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Comment by Ono-Sendai | Hacker News Reader

Cutting all blue-sky social science research does seem to go a bit far. On the other hand, I'm not sure NZ needs this:

"The intimate technology shaping millions of lives: Exploring the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences." - 870k NZD

"It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa" - 870k NZD

"Sensationalising Sleep: Discourses and practices of sleep in Aotearoa" - 360K NZD

etc..

From the Marsden fund 2022: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...

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Why do you think these are not important?

Do you think it’s not important to know whether all these apps that people are feeding private medical data into actually have any benefits?

Do you think studying why a certain group of children have worse wellbeing than a different group of children is not useful?

Considering how important sleep is you don’t think determining the impact media has on people’s sleep is not important?

I’m absolutely ok with the idea that some research gets funded that shouldn’t. But the fact that even your cherry picked sample shows research that even reading a couple of sentences of the abstract shows a lot of value indicates that this may be even less of an issue than I had imagined.

Re: the menstruation app one - instead of spending 870 k talking about what they would like to see in a menstruation app, just make one. It's not rocket science.

re: the transgender one, it seems to be one of these social science projects that just involves interviewing people. From the project page: "This discourse-based research will interview twelve transgender young people". Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of money? I don't think so.

> Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of money? I don't think so.

72 people.

The full abstract is:

> This research explores transgender young people’s experiences of positive family support in Aotearoa. Family support is protective for transgender youth but we lack evidence of what it looks like for young people of diverse cultures. Our project diversifies research on this topic, extending it from parents to young people themselves and their broader family, from monocultural majority to ethnically diverse participants, and from trauma to resilience. Our gender and culturally diverse team will interview twelve transgender young people (3 Māori, 3 Pasifika, 3 Asian, and 3 Pākehā) and five each of their most valued supporters. We will use the innovative method of reflective drawing, asking participants to draw and discuss their experiences of family support. Our visual and verbal discourse analysis will paint a picture of how families successfully support transgender youth, drawing on perspectives of gender diversity and family in Māori, Pasifika, Asian and Pākehā communities. This will be the first discourse-based research in this area, advancing knowledge in transgender studies, family studies and language and gender. It will explore how young people and their families challenge oppressive social structures through discourse and provide insights for those seeking to be part of the village that raises a transgender child.

> Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of money? I don't think so.

It is called corruption.

Not sure why you're downvoted.

This is the most likely explanation. Hanlon's razor is not relevant anymore, it's actually the opposite these days.

People who don't want to see this reality are just polezniye duraki that further allow the corrupt people in charge to get away with it.

Slightly derailing the topic, one only has to take a look at US goverment budget for like 0.001 secs to see how deep this problem goes. There are invoices like $500 a piece for a fastener.

The duraki will come up to say "oh but that's probably a fastener that has to be created in space from the rarest material available to be used in an extremely sensitive physics experiment". It's not and you're making a fool of yourself. The real purpose of those fasteners is to get someone a new condo in Miami.

It's just corruption.

They’re downvoted because there’s no evidence of corruption. Their assumption is based on false information.

> There are invoices like $500 a piece for a fastener.

Please provide an example of this fantastic claim including the accounting methodology.

The example that comes to my mind is the $10,000.00 toilet seat. That turns out to have been three toilet seats for the C-5 that had to be custom made because they were no longer available. They are now 3-D printed for $300.00. These numbers don’t explain what was involved in making the $10,000.00 one, how it was installed, or how long it lasts.

https://www.military.com/defensetech/2018/07/11/air-force-no...

*yawn* and here they are ... like flies to a pile of garbage ...

Here's a few of them,

https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/30/air-force-ove...

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/04/27/pentagon-over...

There's even this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42410606

This was a 5 minute Google Search, I can guarantee there's much more overspending going on. Oh wait ... yeah, why would one believe me if I haven't performed a detailed audit of all US Govervement expenses and published it to support my claim? Oh no, you got me this time ;).

I’m not asking for a full audit of all expenses. I’m just asking where you got the $500.00 fastener number.

Wasteful military spending is one of those things people “just know” but the reality is often more complex than a headline.

Read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_languag...

Or at least live to your own standard,

>turns out to have been three toilet seats

Where's that info?

>that had to be custom made

Where's that info?

>because they were no longer available

Where's that info?

>These numbers don’t explain what was involved [...]

Where's the explanation behind them?

What is the "accounting methodology" that was used?

Anyone could play that game and keep the conversation stalled indefinitely.

Sorry, posted the wrong link earlier: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...

It’s not about stalling the conversation. It’s about forming opinions based on actual facts.

Do you think they just did 12 interviews and then called it a day?

The question isn’t whether it’s important at all, but whether it’s a worthwhile use of taxpayer money compared to other priorities.

With social sciences much of the “qualitative research” involves interviewing a small handful of people, interpreting their responses to fit a preconceived narrative, and then stretching the results into a lengthy paper. This is usually done by using the most convoluted synonyms available and repeatedly invoking terms like “intersectionality”, “lived experience”, and “power structures” to lend the work an academic veneer. The result? A paper that boils down to anecdotal evidence supporting the author’s opinion, which is almost certainly whatever best meshes with their political ideology.

Regardless, it’s important that people document and collect such anecdotal evidences (assuming it’s done somewhat properly and not cherry picked)

In my book, pure numbers can’t capture the complex realities that people face in their lives.

