I think if you're against these cuts you also have to be open to finding out which of these historical investments have a good rate of return. I.e. which is more important, tax dollars spent finding out the composition of Mars rocks or spent on fusion energy?
In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.
This is already what the funding agencies do! The merit review process solicits outside expert assessment of the importance, feasibility, and potential impact (including economic development and societal impact) of the research, and the funding agencies do their best to maintain a balanced portfolio of research that is promising for advancing national priorities
By all means we should discuss the transparency of this process, what those national priorities are, and exactly what we (collectively as taxpayers) the risk-reward tradeoff should be. But let’s not pretend that the funding agencies don’t already view science as a public investment, or be too hasty about dismissing the potential medium term economic value of research into for example geology and geochemistry on mars
I don’t find this compelling, especially given the enormity of the replication crisis and misconduct in academia. If scientific institutions want less budgetary scrutiny and more freedom, they need to be fundamentally trustworthy, but the past decade has made it amply clear that is not the case.
More rigor around funding isn’t putting a stake through the heart of scientific inquiry; fabricating data is.
I was responding to the idea that science funding should be predicated on expected ROI. That strikes at the heart of inquiry for a couple of reasons. First, that the point of scientific inquiry is to try to explain the universe, not to generate returns. That it generates returns is a happy side-effect. Second, because we rarely know in advance what sorts of study will or will not generate returns. It is quite common that research that has no obvious benefit up front results in a surprising benefit or laying the foundation for such benefits through later research.
I agree with you that fabricating data is bad (who would argue with that?), but that's an entirely different topic.
I get that fabricating data and academic integrity look like a different issue from ROI-based funding, but I don’t think they are. In the context of public funding, there must be a justification for the money spent. For a long time, it was “this research will help all of humanity and further our understanding of the universe”, which is great until it turns out that a lot of the research is questionable at best and outright lies at worst. How does made up research help further our understanding of the universe?
So absent institutional integrity, another justification for funding must be found, and one option is ROI. That has its own drawbacks, but at least if we start there we could move back to a place of institutional trust.
The ROI of unknown unknowns is by definition unknown.
I'm always amazed by people who speak fancy econ language like "ROI", economics is an abysmal example of science, it can't predict or solve anything but you're arguing for making it the arbiter of all other sciences? That's going to end as everything econ - in another great depression or war.
Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common. Queer theory, for example, isn't like NASA creating cordless power tools for the people, or discovering the benefits of grooved pavement for space shuttle landings.
It is eminently clear to anyone with their head on straight that technical research will lead to a positive return overall. You are correct that the specifics about how inventions come about can be random.
Here[1] is a queer theory journal. Let me know if this is going to help us accidentally discover a new industrial process that feeds more people or saves lives in some other way. You don't need to have precognitive abilities to correctly dismiss this drivel and save everyone a headache.
> Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common.
That's a lot of words when you could have just said that you're against individualism and personal freedom.
Given the rather direct connection between Alan Turing dying because he was persecuted for queerness, this seems to be a rather odd angle to argue; there seems to me to quite a bit of evidence that queer studies might significantly reduce things like suicide rates [1].
It's also rather irrelevant: queer studies doesn't get very much funding to begin with. One estimate I found placed research "on sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) populations" at 0.8% of the NIH budget, the majority of which went to HIV related research [2].
Which all really seems to rather disingenuous given that the funding cuts that are currently taking place are across the board: "The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut" [3]. This includes massive cuts at NASA, to the point that many current and future missions are in danger of being canceled:
"This would result in the cancellation of a number of high-profile missions and campaigns, according to the new documents. For example, Mars Sample Return — a project to haul home Red Planet material already collected by NASA's Perseverance rover — would get the axe. So would the New Horizons mission, which is exploring the outer solar system after acing its Pluto flyby in July 2015, and Juno, a probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016." [4]
As a result of these cuts we are literally going to know less about Jupiter. And you're off on some weird gender studies tangent.
This is over stating the extend of the replication "crisis" (which is a terrible name). The reality is that fraud rates are much lower than in pretty much any other part of society. The irony is also that the problems have increased significantly, because of making scientists constantly having to justify the "monetary value" of their research. It incentives overstaying impact (everyone who's ever written a grant application knows how ridiculous it is, everything is supposed to be high gain/risk, but at the same time you're supposed to already know everything you'll find out and how you will use the results).
