freedom to choose one's sexual identity if you'll admit that the other side has put too much emphasis on resisting such choices.
I appreciate the effort to be conciliatory but I think this undermines the point you were making. Anti-scientific thinking has proliferated in left-wing spheres since the mid-2010s. This was one obvious example, but you also have the rejection of psychometrics and heredity (admittedly more among academics than actual scientists), an (albeit brief) embrace of Modern Monetary Theory, and then the “Trust the experts, believe in science” mantra of the early 2020s.
I just don’t see a lot of evidence to support the idea that progressives are exceptionally rational.
your comment would have a lot more weight if the grandparent hadn't been flagged and removed by people who don't like to read things they disagree with!
How am I supposed to know what arguments to expect from MAGA if you people censor what they have to say?
Censorship isn't helping your cause! It just makes your side look weak and scared.
I agree HN hides comments/posts too quickly, but the main issue here is that you can easily google federal outlays by month. This is an extremely easy thing to do. Unless you don't believe the data collected, there's nothing to debate. Why don't we have a debate about what color the sky is, or what 1+1 is?
What are people supposed to argue with the sort of person that claims destroying 2B of federal science funding is justified solely by alleviating 0.001% of the 1.83T deficit - aka accomplishing nothing?
There's nothing to be aware of, nothing to prepare for, it's an "argument" that destroys itself with simple division. (Taking their grossly exaggerated "3T per semester" deficit number - combining the 2020 peak in annual deficit and casually doubling it - at face value only makes the 2B from the NSF an even more insignificant 0.00033%)
I find nothing revelatory about it. Just another person that wants to vandalize anything associated with their vague meme-complex of woke-lib-fed-science-international stuff.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-med...