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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

I could imagine people moving away from CDC into private sector, and considering it's long been a "model" US view that things progress best when done in a free market, it might actually be a boon to medical research.

But, a couple of quick searches tells me 1/3rd of healthcare costs per person comes from the federal government (data from 2023), and NIH puts majority of it's $48B budget towards external (83%) and internal (11%) research.

Obviously, only some research would have (or need to have) the forbidden terminology, so perhaps nothing really happens.

Edit: and lest it remains unsaid, let's also take this with a grain of salt until it comes out from multiple sources or officially.

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Healthcare costs don't neccessarily map to funding of research. It doesn't make sense to bring that up here.

noobermin is rihgt. I've been reading a book about gastroenterology and it is surprising how many decades occur between research, findings, medical acceptance, and then eventually application to the public.

What book? Sounds interesting.

Sure, but there must be some relation as they cover the cost of drugs and any novel procedures, which are at least somewhat priced according to how much research to develop them cost.

I was just looking for how much research is funded by federal government, and that number came up as somewhat unrelated — it was harder to come up with a total medical research cost number, so this was the best I could do in a couple of minutes.

If corporations are going to argue for the current regime of health care costs to stay as high as possible in the "free market" using research & development costs as an argument, then yes it makes sense to bring it up.

A lot of research NIH funds because there is low outcome of a market product at the end of that research. This is because investors won't spend the money or only fund research that has no money incentive in its outcome. The way I see is it is progress is about to stop because investors will only fund thing that can have a direct money outcome for them in the future...

According to TA, this also affects lots of other papers even if they are not central to the topic. The intention is to combat "woke" research, but it creates pure chaos and uncertainty across the whole field. There is no official policy, and every bureaucrat is trying to guess what is going to be permissible in the future and what not. To be on the safe side (i.e., to not get fired), the ban is interpreted broadly.

> it might actually be a boon to medical research.

How? That seems like going out of your way to label this as not as bad as it actually is.

If you get really good researchers away from cash-strapped CDC into private sector — not sure if this will play out, and if private sector would be interested, or if their research even has earning potential — but it "might", right?

Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on. The issue with banning "woke ideology" in principle is that it isn't formally defined and doesn't mean anything. And to ban a thing first it has to exist in a detectable way.

My guess is there'll be a bit of flailing then everyone will default back to status quo. It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies and it isn't going to do anyone any favours in terms of image to pursue this. Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

> Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

That’s a lot more optimistic than I fear.

> They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

The authors of this memo banning terms haven't realized this has already happened in part. Obstetrics avoids the use of gender with the term "parturient" instead of "mother." "Pregnant person" probably isn't showing up in many papers.

And maybe that's fine because it isn't a signal of ideology like "pregnant person" is. Don't forget that if scientists were using these terms, they were likely already doing so because of political pressure, so it is good to stop it in cases where it's nothing to do with their research (eg. transgender parturients). Of course it doesn't mean this order isn't ham-fisted, but research is often polluted by politics because it helps get funding as well as researchers are pretty politically biased in some fields.

What’s wrong referring to the relevant sex characteristics? Why change language for the exceptional and small population? A man who gives birth is still the mother even if they take a social role of a father later in the child’s development.

Because their sex characteristics aren't the relevant thing, the fact that they are pregnant is. The medical field prefers precise terminology. It's only when it comes to trans people that people get weird about it, because they're really using it as an excuse to argue about something else

It also might take four generations or four centuries to 'blow over'

Authoritarians do not stop until they are stopped by an external force.

The cost of stopping them only increases with every move they make to consolidate power (which of course is the intention).

From the article:

> This is leading to what Germans call “vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or “preemptive obedience,” as one non-CDC scientist commented.

And why is this term German? Do, perhaps, the Germans have unique experience and insight in this regard?

> After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. [1]

It’s become fashionable to accuse people who raise the spectre of fascism and authoritarianism of crying wolf. We are being told not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, like when Elon Musk performs the Nazi salute in front of the far right dignitaries assembled for the inauguration and we’re supposed to believe this is because he’s on the spectrum or some other nonsense. If you don’t want to go down the road that anticipatory obedience leads to, then you have to resist. It is that simple.