The problem is that finance is a model - every model is useful, and every model is wrong. When you optimize for any specific model things inevitably get left behind, and our society has already optimized heavily in the direction of finance.
For an extreme case, take a look at libre software. Giving away freedom destroys most of the ability to be economically compensated for a work. And yet, how many distributed trillions of dollars in value creation has libre software enabled? (I am still using the model here in a hope to better convince you, but there are also plenty of intangibles not captured by the model of dollars, eg the freedom itself)
I'd say that foundational scientific research is in a similar spot. Which means it needs to be evaluated on different metrics - the entire point of these various review committees, boards, etc. And I will certainly agree that they could use some reforms! But we are not talking about reform here, we are talking about wholesale destruction and installation of different-flavored political apparatchiks. So in the context of the original point, it's a bit disingenuous to bring up criticisms that point to the need for reform, as support for the current political winds.
> I think if you're against these cuts you also have to be open to ...
Philosophically, that assertion can be made.
Real-world, there are vastly more humans who are against these cuts for mundane reasons than there are devout philosophers.
And our current scientific research establishment is a bloated & self-serving bureaucracy. Which demands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy while treating its actual production workers like crap.
And, given human nature, reforming a crappy "X-ology Research Establishment" is far more difficult that deciding on the in-theory relative merits of researching X-ology vs. Y-ology vs. Z-ology.
> In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.
I agree, in principle. However, this is a trap.
Here’s a playbook:
1. Declare, loudly, that a problem exists. The problem doesn’t have to be real, but it’s better if it is.
2. Announce, even more loudly, that you are going to address the problem in a way that’s suspiciously self serving.
3. Implement your preferred solution as rapidly as possible. The “solution” can be as flawed as you like. It may or may not actually fix the original problem; that part is unimportant.
4. When people react to your implementation, they sort themselves into three buckets: supporters (partisan or otherwise), detractors (partisan or otherwise), and “reasonable people” who “see both sides.”
5. While the “reasonable people” are still debating whether it was a good idea to cure the patient’s brain tumor by decapitation, move on to the next “problem” that needs to be “fixed.”
A well-known (at the time; awareness has probably faded somewhat since) different articulation of this playbook, from an (anonymous) implementor of it in the Bush Administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
That Sherpa was born and lived on the mountain his whole life.
Everything he is was molded by his life.
His ability to make the climb came from years of experience
and knowledge.
The foreigner huffed some gas and slept in a high-tech tube a week before the climb.
I'll leave to the reader to decide which one deserves respect and admiration.
It really does seem as simple as that. I grew up dirt poor in rural appalachia but we were all poor so I didn't care. Really had a good life and it helped shaped my perspective on what matters even though I make good money now.
Weird. I grew up in a similar environment. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Maybe the rampant violent alcoholism and meth just isn’t my thing. Of course, it had other major issues.
I had a huge family, 100s, and all of us were pretty religious so if anyone was drinking, it was secretly and I never really experienced it. I mostly just experienced hard work, hunting, 4wheeling, and general redneck shit. People were annoyingly religious but that was about the worst of it.
Bingo, nr 1 reason why older generations now don't grok younger these days. There were always similar scenarios, lets be honest this ain't unique situation generally, despite many trying to claim otherwise, certainly for me and my peers say 25 years ago situation looked almost exactly the same, we just didn't expect to have a great life immediately but work it off gradually.
Heck, my first net salary after university (proper CS title) working 100% as Java software dev was what, cca 350-400$ a month? I could afford almost nothing and that was fine and expected. I don't think I need to calculate how many tens of times my salary went up till this day while still doing Java dev. Yet young folks who start are immediately pissed off they only get very high and not ridiculous amounts right out of school, complaining they can't buy some central housing. Buy?!? As said huge disconnect across generations.
This is related to the evaporation of "free time", socializing irl, and hobbies that I've observed vs. my pre-cellphone/pre-internet youth & young adulthood. Not having social media, work emails & slack, and all the group chats enforced periods of quietness, boredom, and being alone. You went out and socialized and did things in public more often just because you were bored and you couldn't just doomscroll and share memes with the group chat. The overall increase in baseline cognitive social load that is entirely digital and interruptive (notifications!!!) instead of planned irl activities just seems to add to general stress levels and decrease baseline mental wellness.
