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Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

You have a group of people in Washington tasked with doling out money for research. By its very nature this federal funding has politicized science for a long time. Ask anyone who has been through a scientific PhD program whether or not their field has been politicized because of grants received or not received.

The trick this article plays is to argue in part that science needs to be politicized the right way. Diversity initiatives. Massive spending programs without clearly-defined revenue streams. Protecting scientists from "political interference," a term which is impossible to define without eliminating the ability to filter junk science. Everyone needs to sign off on this or the bad things will happen.

I'm sure the author's intentions were good, but restoring public confidence in science means that scientists themselves need to take a good look in the mirror.

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Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on any given year. But if a politician advocates for teaching that Pi is exactly three, in my opinion that's on a whole different level.

Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the muddling of the waters is complete.

What value is in that mathematical papers though? Most of it is correct within itself, but useless for anything real world and always will be.

There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep. A lot of mathematicians could be funded with the leftover money (remember they are living the same life so their cost of living is tiny - more than half our population could produce more theorems).

The above is obviously Reductio ad Absurdum. However it brings out the point: we as a society have already decided math isn't the most valuable thing. We are already drawing limits, the only question is where.

It can be difficult to predict whether a given research topic will be useful or not in the future. It's easy when something is developed with an application in mind. It can be far more difficult for "pure math". There are plenty of examples of math that we don't have an application for today becoming very relevant in the future. For example:

- Fast Fourier transform (Gauss discovered and didn't publish it b/c he thought it wasn't very useful. Others rediscovered it later.) - Number theory was considered useless for a long time, now it's used for cryptography

Mathematics is surprisingly useful. You've used your credit card online -- where'd that encryption algorithm come from? "Useless" math. You've booked a flight online -- where'd that schedule come from? Uh, math again: all that optimization, those traveling salesman problems.

Right now I'm doing all sorts of work studying risk in financial networks, studying public health, all using math that was considered "pure" just 20 years ago. Actually, at the moment I'm looking up papers on the tropical geometry of deep learning.

Certainly I realize society has decided math is not the most valuable thing, which is why I'll be seeking to do "machine learning" instead in the next year or so, rather than education & research (useless for anything in the real world!). I'm sure I'll add more to humanity when I'm optimizing for ad clicks :)

I didn't argue all math is useless. I argued a lot of it is

Something may look useless now, but turn out not to be useless.

Something might be useless now, but further mathematics based on it might be worth billions.

> We get to "all science is politicized"

No, just the science that's fashionable to politicize. You can't pretend that this article isn't at least more biased than the people they're supposedly warning us about.

The Trump Interior Department abruptly canceled a study into coal mining's effects on the health of nearby residents. An Interior Department official explained the decision this way: "Science was a Democrat thing"

Academia is political too. Inherently relations between people are by definition political.

The point is to raise the role of epistemology in decision making where it is possible. That's all.

I think the parent comment was referring to "political" specifically in the sense of "dealing with the government", not the general (e.g. "office politics") sense.

Indeed, and I was saying that government politics is ultimately no different.

"Massive spending programs without clearly-defined revenue streams."

Science doesn't have "revenue streams". Basic research doesn't have "revenue streams".

> science needs to be politicized the right way. Diversity initiatives.

No thank you. I don't need the left telling me that there are 30 genders nor the right telling me that climate change doesn't exist. There is no "right" politicization.

Spot on. Science needs to be data-driven, accurate and absolutely without politics.

Anything otherwise, and we lose credibility and a good chunk of audience for political reasons.

Don't weaponize Science! Keep it pure, keep it true.

I do not think author of this piece has particularly good intentions at all.

Good intentions would have included self-reflection, non-partisan discussion of alternative views, and so on.

A simple review of the funding sources of The Union of Concerned scientists letters, this piece is based on, explains the motives (eg 20mln for linking man-made climate affects and hurricanes).

https://buyingbias.org/2017/09/20/457/

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