1: https://lithub.com/resist-authoritarianism-by-refusing-to-ob...

Late Soviets had term for it too - “aggressive-obedient majority”, although this applies more to Republicans in legislature and the Air Force people who took down Tuskegee stuff

Governments implement incoherent policies all the time.

I'd argue that it isn't possible to write thousands of pages in a single bill or budget proposal and have it actually be coherent.

> It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies

If you assume that the goal is to implement a policy, no, it's not possible. But that's never the goal with such chaos. The goal is to make it unclear what's allowed or not, so that the real answer becomes: whatever the current ruler favors is allowed, and whatever he dislikes is disallowed. "Woke ideology", like "globalism" or "cultural Marxism" before it, means nothing, which means it can mean anything.

I remember my dad having to travel to Moscow during the Soviet times to get the censor's approval for the movie he was planning to shoot (that is on top of budget-related issues etc.) I was still very little then, but from what little I remember, it seemed like it always was a guessing game: how much do you have to add of glory to the proletariat in order to make the cut. Naturally, artists were turning their noses when they saw too much of the Soviet propaganda in a movie, so, they tried to put as little of it as possible, at the same time using all sorts of tricks to disguise the criticism of the system that required the censorship.

And while this kind of little struggle had its fun moments... overall, I don't think it was fun. Also, indeed the rules of what's allowed or disallowed would change based on current political events, and just like in 1984, everyone was supposed to acknowledge that the rules had always been the way they currently are. Which, in terms of long-term planning, would sometimes result in problems. Like, when someone was trying to placate the censorship by overemphasizing some political aspect at the time of submission, but the events developed so fast, that the official party line at the assessment time was the exact opposite of what it was at the submission time.

----

Oh, and just to give some examples of when the "proto-woke" (in Soviet times it was called the "decadent capitalist influence") had some tragic consequences.

The only acceptable painting style was Soviet Realism. Anything that had signs of deliberate distortion of color / perspective / size / anatomy etc. would be labeled "decadent capitalist" and perpetrators would be prosecuted.

So, another student in my dad's class came in drunk to a model drawing session. And instead of using a graphite pencil, used what was called a "chemical pencil", which is a kind of Indian-ink based pencil (it's practically impossible to erase). And, in a study of a head of a model, that student made several strokes that extended beyond where the area of the nose would've been, and so it looked like the model had whiskers...

That student was later taken away to the dean, and in short time was expelled.

Another student was expelled for wiping his paintbrush on the canvas (which he later planned to cover with some neutral background color, but was too late...) because he forgot to bring a piece of rug that one usually uses to wipe a brush before using a different paint.

That sounds like a fun anecdote, but those two had their lives ruined.

> The only acceptable painting style was Soviet Realism

It was the "socialistic realism". Being interested in math this particular insanity did not affect me too much, but for someone interested in the arts living under this gun was a 24x7 reality. Not fun times...

Yeah, my bad. Funny how I managed to forget it. That was a big part of my life :) It was still a thing when I went to art college.

And then years later I'd go to see Kyiv Art Academy final year exhibition, and it was still socialistic realism, but now instead of workers and farmers they have saints. For some reason it became very religious... Or maybe I just fell on bad years.

The weirdest thing is to watch the American right wing implement a Russian playbook. The people who made loudest noises about "commies" are now fawning over the Eastern Bloc.

Today's Russia is not communist in any way. It's a far-right-wing autocratic kleptocracy, where all power is held by a single individual and those who have personal favor with him, all wealth is managed through a cycle of corrupt state-sponsored ventures, and all cultural identity is wrapped up in tradition and faux-masculinity. There's not even a pretention of left-wing influence; it's a fully fascist state.

The USSR was obviously similar in practice for most of its history, especially under Stalin, but it still pretended to maintain the trappings of a communist structure. And at least the USSR made it clear what the rules were: it was an unabashed command economy, with property owned by the state, and economic decisions flowing through the party leadership. The Putin/Trump version where there's a de jure market economy but de facto control by the ruling party is a different kind of corruption incentive - it's much harder to challenge what theoretically isn't happening.

