The US Assault on Science: National Academies Letter | Hacker News Reader

The US Assault on Science: National Academies Letter

nytimes.com

95 pointspmags42 comments

The other mystery to unravel is the tech industry rallying behind a leader who wants to undo the very fabric of what makes the tech industry possible. Less taxes I get. Killing any chance of regulation so monopolies can continue to monopoly I get. I don't know why any non-cultist tech leader would want less science and technology education and research.

They recognized what was coming and knelt rather than having their balls busted.

Also, they're already wealthy, they have what matters in the foreseeable future.

This is unequivocally not an endorsement of their choices.

Or they are not too worried…

They taught us that the renaissance/enlightenment was when we woke up and started caring about facts and now we were just in the process of refining the process, and that now all that willful ignorance is behind us.

I think Feyerabend had it right: Science is fundamentally anarchical. It will perennially offend those who are drunk with power.

We should've been learning to carry science forward despite powerful adversaries trying to shut us down--to take it underground like it was a criminal endeavor. Instead we focused on publication and on groveling after funding and no nobody knows what to do because the funding faucet has been shut off. And just when AI was starting to look like it might become a decent lab assistant. How sad.

That all sounds romantic, but molecular biology labs, spinning confocal microscopes, clean rooms, super computers, particle accelerators, etc are all hard to come by "underground".

Except for particle accelerators. I hear CERN specifically did build that underground. </SCNR>

Touche! ;-)

Yeah, there are limits to what you can do in your garage. I'm just saying that we should push them.

For instance, it seems likely that certain powerful parties will attempt to censor evidence of a pathogen outbreak if it makes them look negligent. I'd like to be prepared to derive consensus about the nature of the threat despite their efforts.

Some work is being done in this direction at https://openbioeconomy.org/research/ (not affiliated, just a fan).

The low hanging fruit has been picked. You can no longer "do science" by mixing random household chemicals. Now you need pure sources, you need machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars, you need significant sample sizes and big data, you need computer clusters.

It was a lot easier to mix bleach and

The letter itself:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/31/health/scient...

Here's what I don't understand. Let's say you're a selfish multi-billionaire, essentially having won at life, and now you want more. Essentially the only things your money can't buy you are long life, health (both physical and mental), and perhaps the ability to explore places humans have never ventured and create things humans have never created. If you want any chance at these things, wouldn't you want to encourage as much scientific innovation as possible? Steve Jobs died at 56 of pancreatic cancer. Wouldn't these people want science to advance as fast as possible, before they too get cancer, or at least die of some age-related disease that science might otherwise have been able to cure?

Why is the billionaire class so dead-set on tearing down scientific institutions? It makes no sense even if you assume they're selfish assholes. It only makes sense if they are extremely stupid selfish assholes who are so blinded by their own evilness that they are cannibalizing their own futures for the fleeting sensation of their societal rank going up (due to them tearing down the rest of society around them). Is that really the explanation? I've never believed in purely evil cartoon villains before, but I just don't see any other explanation anymore.

I think it's because science, knowledge, and truth are the great equalizers. In the limit, they put everyone on an equal playing field, which would also eliminate the advantage of wealth.

True long-term thinking.

Power. That's what you do if you want power.

Edit: For those in doubt, a parallel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

> The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals

Given the movement is based around returning to some imagined idyllic time with simpler problems that we've already figured out how to solve, perhaps we should call it the Great Leap Backwards?

I think there's actually a really simple answer: They're bored [1]. You're right in that they have so much money that they could do literally anything they want, but none of that is exciting. Tearing down institutions, making yourself King, having the masses lavish you with praise and worship. That's all stuff that's exciting, and why wouldn't they do that? They got all this money and wealth thanks to their own hard work, so they know how to best drive the car so to speak.