I’ll save it as the ultimate “just be positive” slogan as the world gets worse and worse.
Young adults got tossed into Covid lockdown as teens and higher education students. They worry about climate change. Wars have always happened but now with Ukraine it’s happening in proximity to the West. The second Trump administration is much worse than the first. The old “getting a better life than your parents” isn’t looking great, in fact it’s trending downward.
That people are perhaps more toxically “tuned in” to what everyone else is doing is just the cherry on top of objective reality.
Yes, exactly. It's why everyone is obsessed with 'inequality' these days. They all have a better life than my childhood was and I was happy then and I'm happy now. The difference is that I'm not always looking in the other guy's bowl to see if he has more than me.
That's victim blaming, to suggest the problem is that young people are comparing themselves to their parents' generation, rather than the problem being that their parents' generation has made the world worse for their children.
I don't think the parent comment is passing blame on a particular generation -- they're simply blaming the state of the era we're living in, and the tools that are available to all of us, including the younger generation that has (always had) less self discipline to moderate their behavior and addition to these tools.
They are comparing their lives to completely phony ones on the internet and finding it wanting. The no. 1 job they aspire to is influencer, because they see it as the ideal life, cause it's painted as such.
Globalization was fantastic actually. America is only a few weeks away now from discovering how wrongheaded complaints about it were.
The actual problem is inequality, but inequality in right/libertarian thought is supposed to be good. So they * reached for a more comfortable explanation involving 'the other': globalists!
* 'they' is a discourse smell, so I will cite some examples:
Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, etc.
It has been annoying, for almost two decades, to witness the success of anti-globalization propaganda.
Economic inequality surely is contributing to depression in young people. Exposure to wonderful people, products, opportunities and ideas from all around the globe is not.
> Economic inequality surely is contributing to depression in young people. Exposure to wonderful people, products, opportunities and ideas from all around the globe is not.
Those two are linked though, exposure to competition from all around the world is the problem you are talking about. You can't have both these opportunities and avoid competition.
I do think this freedom is a good thing, but I also understand it leads to inequality. That is why globalism was typically a right wing position since it helps the rich.
Globalization is not the cause of economic inequality. The cause is political and cultural. Since the late 1970's, the top 1% of income earners (> ~$800,000 in income) in the United States has captured 60% of economic growth as income. The top 10% (> ~$200,00 in income) of earners captured 90% of the growth. The bottom 90% of the population has captured only had 10% of the growth in wages over that time period. The US now has might have the highest income inequality that we know of in all societies, present and historical. For example, India from 40 years ago that had a strict caste system and half the population was illiterate was more egalitarian the the current day US. Apartheid South Africa was more egalitarian than the current day US.
This started in the late 70s as that is when we started dropping the progressive tax on high income earners extremely low. This incentivized senior managers at companies, who set their own compensation, to set higher and higher wages for themselves, capturing most of the economic growth of the past 50 years.
Whether you think this type of inequality is justified or not, its worth looking at closely because it is hard to imagine an economy or society continuing to function indefinitely with such extreme difference in outcome between different social groups.
OP's comment says globalization comes with dark sides, that's it. Do you disagree? I think people are angry because so much of the discussion of it among people who have enjoyed the fruits of globalization is essentially to silence any talk of that fact and point to things that ultimately are not a crucial part of a better life (ability to buy cheap junk mostly).
The comment claims that 'globalisation' is depressing young people. Well, that's a hypothesis, not a universally agreed-upon fact. And the assumption that it's agreed-upon is probably a product of the propaganda I complained about.
There's a stronger case for globalisation making youth happier, on the whole, and other factors (such as economic inequality) making youth sadder.
The US has enjoyed amazing prosperity, but it was squandered by allowing the majority to only go to the 1% instead of spreading it around through programs like universal healthcare and free education. Thinking that workers would still be working if it just wasn't for globalization is completely ignoring automation. Add in that very few people want to do work that is long and dangerous, and it made sense to send it elsewhere and move up the value chain.