Having lived close enough to it to "pick up the vibes" I'm going to say the only thing that's really changed is the flavor of the propaganda. USSR might have started as a leftist thing (I wouldn't know), but it didn't behave like one toward the end. It was all about power & corruption.

Should not be too surprising. Russia is mot communist anymore and advocate a more traditional society.

But the book was written as a guide to how to take down USA. Implementing the book for local politics = helping Russian goals.

It's a lot easier to destroy something than rebuild it.

I've always joked that Trump was basically the Manchurian candidate.

> Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

"Winnie-the-Pooh"?

> issue with banning "woke ideology"

It’s the illiberal right shaking hands with the illiberal left. The problem is this time the purges aren’t just ideological, but also financial: there are winners and losers in our healthcare industry likely to be defined by their polarity to Trump.

What "illiberal left" benefits from this? Half of the reason we are at this point is the nonstop equivocation that goes on in our discourse.

Lay this at the feet of who caused it.

> What "illiberal left" benefits from this

Banning terms from general and academic use originated, in modern America, from the illiberal left’s cancel culture.

I’m not saying they caused this—it’s not novel that illiberalism leads to censorship. But the tactics both groups use when they get their hands on power are remarkably similar.

> the nonstop equivocation

You probably mean false equation. I don’t believe I am, because the illiberal left never came into power. At least not federally. Liberals on the left successfully checked our radicals in a way the right did not.

(If you want policy fusion between the illiberal left and right, it’s in RFK Jr. Marin County sees eye to eye with MAGA on e.g. vaccines.)

before cancel culture it was satanic panic from the right. This is not a new phenomenon, and I don't think it has much to do with the shift towards right wing extremism

cancel culture from the left came from grassroot movements - kids at uni get offended and they ban certain words and heckle certain speakers.

cancel culture from the right is coming from POTUS.

can you tell me if you think there's any difference at all between the two?

> cancel culture from the right is coming from POTUS

Not really. Trump is channeling something that probably came from the book-banning religious conservative crowd.

"the buck stops here". he controls the most powerful army in history. I don't care whose arm is reaching up his colon to move his lips - he's responsible. it's his signature on the orders.

Nobody is arguing with you on that. You said cancel culture was grassroots while this is not. My point is they both started grassroots. This one just reached higher.

He clearly has dementia on top of raging NPD and I'd honestly be surprised if he knows what day it is.

The origin is not the point, the power differential is. Hence why this is an equivocation.

Cancel culture was systematically supported and promoted by the most powerful people in our society.

give five examples?

If we’re talking about banned words or terms, one of our Supreme Court justices wouldn’t define the term “woman.”

The Biden administration directed ICE to use the term “undocumented noncitizen” instead of “illegal alien.” They also pressured social media sites to censor certain content.

There was also the whole Al Franken thing.

is any of this comparable to banning any acknowledgement of the existence of trans and intersex people in anything connected to the federal government?

in fact refusing to define a term doesn't sound like banning at all. to ban is to forbid somebody else from doing something. to refuse to do something personally isn't banning.

Being unable to describe a woman would be pretty similar to banning trans acknowledgement. They're basically 2 sides of the same coin; the mismatch between reality and the categories we use. There are different opinions about which part of the mental model has to give. Ie, the concept of man/woman is too imprecise for political discourse - do politicians abandon the word woman or do they abandon the parts of reality that don't fit into a man/woman model?

The obvious solution is the third option of letting a few more genders in, but that would still require being able to articulate what a woman is.

again, one of them is refusing to do something, but the other is forbidding the doing of something. there's a huge difference.

The gender one is more consequential; if we accept that they exist there are a lot of women who get involved in the legal system because of their gender. Eg, say there is a case that involves gender discrimination - a judge that can't identify what a woman is will struggle to come up with reasonable rulings.