I have no problem with people interviewing them. It doesn't cost that much money to do so. The people who are interested in learning more about that particular group can interview and self-publish books. The government is there to help a society do important things to most or all of society that are impractical to do individually. (e.g. road or rail networks, national defense, space program, paying for retirement of workers, medical care in most places, etc). Interviewing 12 youths about their feelings about gender and writing about it is neither impractical to conduct with one person's time and funds, nor is it something that more than a small fraction of the people are asking for.

"anecdotal evidences" is an oxymoron. Anecdotes by their nature cannot be considered evidence of anything, not enough to satisfy any level of scientific rigor at least

People can write a blog if they want to document their own stories. We don't need to use taxpayer funds to go interview them and we definitely do not need to be trying to draw scientific conclusions from small handfuls of people's anecdotes

Furthermore, once it’s published in even the shoddiest journal that “research” gets cited by politicians/orgs with an agenda as if it was a Nature-worthy large-scale longitudinal cohort study of millions.

Evidence is that which provides a reason/justification to change beliefs.

When it was noticed that people working with cows (and who were therefore often exposed to cow pox) didn’t seem to get chickenpox, this seems to me an example of a collection of anecdotes, and yet it was evidence.

It was evidence enough to justify forming a hypothesis and getting funding for further study, but not evidence to consider it a scientific conclusion. Drawing generalizable scientific conclusions is a high bar to reach but it should be. Clearing that high bar is what is going to actually produce real value for society

A research project that produces a small collection of anecdotes is not scientific research, it is journalism. There's nothing wrong with that. Those anecdotes might be important to share, they might be interesting to hear, they might be historically relevant. But we cannot draw scientific conclusions from them, which is what we should expect from scientific research projects

That, I think I can agree with. It seems to me reasonable to say that the requirements for something to qualify as “scientific evidence” are stricter than to qualify as “evidence”, and that anecdotes don’t qualify as “scientific evidence”.

I don't have any issue in principle with any of these as research topics, but my concerns are.

1. So what? We do research, maybe we find something out, and are we going to do anything?

2. Would the money be better spent on programmes that do something instead of specific research.

3. What's the process for getting funded, and are decision makers bringing their own biases and beliefs into that process?

In the context of NZ which is slashing spending on many many programmes, you might as well cancel all this research spending. Even if research finds that we should intervene and provide support for some kind of minority group, there's no way it's going to get funded anyway.

The head of the physics department goes to the university president to ask for money for a new lab. The president says “Your department always needs such expensive equipment. Why can’t you be more like mathematics? All they need are paper, pencils, and trash cans. Or even better, sociology only needs paper and pencils.”

Usually the third field is philosophy. Sociologists have to go out, meet people, and observe things, while philosophers can simply think alone in a closet.

In fact universities love Physics departments. They usually can justify multi-million dollar expenditures and grants that keep the university research afloat.

Each of these are relatively tiny. 870k NZD is scarcely more than the average price of a home in NZ. As in many countries, the kinds of expenditures are absolutely dwarfed by military spending. In the case of New Zealand, that's about 5B NZD. I suspect if we go line by line through their budget, we'll find plenty of questionable expenses that could pay for hundreds of social science studies.

I'm not sure NZ needs this:

Throwing the baby out with the bath water makes great sound bites for politicians, but weaker societies for everyone else.

Spending public money on unproductive work makes society weaker for everyone else. I'm not necessarily opposed to government funding for social science research but it's not clear that this research produces a positive ROI for taxpayers.

Plenty of government programs that benefit the public are not cash flow positive so how do you define a positive return on investment?

Mostly programs will either have a positive return on investment in the conventional sense (e.g. hire more tax inspectors, make more tax income),

or have an arguable, positive overall long-term return on investment hopefully, (e.g. infrastructure spending, sending smart kids to college)

or will enjoy widespread public support and provide non-monetary benefits, (e.g. public parks, libraries, maternity leave)

or will be widely accepted as a core function of government (e.g. police and military), or a morally good and virtuous act (e.g. caring for the disabled, foreign aid)

or will be the pet project of someone powerful, semi-useful, and inexpensive enough no-one cares to fight them over it (e.g. opera subsidy)

or will convince people they're one of the above regardless of the truth of the matter

or will be at risk of cancellation.

Government programs like research funding aren't measured by cash flow but rather by long term impact on GDP (or perhaps other metrics related to quality of life). For basic research in the hard sciences we can draw a direct line from grant funding in various fields to commercial products years later. When it comes to allocating a limited pool of government grant funding across fields, this shouldn't be the only factor but it has to be a factor. If nothing else this helps to ensure continued public support for government science funding because taxpayers see that their money isn't being frittered away.

Spending public money on unproductive work makes society weaker for everyone else.

Fortunately, the rest of us not computers, and are happy that our tax dollars go to symphonies and art and orphanages and other "unproductive" works.

Quit trying to score cheap points with low-effort snark. This is an article about research funding, not symphonies or art or orphanages, and my comment above was obviously intended in that context. If we have to qualify every comment to prevent possible misinterpretation then the discussions become really tedious.

When the ratio of bath water to baby reaches a certain point it becomes the best solution.

All three of those seem like very useful areas of research to me. New Zealand benefits from better understanding physical and mental health of large communities.

Your choice of research you don't like (menstruation, perimenopause, support for transgender youth) says more about you than what NZ might need...

The menstruation one isn't researching menstruation. It's researching "the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences".

They're not even making the app. They're trying to find out if an app would be useful, for $870k NZD.

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