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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

I think this analogy needs a bit of tweaking. The NIH is not a spouse, but a priest that officiates weddings. For a period of time the priests makes the future spouses recite something like "I swear to be faithful to my spouse till Death do us part". And at some point the priest stops including this incantation in the ceremony. It does not mean those couples that swore the oath are free from the oath. It does mean the new couples don't swear the oath. But it's an empirical fact that swearing or not swearing that oath has very little bearing on the actual faithfulness of the spouses.

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Or how about this analogy - Google removing "don't be evil." Does it mean anything? Maybe not, but it probably signifies an internal political shift, and we might want to keep an eye out to see what it is.

More than this, it shouldn't be taken in isolation.

I keeping seeing people trying to analyze each action of the current government of the United States on its own. "Okay, the NIH, rescinded its brand new scientific integrity policy. So what? There's potentially many perfectly valid reasons for doing that!" Which is technically true, but not necessarily useful.

But when you look at it in context the picture doesn't remain the same. The NIH is part of Health and Human Services. The same HHS that just launched a major research project headed by a research of questionable ethics who's been stripped of his medical license[1], while the Director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (also part of HHS) just resigned, complaining of 'misinformation and lies'.[2] And those were just example from the last two days.

Its the difference between "that might be smoke" and "that might be smoke, this is really hot, and I can see what look like flames". Sure, stripped of context, this could have a great many explanations. But it context, it looks like one piece of a picture that appears to show a HHS up to no good.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-cdcs-reported-hir...

2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/top-vaccine-official-...

I think that analogy is also imperfect. Google's "don't be evil" motto was just a reflection of beginner's naivete. It's something that a garage-level startup can say. But once you grow past a certain scale, the statement is too vague, and exposes a company to too much litigation risk. Dropping the motto did not reflect the transition of Google from a force of good to a force of evil. It reflected the transition of Google from being an idealist adolescent to being an adult.

An "adult" who subsequently moved to the deep end of the alignment pool.

> to ensure alignment with the Administration’s priorities.

"We no longer are doing the fidelity pledge in alignment with this officiant's priorities. This phrase may sound familiar, we used it to remove diversity goals from church hiring and in the announcement that the church would no longer investigate theft by clergy."

I’m not a fan of the current administration, but I’ve found that my lack of trust in science has been driven almost entirely by how science has become less scientific and more bureaucratic, so removing yet another bureaucratic mandate that didn’t exist until a few months ago doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I think adding more bureaucracy isn’t going to fix the systemic problems in science today. I can’t find a copy of the policy online that doesn’t time out, so I can’t confirm whether the policy was bad or not though.

Hah well .gov timeouts are a growing hallmark of this administration.

Maybe I have a skewed vision of science because I work in industry but I picture it as efficient, individual work that is thrust (published) into a vast bureaucracy (peer review) that roots out flaws. I'm not sure what's broken about science.

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