In fairness we don't have the words the judge used in front of us so maybe there was some hedging involved. But they do have to be able to come up with a working definition.

if the ruling is unsatisfactory, you can appeal. you can bring in expert witnesses. she's a professional, and she'll make her decisions based on the facts of the case, and hopefully not based on prejudice. if it's the supreme court, she won't be alone.

I think that's the only option. We need the truth, we currently have a deranged President leading the blind who would rather believe in a sky daddy and the lies they tell themselves than reality. I could see an oligarch that actually might choose to do the right thing, along with a group of high end Universities to replace CDC and NIH at least for the next 2-4 years when we can reestablish some sanity. While I'm fine with rescending bad papers and false information, these blanket attempts to normalize thought crime from the new regime to destroy science and the truth and replace it with their own distorted world view needs to be met with resistance.

Whether they believe in God doesn't have to be part of the equation though. You can believe in God and also in trans rights and science and everything.

It's possible but somewhat rare. I've met religious research scientists before, but in general principles of faith and the scientific method are at odds with each other.

I don't agree with how Trump and his administration are going about this, but it has been interesting to see how quickly it has pushed democrats back to a more federated approach.

After the election many started looked to state's rights type issues to make change locally before Trump took office.

Changes like this could very well push research back out of the centralized government back to more of a free market and federated or decentralized approach. That would at least be a silver lining in my opinion, though to a potentially very dark cloud.

The free market doesn't support most research. Research usually doesn't end in something that's marketable, and even if it does it's often on a too long time scale to do so for companies to justify. And even if there is, it might never get published lest competitors gain anything from it. This is bad for science. At best states might step in but I imagine many won't.

This is bad for science, if you mean the deletion of data. Moving away from centralized authorities may be net positive though, time will tell.

You're also touching on the problem of research as an industry. Papers should be published regardless of economic value, and research should be done for the sake of curiosity. Sometimes outcomes are useful or functional, but that shouldn't be the only, or even primary, driver.

That's the conventional argument for government funded research, but is it true? The AI space is a good example of very long term research, funded almost entirely by the private sector without any clear idea of how the results would be marketed, they publish and - the key part - the work actually replicates. Nor is the AI space unique. XEROX Parc was another famous example, Big Data/Cloud has come entirely out of private sector research. Not unique to computer science either: the research work that led to Ozempic was being funded by Novo Nordisk as far back as 1998.

> Research usually doesn't end in something that's marketable

It usually does, even in academia. That's why they count citations. It's just that the thing that's marketed is either policy advocacy (marketed to governments) or the claims in and of themselves, marketed either to the general public in TED talk style advocacy or to other academics as work they can build on to get more grants. A lot of people don't recognize the existence of things like the profit motive, lobbying or marketing in government funded research, imagining that they don't exist, but they do. In some fields, it's common for lobbying to be like 50% or more of the word count.

There's a long tail of papers that research things that nearly nobody cares about, yet perhaps one day they might. These are the "we studied some obscure fish in the Amazon and found a cure for cancer" type stories that crop up from time to time. But such claims often don't quite work out, and the private sector is easily able to fund this sort of exploratory work too.

Yet at the same time we keep seeing startups bringing innovation, while the big enterprises do not bring that much original innovation. Instead, those big enterprises rather kill innovation by buying those startups. Not seldom to just cancel the whole product together.

This is almost a secret, but __most innovation come from the small players__. Those small players benefit from open access and academic progress. It is a very fruitful cooperation.

But the tragedy is that in the US the meaning of "the free market" is being loudly distorted. What they actually mean is a cozy climate for oligarchs, protected by the mountains of tariffs and deregulation. In the US society, the idea of competition has deformed into "killing competition", and they clarify it now with "by all means possible". Those extremists HATE competition. Nobody arrived likes being disturbed and having to work to keep competitive. Rent extraction is way simpler.

Especially HN should think a little longer about what that all means for aspiring entrepreneurs.

That is not actually what happens with most acquisitions, especially not in the drug and biotech space. Big enterprises buy promising startups at the phase 1 or 2 stage fully intending to bring them to market. But still many fail to ever make it through phase 3 and gain FDA approval. That's not an innovation problem it's just the nature of the business.