Essentially what we've done is allowed excessive amounts of wealth to pool in the hands of bored, malignant narcissists that are now leveraging it to play a real world game. What's going on in the US is I think a unique brand of oligarchy, because the oligarch classes in other countries were concerned with preserving power and wealth. But the oligarchs we have at home are not smart enough to preserve power nor do they really care.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/tech-righ...

If they keep this up they might find themselves in an entirely different pool.

"What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less than he

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free: th’Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n."

- Paradise Lost, Book 1, by John Milton

Some of us engineers were paying attention in English class.

>Wouldn't these people want science to advance as fast as possible,

The Trump admin (lump the aligned billionaire players in) links some of this research to patronage networks of their opponents.

Here's an example of their claim: https://x.com/NIH/status/1888004759396958263

If you're asking what their target is, I think it's the money networks. Whether they are going to achieve their aim is debatable.

https://xcancel.com/NIH/status/1888004759396958263

Let's not contribute to xitter.

This resonates, as the only thing they see the world in terms of is "patronage networks". In their mind there isn't some larger purpose to funding scientific research, it's just money supporting the "liberal conspiracy" (ie any institution that won't ask "how high" while smiling when they bark "jump")

Stepping up a level, it's not because they see a larger playing field and have some reason to want to change the system. It's because they're small minded people who literally don't understand what they're butchering and chopping down to their own level.

Now, I don't think they were always like this. Musk definitely accomplished things through his companies, and Trump hasn't always talked like a senile old man waiting for a ride from the police station. It seems that they've been made small minded by crippling social media addictions, going in spirals of ever-smaller numbers of ever-more "enthusiastic" followers that lap up the lamest low-effort reactionary takes.

> Why is the billionaire class so dead-set on tearing down scientific institutions?

Because they are mentally ill. They need more because that's who they are.

And at this point in time, their biggest risk is not being able to get their desired 7% return yoy. They can't get it via innovation because they are not innovative. They can't get it via fed printing money. They can't get it via general investment.

They can get it by exploitation or by robbing/scamming. See Trump coin or buying elections.

And no, they are not interested in making the world a better place. Their sickness wants just more more and more for themselves.

One of the things I learned from those leaked messages the other day is that the people pushing these ideas publicly actually seem to believe them, because even when they're around other people who might be in on the "con" they're still loudly pushing the same ideas. So yeah, I definitely believe the leaders that are on-board with this are just really stupid. It doesn't take a ton of intelligence to make a ton of money. You just have to be persistent and you have to get good opportunities, which are largely luck of the draw.

Being born into money also certainly helps. It's one of the seeds of inequality.

because humanity got a secret revaluation and was deemed to retarded under economic stress to keep its most dangerous tools?

Isn't it ideological? I see no mystery. Presumably it's because climate scientists sway opinion against fossil fuel, and humanities academics promote leftist concerns. It's not an intentional attack on future cancer treatment.

The obvious answer is they can support anything they care about directly. The relationship a selfish multi-billionaire has with the government is ideally that said government takes a huge amount of money from them, then spends it much less efficiently than they would on things Mr. billions doesn't think are the highest priority targets to fund.

"Poor man wanna be rich Rich man wanna be king And a king ain't satisfied 'Til he rules everything"

- 'Badlands', Bruce Springsteen

Evidence based policies are toxic to economic growth. I say so much the worse for economics, but some say so much the worse for evidence.

Why is the letter behind a NY Times paywall and not on the National Academies’ website at https://www.nasonline.org/ ?

The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/31/scientists-l... — has a link to this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13gmMJOMsoNKC4U-A8rhJrzu_...

I agree with the letter, however there is merit to defunding due to the replication crisis. That should have at least been mentioned in the letter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Instead of defunding, fund somebody else to replicate the claim. We should start rewarding researchers for disproving or confirming another person's work at the same level as we would the original researcher. I would go as far as to say that a confirming researcher should get top billing along with the initial researcher.

Indeed that would be awesome, and original researchers should be incentivized to do things that facilitate replication attempts, ex. sharing code, etc.

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