Some of America’s comparative advantages that we see a lot of on HN has been designing chips, online services and financial services etc. Also the defence industrial complex. There are probably more.
In general todays Americans don’t want to work in factories any more, and factory owners don’t want workers these days either: they want robots. Witness all Musk has said about workers being temporary while he gets robots at Tesla since the start etc.
There's nothing substantive about a comment like this. The US has dominated indices for decades and the amount of money those indices have generated non-US investors is huge. Belief in the US based indices domestically and abroad is still superior, just look at the numbers.
The US has a gargantuan debt problem to handle, and reciprocity in tariffs seems far from an 'antic.'
That belief was based on a lot of suppositions like the gold in Fort Knox being there(had that fight with Europe already and resolved it until recently), the backing of NATO allies, the backing of long term allies like Canada and Britain who we have threatened with annexation and referenced as losers militarily, respectively in the past month, or even basic rule of law in line with our own systems.
We have become a source of absolute chaos and until we settle down into an understandable and, critically, stable set of behaviors three is no belief in us.
You can’t rely on past behavior as a source of trust for counter parties when you are simultaneously telling those counter parties that every agreement you enter into is worth nothing upon tomorrow.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
The US is actively stopping honouring its international engagements and relations. It’s already starting to have an effect. Confidence once lost is hard to regain the same goes for trust.
There is, actually. Instability where you win or lose based on which loony is next in driver's seat is not super appealing for folks on the outside, you know, those who get the stick.
WRT tariffs, both economists and more layman's explanations make it clear that, at the very, very least, the Trumpian view is out of touch with reality.
For example country A, having a massive trade deficit with country B, because you buy raw materials which you refine into products and sell to country C can absolutely be a good thing for country A - and it's very conceivable that imposing a tariff on the materials from B just undermines the profitable business in your country, as the margins from that industry is squeezed by the tariffs you imposed.
Right it just allows unelected officials answerable to no one pull all the strings indefinitely then puts you into a labor camp if you practice religion.
I wonder how much more. And if the increase is offset by the reduced exhaust, brake dust, oil leaks, and pollution from oil and gas production and distribution.
I wonder if the author could enlighten us on a more successful system? Do they envision a world where...no one works or produces value? Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals?
If they can't understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can't take their case seriously. If they can't cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can't take their case seriously.
> Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals?
Trade offered! You receive: enough sustenance to live for a day and a roof above your head so you don't have to sleep under a bridge. I receive: your 12 hours of labour of my choosing.
Yes, it is a mutually beneficial transaction, and millions of people historically have accepted it. Yet somehow there is this nagging feeling it might not be "fair"... but that's absurd, isn't it? It's both completely voluntary and mutually beneficial, so it has to be fair. That's what "fair" means, after all, doesn't it?
This "mutually beneficial" transaction only seems so simple and obvious if we refuse to investigate the many unstated assumptions here.
It would require far less labour to secure these living standards if all the land in the world weren't already claimed and violently defended by a property-owning class. Looking back through history, it's plainly evident that most ownership, especially of land, was acquired through violent means that most would condemn today.
If there were some great reset where we could all agree on a fair system in which no one had any benefits or disadvantages due to some historical events, there is no way the same labour trade "deal" would be maintained.
The authors speak about denial. Thinking that something unfair is fair is denial, when it helps you cope with your reality.
Finding a solution to being homeless doesn't make your life fair.
It can mean you're being exploited though.
If putting those 12 hours towards making food and shelter works then it’s not fair. If you need multiples of those 12h to make yourself a shelter, you’ve just invented capital.
In real terms: if every renter received equity in what they pay for rent (- maintenance) then housing would be more fair as both rent prices would come down as well as purchase being more affordable as landlords start selling the stock
Edit: note that I guess i’m replying to both you and the original commenter
Keep the thought rolling: "Hey boss, someone has an idea to make my work less unhealthy to body and mind. I figured you make a lot off my pain and might want to implement some of those ideas. I understand the fairness of my work and compensation but you have not compensated my pain thus far. Nice custom car, btw, and I really like the size of your house. Maybe you want to build a school in there or something?"
Pain compensated.Environmental consequences hit the fan.Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment
...
And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way.
I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well.
So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it.
Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?
In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.
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