I am not sure if this applies here, but Regulatory Capture is a certain way to block the small players from growing. I understand that drugs are a special case, so I do not know if that applies there.

Also, the fact that a product fails post-acquisition is precisely what happens a lot in regular business too. They can be seen as a threat to other fiefdoms in the behemoth, or they lose their autonomy. Doesn't always mean the product or idea was flawed beyond repair.

Well, in the AI space at least that's not really true. Google, NVIDIA and Meta have all made huge contributors. So has Microsoft, in their own way. It's a real mix of big old companies and smaller upstarts.

Even in this example it is a yes and no. Remove academic development in the AI, including the paths we left, and your examples would not have any AI at all.

The problem is a little bit more nuanced than that though. It is not that big companies do not make inventions. Often, these inventions do not survive politically in the behemoth. That is why some companies decide to create a spinoff, knowing that their own body would be trying to kill the growth of their offspring.

Even in the early days AI was heavily funded by the private sector. Symbolics machines were partly promoted as a way to do AI research, back in the logic era. And the AI winter was mostly a grant funding phenomenon. When it became unfashionable in universities the field rebranded as ML and became commercially driven by (mostly) different people. Companies like Google invested in advanced ML research from day one.

Nowadays it's been rebranded back to AI due to the switch to neural methods, but there's been funding for AI from the computer industry for as long as the field existed.

I'm pretty sure AI would exist as a field and be in a similar place to where it is now, even if governments had never funded it at all.

Even more, a significant portion of the researchers at industrial labs got their start as graduate students, largely funded by government grants. Even if somehow no actual fundamental research transferred from academia into industry, the people sure do.

It has never been the case that one party was for centralization and one was for decentralization. Neither of these are goals. Both are instead methods of achieving goals. Both parties will use claims of federalism when they want to oppose federal policy they don't like and have done so for decades and decades.

Sure, that seems to be what drives the two parties flipping and it seems to be happening now. While your team is in charge you like federal powers, when the other team is in charge you like state powers.

It is generally true, though, that one of the two parties is for decentralization at any given point in time.

I don’t know about “parties” but political movements absolutely are divided by centralization (or not). Collectivism is literally the centralization of wealth.

States rights will be in the crosshairs soon enough. States that support public health, be that reproduction, vaccines, sex ed, weather, or simply just fact-based research, could see thier federal funds dry up. States still need to biuld infrastructure, something that almost always taps federal funds. Everyone who works in science or research is afraid at the moment, irrespective of where they think their funding comes from.

I know a guy measuring tree growth, with an eye to whether tree planting is effective post-fire. Much of the study is on federal lands. He has no idea whether the project will still exist come spring.

Once the Republicans start going after state's rights the parties really will have fully flipped.

Nothing wrong with that, it happens pretty often, but it is interesting to see play out in real time.

I don’t think states rights is defined by whether they receive money from the federal government.

There is a history of federal funding drying up when states don't follow federal guidelines.

Louisiana didn't have ant federal funding for roads for years because they were refusing to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21.

I don't see how this addresses my point. State rights is the ability of a state to act on their own - not have unfettered access to federal funds.

When the federal government takes somewhere between 50% and 100% of the income tax payed by a state's citizens simply to give it back to the state with strings attached, that is a straightforward undermining of the state being able to act on its own.

In general, it's amazing how reliably crypto-authoritarian points are prefixed with "I don't see how". It exploits our natural advantage to assume good faith and difficulty understanding, rather than a willful ignoring of coercion.

Sure, but the GP you were replying to was focused on the risk of states losing federal funding and how that leverage is making many act differently in response.

Interesting thought, but significant technologic “break throughs” almost never come from the private sector. A “break through” is just luck, and countless years working on a problem incrementally. That doesn’t typically return profits.

> I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

A government agency trying to enforce censorship in scientific publications outside its sphere of influence... I have to admit, that was not the first thing I wondered about.

I wonder how much of the success pseudo gender “science” had in undermining the scientific and medical communities was attributed to the centralization of science authority in the federal government. It makes me wonder if there shouldn’t be a separation of science and state.

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